On return from study abroad and entering into thesis project season, I wasn't intending to pick up the Presidential reigns for a second year. However, after a drought quarter while the Seniors had been away on study abroad, there was much interest from the students and faculty for revitalization. I opted to switch my original thesis topic to Design Circle's longevity strategy.
The project became a 6-month overhaul redesign of Design Circle from the ground up. We evaluated the current situation and reorganized the government entirely, introduced officer incentive and retention plans, developed and executed new election procedures, established an annual calendar of events to be used as a minimum volume of activity, pulled apart our financial strategy and wrote an annual budget proposal, created a directional brand strategy complete with guidelines, refined the constitution, rebuilt the student/department relationship, started from scratch on the website's goals, functionality, interface, and entrance points, created a marketing campaign, and much more.
I took all of this ground we had covered and put it together into two final thesis deliverables. The first being the website, which is the home of all of our external community initiatives. The second is a 300-page training manual, detailing everything above including color specifications, individual officer roles + responsibilities, event budgeting, etc. Final implementation of these two items continued into the Summer as we organized orientation meetings and finalized other details in preparation for a successful year.
This project awarded me Best in Show at our Senior exhibition.
Right-click and download the PDF of the entire training manual here: