Entrepreneurial Lecture Series

Needs Analysis

Describe the need that was addressed by your project.
We identified a need within the student community at the University of Alaska Southeast for basic education on ethics topics. Understanding our ethics lecture has enabled our students to understand more about their own jobs and place within a company in the future. Another serious need that our ethics lecture will help address in the future concerns the community of Angoon. Currently this community is faced with 12.9% unemployment. There is a significant need for new employment opportunities in Angoon and with our ethics lecture, our participants learn the knowledge and skills necessary to start their own businesses and employ themselves in an ethical manner.

Describe who your target audience was.
We have targeted two groups with our ethics lecture. The first group is the students at the University of Alaska Southeast, specifically those that have little prior knowledge of ethics and current Alaskan ethical situations. The second, future, group is the Angoon Small Business Center and the people of Angoon.

Describe why you chose to focus on this need.
These groups were chosen as our focus because we have the capabilities to really help them. Ethic is a prominent topic in the news today. People who are aware of these prominent ethical topics will be much more likely to succeed. We will also be able to make a lasting impact in both our University and a small community in need.

Project Analysis

Describe the project your team created and implemented to address the above need.
We have fully implemented the ethics lecture, along with 5 other educational lectures to accompany it. They are currently available at the SIFE website, and we are directing potential participants to them through posters, viral marketing, and direct mail pieces. Besides ethics, the other five topics include Human Resources Management, Marketing, Accounting and Finance, Entrepreneurship, and Economics. The lectures come in two forms. The first is a PowerPoint presentation with a voice over lecture. The other format is a PowerPoint with embedded video lecture. For the Angoon Small Business Center we have also provided DVD's loaded with the lectures for people in Angoon who do not have internet access or who do not have fast enough access to view our lectures.

Describe why this project best fit the needs of the target audience.
Our ethics lecture fills the needs of University students because so many of them are lacking basic ethics knowledge as well as general business knowledge. With these lectures, students are learning the key points of important topics in a short amount of time which will help them in their future careers. Also, since the new Angoon Small Business Center currently does not have any educational resources, these lectures address that deficit. These lectures are tailored to the needs of both the ASBC and University students because they present group appropriate information. Most other educational lectures are designed for business students. These lectures have been designed to help and inform future entrepreneurs who need to know the basics of these topics in order to make their businesses successful.

Success Analysis

Describe the way in which your team measured the success of the project.
All of the lectures have a quantitative measurement of their usefulness. Participants have been asked to do a very short pre test and post test of the same questions. These test results will be, and have been, analyzed to tell us how effective the lectures are at teaching the topics. We will also keep in touch with our students and periodically ask how their businesses are going and if they still use any of the information they learned through us. This will give us some qualitative data on how successful our program is in the long run.

Describe why your team chose the measurement tool(s) used for the project.
These measures were chosen so that we could keep track of our success in an easy to understand, as well as easy to use, format. The qualitative measures add a level of personalization to the statistics. Using these measures it might be possible to spread the program to other organizations by showing our success in hard numbers.

Outline the results of the project based on the measurement tool(s) used.
The initial success rate for our educational lectures is very encouraging. All participants have shown a clear increase in knowledge based on their pre and post test score. Specifically with our ethics lecture, particpants scored an average of 60% higher on their post test after viewing our lecture. The average improvement among all clients was 65% between their pre and post test. It is importat to note that 2 of our respondents reported improvement of 100% which speaks to the effectivness of the lectures at teaching these subjects.