Storyboard Session

The storyboard session was a huge success! Nick gave us a section of the restaurant where we were able to write on the glass windows and post index cards all over the place. It was a really cool experience. When we first got there we got to be a part of the taste test for possible new items on the menu. Lets just say we ate all day and the more we ate the slower we became. But we did make good progress on what we would like to accomplish for the semester and what dates we plan to have these milestones done.
Our first order of business was to set up our business mission and vision. We want people to know that we want to expand the relationship with the customer through the sharing if their personal family stories. We thought we can do this several different ways.
First, through our website mypapouli.com where people can go online and submit a video to our website and from there they are able to link to several different websites we plan on using to bring an awareness to this project, such as twitter and facebook. Since most people will want to visit a website where there have already been stories submitted. We will start off with Nick's staff at the Huebner location and put there stories online. Followed by our own stories as well.
Second, we would like to develop some collateral material to handout at events or to keep in the restaurant for people who are interested in making a submission or know someone who has a great story to tell. We plan on creating t-shirts, POS cards, and brochures to bring an awareness to this project as mush as we possibly can.

Sunday Meeting

So this past Sunday Delia, Joshua and Christina met at Mama Margie's to discuss further plans about how we wanted to extend our business to where it stands on its own. The idea we came up with was to have a consulting business almost like a PR firm. We would be hired through contracts to develop a social inspired project for small businesses. It would make it easier for the business to hire someone to do the work for them and eventually set them up to the point where they can manage this project on their own. We thought that there are several small businesses that want to do something for the community they just dont have the time to do it. Other then making donations small businesses typically dont have the time to invest in these projects they would like to start and it falls to the bottom of there priority list. So the goals of our business are to target small businesses, change the community a little at a time and create revenue from these contracts. As of now we haven't thought of a business name were hoping that will be decided in our storyboard session.
We also discussed the possible ways of crowdsourcing the stories for the grandfather project. We need to discuss with Nick the times that it would be best for us to be in the restaurant to talk with his patrons. We also know he would like his staff to be involved with this project so we will need to setup a time for that as well. We figured it would be best if we had two group members at a time recording stories. One person can record while the other talks. We want to develop a script or list of questions to make people comfortable talking to us, as well as giving us there contact information in case we need a follow up.
Another idea we had was to have everyone we know with great stories come together one day for a few hours and just share the stories they have and we could film it to put on the website or into the book.
We went over the topics that will need to be discussed in the storyboard session. The website, stories, product, buget/finance, and crowdsourcing. There are probably more we need to look at and hopefully with everyone there we can come up with everything we need. This should be exciting for everyone. Nick is giving us the space we need to post stuff and write everywhere, so it should defnately be fun. Joshua plans on bringing his camera to record it all and I will bring my camera so I can post pictures on the blog. We are really excited to see how it all turns out.

Our first meeting with Mr. Nick Anthony

So Tuesday evening we met with Mr. Nick Anthony where he treated us dinner. Dinner, wine, and baklava, it was good! We let him tell us about his family and how Papouli's came to be. You can tell immediately he is all about his family and that he truly wants to capture eveyones story. The purpose of The Grandfather Project is to capture peoples strories about there grandfather and share them, especially the people of our generation. Since we have the social aspect of our project it was time to present him with the ideas to make the grandfather project sustainable on its own. He loved every idea we gave him, he also made us think even harder about what else we could do and how we could do it. We discussed the different ways of caputuring a persons story from being just in the restaurant to being a part of upcoming events. This project isn't just about the Greek community its about everyone, all different cultures. He is baiscally giving us free reign over the website and ways we can make this project work. Some more ideas will come when we meet again for our storyboard. We are all thrilled to be apart of this project and know it can grow into so much more.

Getting Started

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Today our group met for the first time to discuss our plans on how we should continue with this project and where we should take off from here. It was exciting to see our brains working together, we are very different people but I think so far we have some great ideas on how to proceed with "The Grandfather Project." We will post more detail later after we speak with Nick Anthony and we make sure all our ideas are in alignment with his vision of this project.