Resource:How to run an eight week Ultimate Trader Challenge
Contents
Introduction
This article provides instructions and tips on how to implement an eight week Ultimate Trader Challenge on your campus. The Ultimate Trader Challenge drew inspiration from Kyle MacDonald and his, One Red Paper Clip story. Kyle became famous after he managed to make a series of up trades that led him from starting with a small red paper clip to his final trade of a house. This entrepreneurial idea of making smart trades can be implemented and modified to fit a college campus. The basic idea behind it is to ahve students start with a small object, like a pen, and after 8 weeks, see which student was able to make the best trades. Holding a challenge of this sort on your own campus helps build a community and is also a great marketing opportunity.
Get Organized
The first step to take is getting organized! Before asking for sponsors or promoting the event, you need to figure out how an event like this will be implemented on your campus. Make a realistic prediction for how many students might attend an event like this. Have a conservative goal and a stretch goal. Think about what incentives you will offer to the students who make the best trades, and from whom you will receive starting items and prizes.
Marketing
The key to this event is marketing it extremely well, especially during sign-up. The more participants you have, the more people will be enticed. Start getting people excited early on. Host a big kick-off party that gives people a reason to come. Nothing attracts college students faster than free pizza or t-shirts. Try and spread the word on as many different platforms as possible - be it social media, word of mouth or professors preaching to their classes. This is the most important part for the success of this event. By attracting large numbers of participants, it will create a competitive environment and get students really excited.
Finding Funding
Finding funding can be a very difficult part of the process. Start on your campus to see if there is money for hosting student-led events. Next, start contacting local companies, but don't underestimate what reaching out to a larger organization can do. In the past, schools hosting these sort of events have been sucsseful in reaching out to companies like eBay because of the similarities to the event and the services eBay provides. If money is hard to find, try and get companies to donate things like pizza or prizes.
Picking a Date
Pick a time to run the event that is mellower time in the year and people are around. Also try and make it a time that can easily be repeated each year or semester. This will really help with both turn out and making it a sustainable event that will continue on in the future after you leave.
Logistics
As far as how to run the actual event it is flexible depending on what will work best at your campus. In the past it has been successful to run the event over an 8 week period with weekly meet ups so everyone can see what each other have accomplished. Try and find away to offer weekly prizes for the best trades for each week this will help give incentive for participant to make as much progress as possible each week. If possible have different categories of prizes for example most interesting trade, most bizarre trade, etc.. Lastly have some sort of final prize for who ever come out on top with the best trade. Make sure to give students advice on how to make good trades. In the past winners have had great sucsess through recources like craigslist. The underlying key to sucess is the best comunicator though encourage the participants to reach out to as many people as possible during the 8 week period.
Media Capture
Documenting the entire experience is very important part of the entire process. Start a face book page where people can post pictures and videos of the trades they made. By doing this it will help up the competition and also show people who may have not done it this time around how much fun they are missing out on. This is also helpful for your resume when trying to show a future company or program what you have accomplished.
Sustainability
To make any event sustainable is always the hardest part. Trying to associate this event through a department within your school will help a lot. Students are constantly cycling in and out of the school but professors stay for along time. Also try and make it associated with a club or make the event a club its self. By passing on responsibility to others it will help keep it alive after you leave. In general the more groups you can get behind the event the better the chance of it happening again.
Successes Stories
A very good example of a place where this was implemented successfully was at Penn State by UI Fellow John Oliver. He was able to get over 100 students participating in his event where the starting object was a recycled plastic pen. The winner of the event was able to end with a ford f-250 pick up truck! Here is a link to a documentary made about the event.
