the four-leaf clover

After reading chapter 12 in Caffarella’s text, the theme of highlighting program successes and understanding program failures really stuck out for me. While learning more and more about program planning and what it takes to develop a successful program plan, I realized how important and informative it is to also measure program failures. As I had thought, and as the text pointed out, more often successes are measured very thoroughly and failures are not. I agree with what Sork stated, that a lot can be learned from the mistakes people make when planning programs.

During my time in the School of Mass Communications I served on the Mass Communications Student Advisory Board. The school is divided into three sequences of study – advertising, journalism and public relations, so it’s not surprising that this formed a divide between the students. To help fix this, the faculty asked us to come up with ideas on how to unite us all. So, quite simply, we decided to start having monthly mass communications socials. The overall goal was to help unite the three different areas of study within the school. It was also important for us to reach potential students who may be interested in majoring in mass communications and provide a place outside the classroom where students and faculty could mingle.

Measuring our successes and failures after the first one would have helped to plan the next social. Unfortunately, the majority of our focus was on what we had done well and what we wanted to do again for the future. We didn’t realize until we had a couple more that we weren’t reaching the students and faculty as well as we wanted and attendance and enthusiasm were dropping. We needed to come up with a more effective way to advertise the socials to interested mass communications students and encourage those already in the programs to bring those who perhaps wanted to study an area of mass communications. Simply, if we had measured our failures after the first and second social, we may have tackled these issues earlier.

I don’t necessarily like to call them failures, but I think having a few bumps in the road when planning a program is a good thing. It means that it can only get better. In trying to relate this to the socials we planned, our student advisory board was given an opportunity and we had to learn for ourselves what worked and what we needed to improve on to achieve our goals. I think if we had looked outside of what we had done well, and had possibly distributed a survey after the first one to get feedback, we would have been able to more effectively examine our failures… or our bumps in the road.