Westminster Business School Blog Academic Minds | Students Raise £9,200 for Charities via CrowdFunder on the Entrepreneurial Practice Module

Academic Minds | Students Raise £9,200 for Charities via CrowdFunder on the Entrepreneurial Practice Module

November 17, 2020
Academic Minds
No Comments

Entrepreneurial Practice module teaching team guests and students group photo

Our ever popular Second Year option module, Entrepreneurial Practice, run by the undergraduate entrepreneurship team, is constantly strive to improve student learning experience through various activities for the whole cohort as well as smaller teams. In particular, the main team activity in which teams develop various entrepreneurial skills individually and together, is to raise funds for their chosen UK charity on this project-based module.

Peace Direct crowdfunder screenshot — Peace Direct (Team members: Marjorie Bassong Moneyang, Huyen Dao, Alisha Islam, Abubakar Mohammed, Andra Nicolaescu, Shawn Shaw)

Entrepreneurial Practice: What’s this module about?

Our course, Business Management (Entrepreneurship) BA (Hons), teaches students to be creative, innovative as well as stretching them out of their comfort zones, working towards a growth mindset. So what is creativity without some limits! We put in a number of conditions to drive students towards not only be competitive with other teams but also to develop, practice and improve employable skills. The only resource they start with is themselves.

Lonely Orphans crowdfunder landing page — Lonely Orphans (Team members: Mohammud Ahmed, Karin Falconer-Bailey, Thamirys Pedraca De Campos, Nasir Rahman)

Campaigns Set-Up on CrowdFunder

Our student teams are required to develop a page for their charity working towards a ‘go live’ deadline on CrowdFunder (week 7) and they crowdfund for 4 weeks. Using their knowledge of marketing, video production (no, they cannot use it the charity’s media resources), planning, pitching, applying entrepreneurial theories and concepts, gathering evidence of their learning and finding further opportunities to fund raise during this time.

War Child 2020 crowdfunder landing page — War Child (Team members: Ecaterina, Baza, Oisin Le Gros, Janice Tan, Lazurus Thorne)

Charities

All these years, the charities have been very good to our students and we are grateful to them. Many are highly involved in the is process and it is only them who can give the green light for students to ‘go live’ on CrowdFunder. Due to Covid-19, so many of the planned creative fundraising events were shelved however, this allowed teams to give their crowdfunding sites that further push.

Street Child Charity crowfunder landing page — Street Child Campaign (Team members: Theyab Alsaei, Nikhil Alok, Rohan Reddy, Hamza Javid, Christian Siewe)

Amounts Raised

The previous academic year, our teams raised approx… £9,200 for their charities which is an amazing effort by all and without the extra event. Previous years have raised within the range of £7500 – £10,000. We are immensely proud of our students but of course, it is not how much is raised but the taking part with all the typical team frustrations, victories and some serious self-learning that such an activity will produce.

Bright Futures UK crowdfunder landing page — Bright Futures UK (Team members: Beatrice Pocini-Fearfield, Marieta Kotova, Emma Montanari, Nayab Khan, Dayoung Park)

Our Workshop Leaders

The role of our Workshop Leaders include being an unofficial ‘team coach’ to give support where needed but to allow teams to develop organically and “figure things out for themselves”. Each have vast experience in their businesses and such wealth of knowledge is to be realised by our teams. We are extremely grateful for the presence of such a coaching team to manage our students on this organised and at times, chaotic module, that is Entrepreneurial Practice.

Growth Potential: Future Aims and Aspirations

So what’s next for the Entrepreneurial Practice module? We are increasing capacity due to high demand and we suspect, high expectations but hard work, learning by doing and prepared to work in a team (as well as have some fun, make new friends) is a winning formula. This module will help students gain experiences and skills which are transferable and wanted by so many employers. Just wait and see what our student CV’s look like after!

We will continue to provide the best experience we can in this module, have a winning team and ensure that we too, enjoy the process that teaching, learning and practicing entrepreneurship can bring. We look forward to meeting and connecting with new students next year.

Special Mentions

University of Westminster, House Team especially their Team Leader, John Whitmore, for putting up with endless furniture moving year on year! And also for his contribution to our student explaining all that is Risk Assessment and Awareness for planning events at Marylebone Campus.

Su Johnston (Partnership Manager) at CrowdFunder, who visits us each year without hesitation, presenting and advising the students ‘how it is’. Her level-headedness and approachability is just what the doctor ordered to get our student teams started on something so exciting.

Thank you to all the supporting charities: