infomatics
Group Members: Luke Smith, Eli Null, Yanlin Zhu(Andy), Danny Klimczak Furqan Waziri Team Name: Group 5 Scenario: 5
Our group was tasked with drawing bigger student audiences to arts and sporting events
at their high school. There are many different variables that will go into executing this project
efficiently. First, we will have to figure out the best way to promote the application that we will
be building. Second, we will have to decide on the best way to ensure that the students who are
using our application are actually in attendance. Third, we will have to consider the best
option(s) for compensating students for attending our events.
The first step in making an app that is effective at drawing bigger audiences at school
events is figuring out the best way to promote the app. The easiest and least costly option would
be announcing it over the morning announcements. That being said, it would also be wise to
consider other promotion options. After reading the article “Social Media Advertising 101: How
to Get the Most out of Your Budget”, the best option (in our opinion) would be creating a
location story on Snapchat that would be viewable by everyone at the sporting event. The story
would feature videos and images from various school events that would present a favorable
opinion of our app, and would help motivate students to attend other school events in the future.
The second step in making an app that is effective is deciding the best way to ensure that
the students who are using our application are actually attending the events. After corresponding
about the topic, we have decided that the best way to monitor this would be through adding a
location service on our application that ensures that the user is in the proximity of the school
event. We came to this conclusion after reading “Challenges and Business Models For Mobile
Location-Based Services and Advertising”. This article notes that location services are generally
very effective at doing what they were designed to do, which is an aspect in our favor. That
being said, there may be issues with implementing this into our application.
There are several downsides to using location services that should be noted. The primary
disadvantage to using a location service in our application is the lack of privacy. Speaking from a
personal perspective in conjunction with the article’s views, there is a possibility that some
students would choose not to use the app because it would monitor their location while the app is
open. Another disadvantage that comes with using location services in our app is the issue of
excluding students who do not have an ios or Android device. These students would be excluded
from using our application, which would result in less effectiveness. That being said, given that a
large majority of students in high school own smartphones, we still think that a location service
in our application would be the easiest and most effective way to determine whether a student is
or isn’t at the school event.
The last and most complicated step in making our app the most effective that it can be is
deciding how to compensate students for attending school events. We conducted a survey that
asked fifteen high school students on a website called “Survey Monkey” several relevant
questions pertaining to our app. The first question we asked was “Would you be more likely to
attend a school event if you could gain compensation for attending?” The question had a 100%
response rate for “yes”, indicating that students would definitely be more willing to attend a
school event if they gained compensation for attending. The second question we asked was
“Which form(s) of compensation would be the most influential in motivating you to attend a
school event?” After reading the article “Why Venmo Is So Popular With Millennials”, we
decided that venmo should be one of the options for this question. The three responses that we
provided were ‘Venmo or Gift Cards’, ‘Free tickets to other school events’, and ‘Closer/Superior
parking spaces’. 86.67% of students responded that they would be influenced by Venmo or gift
cards, and 40% of students said that free tickets or better parking spaces would be influential in
motivating them to attend school events. From this data, we can conclude that students would
prefer receiving monetary compensation (in the form of Venmo or gift cards) over the other two
options.
Even though it is clear that students prefer monetary compensation, it would be easier
said than done to implement this into our app. Rewarding students monetarily brings up a
controversial question - “how are we going to be able to fund this?” Our team came up with two
solid ideas that would serve as good options for raising the funds to compensate students
monetarily. The first idea would be to take a certain percentage of ticket revenue and dedicate it
to compensating students. The idea behind raising the funds through ticket revenue is that, even
though it would take away from total ticket revenue, dedicating these funds to compensating
students would motivate more students to attend the events, resulting in larger revenues. The
second idea that our team came up for raising funds is advertising. We could solicit local or
national companies to provide advertisements on our app, resulting in ad revenue that could be
put towards compensating students.
Works Cited
Cochrane, Matthew. “Why Venmo Is So Popular With Millennials.” The Motley Fool, The
Motley Fool, 22 Mar. 2017,
www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/22/why-venmo-is-so-popular-with-millennials.aspx.
Dhar, Subhankar, and Upkar Varshney. “Challenges and Business Models for Mobile
Location-Based Services and Advertising.” Communications of the ACM, May 2011, pp.
121–128.
Newberry, Christina. “Social Media Advertising 101: How to Get the Most out of Your Budget.”
Hootsuite Social Media Management, 5 Nov. 2018,
blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-advertising/.
Smith, Luke. "Research for Final Project." Survey. SurveyMonkey Inc . 24 Nov. 2018.
www.surveymonkey.com.