WHAT DID I DO, AND WHAT DID I FIND?
I set out with a total of Six research objectives, which shared a mixture of investigation into student funding systems and the opinions of those experiencing it first hand, as well as the education of starting up your own business and what it takes, in terms of advertising, to succeed with a primarily online business. Using surveys and an interview to gather my data, I found that not only are students concerned about the funding system, and like the idea of a proposed solution to help assist these, but I also found that with a small budget, an online business can still work. Organic growth, when done creatively with your companies own tone of voice, can be more powerful and viral than paid advertising ever could be. Scroll down further to see how I got on during the development of the project itself.
THE MID-PROJECT REVIEW
How I'm getting on so far!
So given we are roughly at the halfway mark of this project, I wanted to touch on some of the work I’ve managed to get done so far, as well as the exciting work still to be produced in the coming weeks.
With a great understanding now of Ethical Reviews and after having my own ethical review for this project approved, I felt it was important to start collecting research through my two methods as soon as possible.
In this past week I have conducted my two research methods. I began by interviewing an employee of a large lead generation business, who is the head of SEO at the company and has a lot of experience in paid media and advertising for different businesses within different niches. I felt this person fit the role best because of the extensive knowledge they have of the marketing industry. What I mean by this is that it’s very easy for anyone to get into marketing, but the working practices and advertising techniques/strategies, of course, change with each business or each niche. The employee I interviewed has had years of experience covering all areas of advertising and utilising various strategies depending on the business needs.
The second thing I did this week was launch my government funding survey. This survey is looking to seek out any students across England, Scotland or Wales who submit an application through Student Finance each year. The survey looks to ask students about their experiences with Student finance, their opinions on the current funding situation, as well as their thoughts on my business idea as a way to assist in some way with the current financial problems students face within the UK. I’ve of course acknowledged that not every idea is perfect and there are drawbacks to this so I have also included questions surrounding these concerns to ensure I cover all bases of what I’m trying to establish.
In the last few weeks I got to work on the 5000 word written dissertation report that engulfs our Live Project as a whole. I started and have, in the past few days, managed to finish a 2000 word literature review on a vast range of academic texts and research that explore the depth of Student Funding issues, including looking at international comparisons and also the different available financial assistance from the institutions (e.g Grants vs loans etc). For example, I found out that students in England face some of the highest tuition fees in the world. This is just a fraction of some of the conclusions and comparisons we managed to draw. I wanted to ensure I covered all corners of Student funding as a whole, to ensure that I can make accurate and informed opinions on the current state of funding. The reason I say this is because a common discourse amongst academics in the world of Student Funding, is that not enough hard research is done into the specifics of how effective funding is that is allocated either to these institutions or to the individual students themselves. We haven’t seen a lot of research into how this impacts participation, performance and so on. This is why I wanted to ensure my literature review was as thorough as possible.
In the following weeks, I hope to finalise my Survey and write up my findings across both this, and the interview I conducted in order to make an informed decision about the state of my business idea and just how effective that could be.