Are you a fearless Idea Maker of Guelph? We want to support you in turning your brilliant idea into a reality! Come to The Elevator Project’s Round Four Launch Party on Wednesday, February 15 from 6:30-8pm at 10 Carden (Community Room) and learn about this year’s application process, as well as our new Idea Labs, designed to provide personalized assistance for Elevator Project participants.

At our Launch Party, you’ll…

• Get the insider scoop on all the details of Round Four including expectations and key dates.
• Meet other awesome Guelph Idea Makers.
• Access the tools you need to get your project started on the right foot.

This event is free and open to everyone so whether you are a returning Idea Maker or just curious about The Elevator Project, this event is for you!

If you have have any questions in advance of the event, contact The Elevator Project’s Community Animator Gabrielle at [email protected]

RSVP for the event here.

Hope to see you there!

The Elevator Project Team @ 10 Carden

• CFRU Mobile Studio will be receiving $6,000 cash from The City of Guelph
• Creating Communities of Difference will receive $3,500 cash from The City of Guelph
• Food Survival Squad will get an Innovation Guelph mentor valued at $1,500 and space at 10 Carden valued at $450
• Guelph Young Workers Safety Initiative will receive $700 cash from The City of Guelph as well as 2 laptops, a desktop computer, 4 monitors and a projector valued at $1,692
• Interactive Community Services Map will receive $4,500 cash from The City of Guelph
• Park N Dance will receive $1,000 cash from the City of Guelph, a website + 1 year of hosting from Barking Dog Studios valued at $3,000, a logo and brochure design from The Letter M Marketing valued at $5,000, membership + space at 10 Carden valued at $1,320 , and mentorship with Gabrielle Clermont valued at $1,500
• ReSkilling our Community will get an Innovation Guelph mentor valued at $1,500 and space at 10 Carden valued at $450
• Shokran Canada was the winner of our “Elevator Community Prize” for being the top voted project in our Community Vote Process with $500 cash. They will also be receiving an additional $750 cash to get a membership at Ed Video and rent equipment. Ed Video has matched $500 in-kind on equipment rentals
• That’s My Business will receive 2 one hour consultations with a business coach and a workshop of their choice plus the opportunity to apply to Summer Company (which includes a shot at a $5,000 grant). All of this is courtesy of The Guelph Wellington Business Enterprise Centre
• The Golden Bus will receive $5,000 cash from The City of Guelph
• The Next 40 Years will get $1,200 cash from The City of Guelph
• The Seed POD will receive $5,000 cash from The City of Guelph

In case you weren’t counting along, that is $47,435 worth of investment into community-benefit projects in Guelph! A full 75% of our projects received resourcing this year.

A huge thanks for all of our Investors and all of our Idea Makers for making Round Three such a success!

What is your general role at The Elevator Project?

I’m technically the only employee here so I would describe my role as chief cook and bottle washer – I do everything! It’s a part-time role (not a lot of people know that), but it’s busy. I do everything from assisting Idea Makers sculpt and shape their idea for applications to taking in the applications, to working with the Community Panel on marking the applications, to the community vote process. I also shop for the investors and match them with projects.

Can you explain what you mean by “shop for investors?”

Once all the applications are in and meet the basic criteria, that gives me my shopping list or all the things people need to make their idea happen. That’s not just funds, it can be volunteer time, a yard of soil, and/or a new website. I take that big giant list and start looking for those things. Sometimes I’ll make a specific ask and sometimes investors come to us. We look at what they’re passionate about and see if there’s a specific project that they want to help with. Maybe they don’t have a particular project in mind so we help them get matched up. In round one we had a guy who made videos and we had to look for a project that needed a video – it’s a bit of finagling. Ultimately it’s up to the investor to decide on what project they want to invest in and how much. It’s not us that makes those decisions. The Elevator Project is just a platform. The actual “shopping” takes several months, it’ll start next week. First what we do is have the community panel look at all the applications – they’re looking at eligibility criteria. They also assess each application based on a rubric we developed and there’s a possible score of 70 based on that. What’s the point of the score? To inform investors about how they were marked. Those scores may matter to investors, they may not. It’s just a piece of info they can use and it also helps me to prioritize my time. We try to resource very project, but I do have a priority order. When we do the Community Vote that helps me put things in priority as well. People from the community get to vote for their top 5. If your project gets a number 1 you get 5 points, 2nd place is 4 points, 3rd place is 3 points, 4th place is 2 points, and 5th place is 1 point. Both of those pieces of information get listed in our Idea Bank.

What can an Idea Maker do now that they’ve submitted their application and their waiting for investors?

Next week once the idea hits the Idea Bank, they can hit the ground running and send out emails to their mailing list, helping people vote for their idea. They can link to their idea in the Idea Bank. A lot of these are smaller projects so being on the Elevator platform gives them legitimacy and validity. It’s a great opportunity to promote that. They should also keep me up to date on their application, in case any requirements change.

What can an investor do now?

They can contact me! We would set up a time to chat and talk about an idea that they want to invest in. The Elevator Project’s a platform for giving – investors that give through us have a great marketing opportunity. We would add their logo to our website, we would talk about them on our social media and our big event at the end of the year. It’s a great idea for a company or consultants to show that they’re committed to the community.

This sounds great for corporate social responsibility (CSR).

We can actually be their CSR department. What we’re doing is a pretty genius thing – if you don’t have the resources to do CSR we’re doing all the intake for you and we just give you a list of things that suits your needs. So you’d tell me about yourself, your company, what you and your team care about. I’ll be able to make some suggestions to make sure the giving lines up with your priorities. These suggestions might not be around causes – you may want to give through charitable status organizations. Basically you give directly through the groups forming a direct relationship. We do all the final reporting for you and come back to you later and tell you about that. It’s nice for smaller companies that may not have a giving department.

Need to get in touch with Gabrielle as an Idea Maker or individual investor? Email her at [email protected]

If you’re a corporate investor, check out /im-interested-in-investing/corporate/

Join us 7 p. m., Tuesday, December 8th. We will meet at 10 Carden for some quick, facilitated activities and then walk down the street together to Cornerstone to have a beverage. RSVP here.

The content of this past Tuesday’s Bootcamp session revolved around articulating the problem your project is looking to solve, asking some key questions to flesh out how your project will go about solving that problem, then putting it all together to identify what you know and what else you might need to know to achieve your project.

“A problem statement is a clear, concise description of the issue(s) that need(s) to be addressed by a problem solving team. It is used to centre and focus the team from the beginning, keep the team on track during the effort, and is used to validate that the effort delivered an outcome that solves the problem statement.” ~ Source ceptara.com

Forming a good problem statement involves three elements:

• Vision – what does the world look like if we solve the problem?
• Issue Statement – one or two sentences that describe the problem
• Method – the process that will get followed to solve the problem

Here are some great question to help you articulate your problem statement:

• What is the issue?
• What is the impact of the issue?
• What impact is the issue causing?
• What would happen if we didn’t solve the problem?
• What will happen when it is fixed?
• What is different because of your project?
• What are the boundaries of the problem?
  • Organizational
  • Societal
  • Geography
• Who does your problem affect?
  • Specific groups
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Geography
• How many people are affected by this problem?
• When does the issue occur?
• When does it need to be fixed?
• Is the problem short term or will it continue into the future?
• Where is the issue occurring?
  • Only in certain…
    • Locations
    • Processes
    • Products
• Why is important that we fix the problem?
  • Only in certain…
    • Locations
    • Processes
    • Products
• What do you already know about the problem? What gaps are there in your knowledge?
  • Data
  • Who else is working on this problem? What are they doing?
  • Why is what you are doing different?
  • Talk to people (users, those affected, those who care about the issue)

This session’s content will help you answer the first four Elevator Project application questions:

• What problem are you trying to solve? Why is it a problem?
• What is the idea? How are you going to solve the problem?
• Who will benefit from your idea and how?* How many people will be impacted or engaged?
• What makes your solution the right solution? What sets your solution apart from other currently available solutions?

Join us Tuesday, November 17th from 7 p. m. until 9 p. m. at 10 Carden for session two of the Elevator Academy Reaping Results (Resources & Evaluation), which will focus on developing the skills to answer the next three application questions:

• How will you know if your idea is successful? What things will have changed? What can you measure?
• What resources do you need to make your project happen? Check all that apply. Include a detailed explanation of the resources required in each category.
• What resources have you already secured?

Sign up for session two here

Why is this session so important?

The Elevator Academy session one: Bootcamp will address the first four, and most important, application questions:

• What problem are you trying to solve? Why is it a problem?
• What is the idea? How are you going to solve the problem?
• Who will benefit from your idea and how? How many people will be impacted or engaged?
• What makes your solution the right solution? What sets your solution apart from other currently available solutions?

As you can see, this session will be essential in helping you to articulate clearly your vision, as well as the benefit your project will provide to community of Guelph. Meanwhile, you will develop a method of approach that will keep your team on track throughout both the application process and the execution of the project itself. You will also have the opportunity to identify any gaps or errors in your idea and its planning that you may have overlooked and develop the means to address them before they can compromise the viability of your project later on. Not only that, but you will also have almost half of your application completed by the end of the session!

Don’t miss this great chance to get your project started right. Join Gabrielle Clermont, the Elevator Project’s Community Animator, as she guides you the process of turning your innovative, community-benefit idea into a winner! RSVP here.

The Ramp Up, Amp up! Elevator Academy series will run from November 2015 until February 2016, Tuesdays 7 p.m. until 9 p.m at 10 Carden (Check our Eventbrite page for details). The extended schedule will give ideamakers more time to polish their projects and network with each other ahead of the February 5th application deadline. Although the workshops themselves will take a more “hands-on” approach, focused on facilitating the completion of project applications and helping Idea Makers in meeting the “Great Standard” of our scoring rubric, the skills that participants will gain are transferable to project development and project management in a wide variety of sectors including start-up/entrepreneurial and not-for-profit. Stay tuned to this blog for schedules and previews of upcoming Academy workshops.

After the February 5th deadline, a panel of community experts will first score the applications according to our “Great Standard” rubric, then decide which of them will be populating this year’s idea bank. The change in format ensures that the idea bank is populated with the most promising and ready-to-go applications – not only for when it comes time for the community at large to vote (March 8th – 25th), but also for when contributors and benefactors are deciding which projects they would like to support.

And speaking of contributors and benefactors, another change you’ll notice this year is in our approach to supporting the projects. From the beginning, EP has been committed to resourcing our projects differently. This year, we wanted our model to more accurately reflect that although money is an important resource for many of our prospective projects, community benefit is about so much more. To reflect this we’ll be adjusting our language and model accordingly. Stay tuned for more details about how we’ve improved our model for this year.

Last, but not least, save the date! The Big Show will be May 26th, 2016.

There’s lots of exciting upgrades to look forward to in this year’s Elevator Project. Let round 3 begin!!

After giving away more than $115,000 in resources during Round Two, The Elevator Project returns better than ever!
We spent the summer evaluating how we have been doing by listening hard to all of your feedback. Then we tore apart the process and redesigned it based on what you told us.
We have made a lot of changes and we can’t wait to share them all with you at our new event: Elevator JumpStart! happening October 20th from 6-9pm at Innovation Guelph.

• Get the insider scoop on all the details of Round Three including expectations and key dates.
• Meet other awesome Guelph changemakers
• Get a head start on your project application

This event is free and open to everyone so whether you are a returning Idea Maker or just curious about The Elevator Project, this event is for you! RSVP here.

Hope you can join us!

Just by showing up to celebrate community change-making with us at 6:30 p. m., Thursday, May 28th at the River Run Centre for the Big Show, you are an investor! That’s because all of the proceeds from your $10 ticket, available through the River Run Centre box office (519-763-3000), will go towards supporting Elevator project ideas.

Bring out your business cards to network with like-minded community-building peers, and be ready for lots of other fun surprises that the evening will have in store. Take this opportunity to help us and our ideamakers make Guelph a better place to live, work and play.

– Place the camera at eye level. Use a tripod (if available), or any stable surface that is level with your eye. The camera shouldn’t be shooting up your nose or down at you. One other option is to get someone to hold the camera for you but watch that it doesn’t get too shaky in their hands.

– Fill the frame with your lovely face. Get close enough to the camera so that your smiling face fills the frame enough. Leave a small gap between the top of your head and the top of the frame (this is called “head room”).

– Place yourself just left or right of the centre of the frame. Rather then put yourself dead-centre in the middle of the frame, place yourself just left or right of it. This is more appealing to the eye.

– Choose a good-looking background. The background should compliment you, but not distract the viewer from you. If it’s a wall, put some distance between your back and the wall to create some depth.

– Pick a quiet spot to record. You’d be simply amazed at what sounds the mic pick up. Listen really closely to what the room sounds like. Ticking clocks, running refrigerators/vents, outdoor noise…all of these things contribute to bad audio but can be easily solved. Ask anyone nearby if they would mind being completely quiet for 15 minutes while you record. Or even better, tell them to go for a coffee break away from your recording spot.

– Get yourself close to the mic. If you’re using an external microphone to record your voice, place it as close to yourself as you can without getting it in the frame. If you’re using the camera mic, get yourself as close to it as you can. Speak with a clear, proud voice (just don’t shout). If you can see audio levels on your camera, make sure that when you speak you don’t see them going into the red. If you do that, that means your audio is “peaking” and is too loud.

– Talk to someone off-camera. Rather than look directly into the camera, ask someone to sit right beside the camera (they can handle operating the camera for you so you have one less thing to worry about). Look at them and speak your answers to them. This lets you sound more conversational and natural. They can lead you into your answer by first asking you the questions.

– Take a breath and smile. Before each speaker starts, I always ask them to take a deep breathe in and out, smile and then start talking. It really helps to loosen you up and improves your expression and delivery.

– Do a couple of takes. Once you’ve recorded one take of you delivering your answer, try it again. You’ll probably find that the first take warmed you up and you’ll deliver it better a second time. Plus the editor always loves to have choices between a handful of good takes.

– Review it. Play it back, listen to it. Make sure you clearly spoke and that both the video and audio turned out well before calling it a day.