Greetings! With everything winding down, it’s been a hectic past few weeks, but it’s been great wrapping everything up. That isn’t to say there haven’t been challenges along the way, but no experience comes without its host of unique obstacles.

Something that was touched upon in my last post of mine was waiting on the necessary information we needed for the final phases of our project, and while we were able to get access and critical feedback from our contacts with the organization, the profilebank itself proved to be a challenge in terms of cold calling.

With college and reaching out to professionals in our prospective fields, there were expectations for how the cold calls would go, which were faced with the reality of:

1. We’re dealing with an entirely different generation in a field that doesn’t require a “corporate aesthetic.”
2. What type of information are we looking for from these farmers?

This isn’t to say that they were rude or anything, but I realized very quickly, going into cold-call scheduling and initial meetings, that my expectations for gathering the information we needed were going to need to be adjusted drastically.

The biggest obstacle in this stage was, honestly, just actually getting into contact with our respective farm contacts. Although our point of contact at Concrete Jungle played a huge role in facilitating things and getting the ball rolling in the face of a lack of response to Vic and I’s initial reachouts, the unfortunate reality is that we weren’t able to talk to everyone. From this, though, I learned the value of communication. Not just in the sense of knowing who you’re talking to and the way you need to approach communicating with them, but also in terms of making sure to keep in contact with your managers. Because we met and made our concerns clear to our managers, they were very understanding of the point we got to with our work, and acknowledged that they would do what they needed to do in their own time.

Aside from the challenges that came from that portion of the project, honestly, I feel as if this experience allowed us to accomplish a lot. I know personally, I learned a lot from Vic in terms of approaching Canva and am very thankful for her help with the templates they’ll be using across their organization. In addition, having the space to ideate and come up with so many ideas, and see concepts such as the Farmer FAQ and Posting Calendar come to life, was amazing!

It’s been an honour working on this project, and I’m excited for what comes next!