Working with a client, the Widening Participation Team of Edinburgh University

Finding the apropriate client

After finalising the first draft of what my project would look like, Leonluca and myself sent emails to our two potential clients: the Edinburgh University Widening Participation Team (WP) and the Edinburgh University Marketing team. After not receiving any answers from neither, we had Andrew Cross personally remind them. On the 23rd of November 2020, Niel Speirs from WP answered and showed his interest in our project. As we received no signs of life from the marketing team, we decided that we would be working with WP as our client.

First meeting and impressions of the client

We (Leonluca and myself) had our first meeting with Niel Speirs on the 30th of November 2020. This meeting challenged what our ranking of importance of every part of the project was. Neil Speirs shared his concern about the target audience and the way we would contact the teachers and their students. His worry was that teachers are very busy and that requesting involvement from their part would be difficult, and that students of this year group are busy with preparing with exams. Even though we had answers and solutions to most of these issues, he would insist that we had to rethink our project and together write a project summary to be sent to him for the start of January. Even though writing this summary would add precision to our already pre-established solutions, I believe a more constructive dialogue could have hastened the process. During the meeting, as we described to him the content of our respective projects and asked for any feedback or changes that he would like, he remained unresponsive as his main concern was the content of the previously mentioned summary.

A great point that Neil Speirs raised on this meeting was a simple question: “Why would anyone want to take time and engage with your resource?”. Reflecting on the answers to this question greatly improved how I looked at designing my project and how to reach out to the potentially interested schools.

Follow-up meetings and delivery of the project

After sending Neil Speirs the project summary on the 2nd of January, we had to receive his go ahead before continuing on with the project. After reminder emails, he met up with us again on the 26th of January to discuss the content of the document we sent him. During this meeting, he was extremely pleased with our project summary as well as how we would tackle the issues he raised during the first meeting. But, as we wanted to move on and check that we all agreed on the content to be delivered, he insisted instead to make everything ready for the worse case scenario. This was fair as the COVID situation made it so that all schools had to do their teaching online, and thus increasing stress on teachers and making involving the students more difficult.

After sorting this all out, we had another meeting on the 29th of January, where we presented to Neil Speirs our respective content, and this time with a very constructive dialogue, we managed to finalise the content of the projects and get started. One of the points about the content that he raised was to put the emphasis to overcome the negative association geology has from the media as it is often associated with fossil fuel. We had to make sure that the message came across to the students that geosciences extend way further than only oil and mining, and that sustainable development is at the hart of geosciences.
From that point onwards, we had a good flow of emails as well as one more meeting in order to keep WP updated on our progress.