Tips for Industry Participation

							Tips for Industry Participation
Introduce A Girl to Engineering Day February 2006

Overview
 The Business Case for Industry Participation

 Tips for Planning
 Tips for Conducting Your “Day”  Tips for Follow-up & Gathering Lessons Learned

 Things that Didn’t Work for Us

The Business Case
 Senior management support for participation is vital.  Determine how “Girl Day” fits into your company’s community relations mission. Seek advice from your company’s gurus on United Way, Junior Achievement and other programs.  Be willing to start this as a grass-roots initiative and grow it into a “corporate” initiative like we did.  Convince management with statistics – view them on the Notes Page for this slide.  Volunteering in Girl Day program may increase retention of your female engineers.  ExxonMobil’s participation history: Started as a grass-roots effort in 2004 at 3 sites with 40 volunteers and 125 girls. In 2006, we’ve grown the program to 11 sites, 200 volunteers and 2700 students. See Notes Page for 2006 sites.

Planning Tips
 Start planning early – December is not too early to start.  Coordinate with other company sites, local universities, Girl Scouts, other companies, local engineering societies.

 Work closely with your Public Affairs group for media contacts; They can also leverage off of existing relationships with community organizations.
 Decide if you will do an on-site program or school visits. Develop a budget.  Talk to teachers and get to know your audience so your program will be age appropriate.

 Find out if special accommodations are necessary for safety, security, special needs students.
 Get volunteer commitments before you finalize your plans with schools.  Provide written expectations to your volunteers.  Recruit at least one or two volunteers to be emergency back-ups.  Test your experiments and demonstrations with students.  Develop a detailed agenda – but stay flexible.

Execution Tips – K.I.S.S.
 Start with info on fire drill & restrooms.  Provide a mix of activities: ice-breaker, hands on experiments & demos, team competitions, tours, panel discussions, Q&A, See Note Page for resources.

 Keep each segment short, interactive and lively, especially “speeches”; Use photos and props if giving a “How I became an engineer” presentation.
 Lunch should be simple and allow time for conversation with women engineers.  Have senior mgmt “drop in”. This benefits the volunteers more than students!  Answer questions in terms girls can relate to. For example, your starting salary as engineer means you can rent a nice apartment, buy a new car, etc.  Tell the girls “what next”, such as summer engineering camps at local colleges.  Provide a “goody” bag with SWE brochures, trinkets with company logo, “Just us Girls” t-shirts, list of websites on engineering schools & careers,  Remember to provide pertinent handouts to teachers and guidance counselors.  Have some fun!

Follow-up Tips
 Survey students and teachers but keep it simple.  Survey volunteers on what worked and didn’t.  If conducting at multiple sites, share learnings soon after the event.  Thank all the volunteers, preferably with a note from management or copied to management.  Provide a thank-you gift where appropriate.

Oops – Things that Didn’t Work

 Don’t assume the school knows exactly how long it will take to get to your site , park and/or check in.

 Avoid swivel chairs for students – it’s like a toy!
 A heavy lunch is an invitation for an afternoon nap.  For classroom visits, if demos are short, have more than you need in case you have extra time.  If multiple presenters will be doing classroom visits, provide a presentation that doesn’t require (or invite) too much customization by each presenter.  Don’t use demos or experiments where only a few kids get to participate. (Avoid the “500 Students at an Assembly” syndrome)  Try not to let employees confuse this with “Take your child to work day” unless that really IS your intent.  If the media attends, try not to let them be too intrusive.