The Matthews Bill Project was by far the most meaningful project in terms of community impact. Matthew’s Bill is a piece of legislation that would require that each high traffic building would have a family bathroom with an adult changing table.

 

The Matthew’s Bill project came about as a result of a real world problem. The main issue was that caretakers of people with disabilities were having issues helping their friends in the bathroom process. Whenever someone with a disability went to a public restroom, there was not enough room to be able to maneuver a wheelchair or be able to change someone who has a disability. One of these caretakers came to us and asked for our help and Ms. Durkee (quite excitedly) said, “Government Project!”

 

The main goal of this project was to lay the foundation for us to be able to, first create and then advocate for this bill. We hoped that by the end of the course, we would have researched the needs for the bill, written the bill, created literature to advocate and explain the bill, and finally been able to hold our first rally and have the bill introduced to the Senate.

 

The best thing about this project is that it allowed us to practice catching peoples’ attention. For this project, we had to do everything from calling people we didn’t know to writing letters to government representatives and organization heads, and we had to catch their attention and get all of our information across to them without them hanging up. (This happened a couple times.)

 

The hardest thing about this project is the fact that this project would not be complete when we finished the course. Normally, the product is finished by the end of the course because it serves as a final grade but this project is going to continue on even after the end of the year.

 

We started this project by researching the needs of the “client” and researching how we should go about introducing our bill. We had multiple guest speakers during our research phase and they provided a lot of insight into the lives of people who live with disabilities and into the world of business communication so that we could effectively market our legislation. After we completed the research face, we started to create models of our different products. We created brochures, websites, podcasts, advertisements, informational booklets, and a whole lot more. We then went through and did a round of peer critiques so that we could make sure that they were easy to understand and got our point across. We finished up our products and on May 22, we held a rally to promote this bill. The project is still continuing at the time when I wrote this.

 

The peer critique process helped us understand what was working with our products and what wasn’t. Since the purpose of these products was to effectively communicate our message, it was really important to make sure that our products made sense and didn’t bore the reader.

 

Communication was the main emphasis of this project because the whole project was designed specifically to advocate for a piece of legislation. Over the course of the project, we brought in a marketing consultant to talk to us about how 80% of marketing is choosing your “target market” and then writing everything so that it appeals to them and tells them what they get out of the product or service that you are marketing.Communication- being able to find a balance between keeping the attention of the target audience and smothering them with too much information.

 

Advocacy for Equal Facilities Website: www.matthewsbill.wix.com/drss