Vealey, K. P., & Gerding, J. M. (2016). Rhetorical work in crowd-based entrepreneurship: Lessons learned from teaching crowdfunding as an emerging site of professional and technical communication. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(4), 407-427.

Vealey, K. P., & Gerding, J. M. (2016). Rhetorical work in crowd-based entrepreneurship: Lessons learned from teaching crowdfunding as an emerging site of professional and technical communication. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(4), 407-427. 

Teaching case. In this, two Phd students (I think) from Purdue discuss a year-long course on crowdfunding that they taught in a business writing class. They emphasized civic and social entrepreneurship, and as a result, they asked students to collaboratively construct a problem and seek input from the community in order to decide if the problem was worth pursuing. Have to check on that part. 

Our aim in developing this crowdfunding project sequence was to provide students with hands-on experiences engaging in all of the work necessary to launch a civic crowdfunding campaign, including conducting primary research, interviewing stakeholders and potential investors, and developing campaign materials.

Groups were not required to go live with their campaign at the end of the semester, but they were encouraged to share materials with stakeholders. 

During the first phase of the project, students conducted primary and secondary research on a problem they wished to address through their crowdfunding campaign. (See Appendix I.) Each group discussed ideas, communities, and topics of interest, and then conducted interviews, surveys, and focus groups to generate ideas for articulating problems and potential solutions. These data became the basis for both a white paper exploring a problem and surveying existing solutions, as well as a proposal for a crowdfunding campaign, including budget, funding goal(s), investor incentives, and project schedule. 

Ok, so they did interviews and focus groups. 

The course was influenced by Spartz and Weber, especially this one thing they found in their survey. They found that 68% of businesses used a ... Hell, I'll just quote it. 

Spartz and Weber’s [4] more recent survey of practicing entrepreneurs also reveals that the traditional genre of the business plan accounts for 68% of the documentation produced before a business is launched but only 54% after the business is already operating. This shift in purpose between opening and operating a business, they argue,

demonstrates that entrepreneurship writing education should consider not just foundational and strategy documents but also operating documents, such as service descriptions, manuals, and proposals. [4, p. 16] 

I don't really see how Vealey and and Gerding's class fits into this switch to operating documents though. 

Vealey and Gerding talk about the pitch deck in probably the most important part of the whole article for me. 

1. The context of 21st-century entrepreneurship is rapidly changing due to the increasing popularity of new methods such as crowdfunding. As this context has changed, so too have the writing practices and genres with which students must be familiar to achieve success in this competitive field. Traditional genres, like the elevator pitch or business plan, have long aided professional writing instructors in providing students with hands-on opportunities for engaging in entrepreneurial activities. However, these genres have increasingly become subsumed into emergent methods. Elevator pitches, for instance, have been replaced by viral videos; while the basic structure might be familiar, the kinds of writing necessary to invent and circulate such videos are drastically different. To prepare students to succeed in this environment, we must help them be aware of the shifting nature of the genres and writing practices common to successful contemporary entrepreneurs. 

x

"an array of rhetorical practices and habits of mind that are not often associated with traditional business entrepreneurship, including storytelling, participatory design, and complex problem-setting, to name a few."

It was also interesting to compare the different ideas of what entrepreneurship is or could be.

• Third, future research might examine how emerging sites of entrepreneurship, such as crowdfunding, challenge our traditional understanding of entrepreneurs as problem-solvers [32]–[34]. Given the deeply social and civic dimensions of many crowdfunding campaigns, entrepreneurs must not only address clearly defined and exclusively commercial problems but also those that are complex, unstable, and ill-defined. In what ways, for instance, do social entrepreneurs address our world’s most wicked problems [35], such as urban pollution or climate change? In what ways can local entrepreneurial ventures work to impact global matters of concern? (Vealey and Gerding)

• self-employed, having to rely on only yourself and your network (Lauren & Pigg)

Grabill and ... Simmons and Grabill (in various orders) were important. 

Service learning. 

• "Grabill [19] acknowledges that a key challenge for civic engagement work is “providing students with meaningful opportunities to do the work of citizenship and learn how to be powerful with that work” [p. 121]. Part of this problem, he suggests, means abandoning the service function wherein writing programs act as “a container, that sends students and faculty into communities to study writing” in favor of seeing writing programs as “part of the very infrastructure that supports communities writing for change” [p. 124]. Such an approach typically “would require real, ongoing projects in which students could play a role,” but can also be applied to “cases modeled on typical work required to write for change in communities” [p. 122]. Grabill demonstrates this case-based approach through a project that asked students to propose a community media center for their area. To achieve this goal,"
• Our understanding of entrepreneurship is indebted to Weber and Spartz [3], who describe it as “a holistic mindset and skillset allowing people to recognize opportunity, instigate change, and unite people in collaboration to create something new” [p. 54]. Entrepreneurship has gained prominence across institutions of higher education through a large number of institutional initiatives, such as the creation of majors, concentrations, and programs centered on entrepreneurial education. Professional and technical communication teachers and scholars, however, have not widely embraced entrepreneurship, despite common ground between the two fields in the form of projects that emphasize “active, experiential, student-driven, real-world learning” [3, p. 53]. They ultimately recommend that instructors embrace service learning and client-based projects in order to avoid “the problem of narrowness in business education” and reframe such projects within a context of civic engagement [3, p. 63]. 
• Finally, the key to our project sequence is the distinction Weber and Spartz [3] make between client-based projects and service-learning projects. The key benefit of a client-based approach is the experience students gain from articulating solutions to clients’ problems and “rhetorical challenges” rather than supplying the labor necessary to apply an existing solution, as is often the case in many service-learning projects. This more involved and active approach “presumes that students possess their own knowledge that can change the client’s organization” [3, p. 67].  

This makes more sense; there are two Weber and Spartzs 

1. [3]  R. Weber and J. M. Spartz, “Engaging entrepreneurship in technical communication using client and service-learning projects,” Programmatic Perspectives, Vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 52–85, 2014.

2. [4]  J. M. Spartz and R. Weber, “Writing entrepreneurs: A survey of attitudes, habits, skills, and genres,” J. Bus. Tech. Commun., Vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 1–28, 2015. 

Constructing problems

• We were strongly influenced by a consultancy model for service learning [3], which casts students as rhetorical consultants who work with entrepreneurial community-based organizations “in both determining and carrying out a project that unites technical communication skills and ethics with client needs, values, and attitudes” [p. 70]. Such partnerships, Ornatowski and Bekins [17] note, prepare students for their dual roles as professionals and citizens by teaching them to recognize communities as a discursive construction. “The possibility that writers construct (or co-construct) communities,” they write, “raises both civic and ethical issues that should not remain unacknowledged” [p. 265]. The benefit of civic projects for students thus involves “not only helping them understand that they construct communities as part of their professional writing activities but also teaching them to analyze such constructions” [p. 265].  
• Civic crowdfunding shifts the focus of entrepreneurship from identifying and exploiting problems as commercial opportunities to the deeply rhetorical work of constructing problems that would otherwise remain unaddressed, invisible, or regarded as not worthy of consideration. 

This is interesting actually. In 306, we position the student as a lone agent of change, and the change proposed often is very artificial and centered rather than de-centered (Piaget). But what if we got students to look at bigger problems? Maybe not bigger problems, but a different method to go about addressing those problems. 

• "In their role as change agents, Leadbetter [7] notes, social entrepreneurs “work by bringing people together in partnerships to address problems that appear insurmountable when they are addressed separately” [p. 25] Through the accumulation of social capital—“the network of relationships that underpins economic partnerships and alliances”—social entrepreneurs are able to create the kinds of self-sustaining, long-term partnerships necessary to support large-scale action [p. 25]. That social mission is tied to “deliver[ing] a social value to the less privileged” [8, p. 25], addressing “intractable social problems,” [7, p. 77], and identifying situations of “suboptimal equilibrium” that require “wholly new way[s] of approaching the problem” [9, p. 34]."

Weren't these the students who didn't do as well?

The team struggled in the development of their crowdfunding campaign because the problem that they were addressing was not clearly identified in existing research. As a result, part of their crowdfunding campaign involved not only representing the lack of adequate resources for homeless pet owners as a problem, but also articulating it as a pressing matter of concern. That is, their campaign not only sought to develop a series of care kits for distribution, but also worked to invent and sustain a problem that had not received significant attention—particularly in a way that moves others to engage with and come to understand the problem as an issue worthy of consideration. Their white paper and crowdfunding campaign materials told a story about an unseen and invisible issue that, in many ways, could draw public attention to larger, systemic issues related to homeless individuals.  

Guess they did better than I thought. 

After struggling initially to identify a local partner, this group selected SNAP because one student had volunteered as a swim instructor the previous semester.  

Identifying a local partner, check. 

 they produced a 90-second campaign video that included footage from a class and interviews with SNAP’s co-founders. 

Shit is involved!

This group stood out for having a higher degree of stakeholder interaction than any other group and for narrowing their funding goals to four highly localized, urgent needs with immediate measurable impacts on the community. However, in their initial proposal, they struggled to move beyond a general fundraising campaign for a national autism organization. They changed their focus only after reading the policies and requirements of Kickstarter, which disallows donative projects and requires all campaigns to disclose exactly how money will be spent. This new focus provided them with an impetus to forge a close working relationship with their partner to identify specific funding goals that were also tied to SNAP’s larger community mission. The civic angle they chose ultimately increased their investment in the campaign and gave their video and Kickstarter pages a persuasive civic angle with extremely detailed campaign outcomes. 

It's other-focused. 

https://utexas.box.com/s/07n427i7fm7m0oehd7xscia76nw6n17s