The publication day event for Young Authors of Arizona went really well, and Convergence is ready to hit the shelves on April 11th, the date of the Scholastic Regional Awards Ceremony! At the event, we collectively drafted the back cover for the book, and we also recorded feedback from students and parents on future possibilities for YAA.

Among that feedback was a positive response to a proposal for more summer workshops, possibly including a summer camp that would span several days. While an overnight summer camp might be a year or more away, one that requires three hours a day could be feasible for older students, while younger students might be able to attend a day camp.

We also discussed sharing more YAA news via social media, involving more use of our Tumblr or Facebook accounts. Social media could also be used to create a group that would allow students to share and critique work, forming a community of writers that can sometimes be difficult to find in one's own school. Of course, there's no replacement for face-to-face interaction, so we're looking into connecting with creative writing clubs at high schools. Apart from this, we'd like to have more events that bring young writers across Arizona together, like poetry open mics. All these ideas made the event really productive in terms of forming a plan for YAA's future.

Meanwhile, I haven't been physically at the museum the last couple days due to illness, but here are some pictures I took a while ago at the i.d.e.a. Museum of the Build It! exhibit:


As you can see, the kids love the Statue of Liberty!

Kids learn about architectural history while building their own creations.

The museum features the work of local artists, like this photography series that captures action figures in lifelike images using scaled props and backgrounds.

Kids build "homes" out of a variety of materials.

Having web traffic information and survey results helps me see what customers look for in the museum, and a conversation I had with the marketing director recently helped me see outreach in a different way. Often, psychographic information is more revealing than demographic information in surveys; when 40% of museums across the country closed a few years ago, that understanding is what allowed the i.d.e.a. Museum to survive. They realized that instead of trying to expand their outreach beyond their most popular demographic, they should refocus their attentions to serve their current audience. And so they redesigned the museum to address the needs of ages 3-5, using surveys to understand what their target group wanted. After this conversation, I ended up rewriting my survey for Young Authors of Arizona so that it was shorter and focused more on returning from the feedback given at the publication day event. While submissions to Scholastic were overrepresented at BASIS and underrepresented outside of Scottsdale, YAA won't make a difference as quickly if we focus on expanding our audience. That's a slow process that can't occur without a solid foundation, no matter how we try to expedite it. Instead we need to focus on building a community within the reach of students who've already been exposed to the Awards and YAA. If we succeed in this, we'll automatically attract more students, and we'll have a stronger program to welcome them into. This marks a bit of a shift in the goal of my project, but I think it reflects what I've learned through my internship at the i.d.e.a. Museum. I really believe this is the right way to approach outreach, and I wouldn't have realized that without this SRP.