Riipen Service Assessment

At Riipen, we are constantly striving to listen to our customers and steer our tech-enabled service in the right direction. I would like students to sign on as an industry (company) user on Riipen to conduct an assessment of both the technological user flow of our platform, as well as provide insights into how our customer success and support services could we improved. We envision this project to include, but not be limited to: An analysis of any discrepancies between our sales pitch and the post-sales journey. An assessment of our platform from a simple usability standpoint (we're conscientious that students don't come from an UX background). An assessment of the support provided by our staff. Some of the other areas listed on this course page don't fit quite as much- we're not looking to ensure employee integrity or motivate them by knowing that mystery shoppers will visit. In fact, this project is fully transparent to the team. Rather, I'd like to focus on having an unbiased insight from an outside perspective. The only perceived difficult is that students will have to put themselves in the shoes of a business, and not a consumer.

Data Visualization

Un projecto de Esteblecer diseños que impacten en el costo de fabricación

Increasing Student Engagement on Riipen (Test)

We are looking for students to work on this gamification project. Riipen has 3 types of users: students, educators, and employers. We are interested in a product solution or other recommendations to gamify our platform in order to increase student engagement. Potential scopes for this project can include, but are not limited to: An increase in completed student profiles An increase in student usage of the in-app chat, file sharing, and the meeting scheduling function An increase in student submissions to Challenges An increase in metrics not identified above An increase in the average time spent per user session

Exploring the potential of a student profile library

As a growing online platform, one idea that we'd like to explore is the potential of having student profiles show up in a searchable library that our student, employer, and educator users could explore. While students who currently use Riipen for their in-class projects or challenges do have public profiles, they aren't readily available in a single depository, like you might find on LinkedIn or Instagram. The reason we would like to consider this option is because making student profiles searchable could possibly encourage employers to engage with and employ more students from Riipen. It could also as an additional bonus encourage other student users to be more active when they see the breadth of experiences that some of our top student users have. This being said, some of the ethical questions we'd like you to shed insight on include: Is it okay for student profiles to be shared in a searchable library? Are there any ethical dilemmas around monetizing this library by providing access only to companies that pay above a certain tier ? Given that you are students, we feel that you would be particularly well-suited for exploring this question, and our team would be eager to hear your perspective. We are happy to provide a dedicated contact and discuss any further resources/ information you might need.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Riipen is currently in the process of revamping its incident response plan and would like groups of students to review and make improvements to it. Items of concern in our current response plan include: Response alert, escalation, and plan invocation Impact assessments Backup recovery and infrastructure repair Disaster team roles Media Insurance Financial and legal concerns Riipen will provide our current disaster response planning documents and policies to the participarting team of students. We would like to have the students develop a new version of the plan (and any accompanying documents needed) which addresses any issues they can find with the current plan. This might include: Missed topics of concern Changes to existing topics Including the use of available tools etc. Riipen will be available to provide feedback to students and any needed information to facilitate this project.

Riipen UK Expansion

Riipen would like your help to create an expansion strategy to bring our online digital platform to universities and companies in the United Kingdom. Having successfully run a pilot with the University of Southampton Business School in the last year, we are confident that the time is now ripe to rollout a larger scale outreach to potential academic and industry customers. While we've grown significantly in the North American market, the cultures, policies, and societal norms of the UK are new to us, and we think that you would be well positioned to provide insight into Riipen's expansion into the UK and potentially the European Union too. We envision this project to include but not be limited to: Market research analysis of potential channel partners for scalable outreach. PEST analysis of the competitive landscape in the UK. An actionable academic and industry sales plan that takes into account our limited resources. We want you to be analytical and creative in creating your recommendations. Please keep in mind that our team will be happy to provide any resources you need or answer questions you may have.

Organizational Workflow Challenges Across Different Offices

Hi! We'd like to work with your students on issues and challenges that arise for a company when staff who are expected to work in close coordination with each other are actually spread out across two different office locations; in our case Victoria and Toronto. What are the exact challenges we face? What are some ways we can overcome those challenges? Are there any best practices out there to help inform our workflow across two cities? These sorts of questions we'd be interested in exploring. We've done some previous internal research on the matter and are happy to share that data with the students as well.

Kitchen Tasks

We are looking to have students conduct Data analytics on our company.  This could include Developing reports, data integration plans, or ETL processes, meaning, Extract, Transform and Load which is the process in database usage and especially in data warehousing that: Extracts data from homogeneous or heterogeneous data sources. Transforms the data for storing it in proper format or structure for querying and analysis purpose. Our company could greatly benefit from an analytics dive like this one. 

Test 2

We are looking to have students conduct Data analytics on our company.  This could include Developing reports, data integration plans, or ETL processes, meaning, Extract, Transform and Load which is the process in database usage and especially in data warehousing that: Extracts data from homogeneous or heterogeneous data sources. Transforms the data for storing it in proper format or structure for querying and analysis purpose. Our company could greatly benefit from an analytics dive like this one. 

New Office Investment Analysis

Riipen has offices in Vancouver and Toronto. The Toronto office has quadrupled in 2019, growing from 2 to 10 employees. We are currently working out of a co-working space, but as we grow are considering leasing dedicated space. When assessing the cost of new space, we need to consider the total cost of leasing an office. The cost per person at our co-working space covers furniture, internet access, cleaning services, key card access (security), and a kitchen with free coffee, milk, and snacks. Were we to rent a new space, we would need to absorb all of these costs. It is difficult to gauge the affordability of a new space, because the rent is only a portion of cost. We would like to understand what monthly lease will allow us to pay the same or less per person than we do now, given that we will also need to cover cleaning, furniture, internet, etc. We would also like to understand how many staff is "too many" to stay in the co-working space. At what point does it make financial sense to move?

The Riipen Flywheel

The concept of the "flywheel" has been popping up a lot recently. Essentially, the flywheel model gets companies to move away from the typical marketing and sales funnel, and moves them to a flywheel that connects marketing, sales, and customer service where the customer is right in the middle. You can learn more about it here: https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel Riipen wants to move towards this model, but our systems and business processes are still set up like a traditional funnel/pipeline. We'd like the students to help us adapt our current systems and processes that's modeled after a funnel and turn that into a flywheel. For example, how can we improve our marketing to sales, sales to customer service, and customer service to marketing handoffs? Key questions we'd like answered: - What are the points of friction that prevent our flywheel from spinning quickly (i.e. where are the bottlenecks)? - What are the forces that can help our flywheel spin quicker? - How can we bridge the gap between our ideal and actual state? - How can we improve our processes in general?

Riipen is expanding to the UK!

Over the last few months, Riipen has started expanding into the UK market. We find that our technology would be well received by post-secondary institutions in the UK and would love to work with the students to analyze our current messaging and consider how we would adapt our marketing to better serve a new market. The students would be focusing on analyzing our main page. www.riipen.com and making suggestions about how the page could be adapted to better resonate with the current climate. For this project, we are assuming that the content would be migrated to a site specifically designed for the UK. To give an example of language in Canada we use the term "work-integrated learning" in the UK there is different terminology for how our platform would be positioned.

The Riipen Flywheel

The concept of the "flywheel" has been popping up a lot recently. Essentially, the flywheel model gets companies to move away from the typical marketing and sales funnel, and moves them to a flywheel that connects marketing, sales, and customer service where the customer is right in the middle. You can learn more about it here: https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel Riipen wants to move towards this model, but our systems and business processes are still set up like a traditional funnel/pipeline. We'd like the students to help us adapt our current systems and processes that's modeled after a funnel and turn that into a flywheel. For example, how can we improve our marketing to sales, sales to customer service, and customer service to marketing handoffs? Key questions we'd like answered: - What are the points of friction that prevent our flywheel from spinning quickly (i.e. where are the bottlenecks)? - What are the forces that can help our flywheel spin quicker? - How can we bridge the gap between our ideal and actual state? - How can we improve our processes in general?

Riipen - Team Development Project

We would love to have your students assist us with our goal of creating and nurturing a positive team culture even as we grow, specifically around Passion Projects. Presently, our offices span across Canada, with team members in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Our team is growing rapidly (approx. 300% growth per year) and we want to ensure that the culture we foster is positive, scaleable, and right for all of our team members. Starting in mid 2019, various members of Riipen, across teams, started PACT, the People and Culture Team. This team was created to ensure that the culture was coming from within, that everyone felt represented, and that the events held were in everyone's interest. Ultimately however, PACT is just a small team of people who also have jobs to do, so we would love some guidance! In the past, Riipen management implemented Passion Projects - projects that were designed to be outside of a team members regular work scope, which allowed them to utilize their skills and talents, foster their creativity, and get outside of their day-to-day work. These were designed to be smaller initiatives, but ones that were still in line with the needs of the company as a whole. What we found was that people were eager to take things on, but ultimately things were not finished and projects were left in the lurch. We would love to bring back Passion Projects, but are eager to find ways in which we can ensure accountability and sustainability, while still making the projects enjoyable and productive. What we would like to explore: What kinds of Passion Projects work? - I know endeavours like this are something that companies like Google encourage Who manages them, and who is accountable. Does there need to be one centralized team (PACT for example) who 'doles' out projects, or do people pick their own? How? How do we ensure that passion projects are in line with company goals? How big or small should they be? Are there rewards? Are there external factors we haven't considered that will help contribute to success?

Content Creation

We are rapidly growing and looking to become thought leaders in our community and the experiential learning space. Blogs and articles are a great way to connect with our audience and share valuable information about emerging trends in experiential learning. This content can also showcase the ways Riipen and its partners are adapting to meet the changing needs of students and employers. We would like students to produce intriguing and engaging content that discusses some of the trends and challenges within experiential learning education that can be shared on our website or through LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social channels. We are looking for content that is both factual and informative, but also interesting, thought-provoking, and creative. Blogs/Articles should be approx. 400-800 words. Sample topics include, but are not limited to: Experiential Learning initiatives in 2019 The Skills Gap Federal Government Commitment to Work-Integrated Learning Trends in Experiential Learning for Arts Students

Increasing Student Engagement on Riipen

We are looking for students to work on this gamification project. Riipen has 3 types of users: students, educators, and employers. We are interested in a product solution or other recommendations to gamify our platform in order to increase student engagement. Potential scopes for this project can include, but are not limited to: An increase in completed student profiles An increase in student usage of the in-app chat, file sharing, and the meeting scheduling function An increase in student submissions to Challenges An increase in metrics not identified above An increase in the average time spent per user session

Pricing Model Development

We would like you to develop and test a series of pricing model options and present an effective data-based pricing model recommendation for our organization. You should conduct primary and secondary research to confirm your recommendation is validated by our target customer in this market.  To accomplish this, we believe you will need to conduct the following research: Our organization’s costs, target customer, revenue targets, and business goals. The competitive landscape of this new market. Organizing focus groups, surveys, and/or customer discovery interviews to get input and feedback on potential pricing models. Using targeted online ads to A/B test landing pages with different price models. We want to enter this new market with a proven pricing model so that we can have a successful launch.  Final deliverables should include: A written report including an Executive Summary that illustrates your research findings and recommendations on our pricing model. A visual presentation of your research findings and recommendations. 

Riipen-Fanshawe College test 2

N/A

Podcast Launch

Riipen is a company with a great story. Our two founders started the company at the University of Victoria as a student project. They were frustrated with the lack of opportunities available to them and although they have both done co-op programs they thought that more could be done to support students in their learning. With the mission of ending graduate underemployment we set out to give faculty the tools needed to embed industry projects directly into the classroom. Through this, we have met a number of inspiring educators, companies, and students who are innovating and changing the way in which experiential education is delivery. The vision for the Riipen podcast is to be a vehicle in which we showcase this innovation. It's about telling stories that encourage people to think differently. This upcoming semester, I would love to work with the students to launch the very first episode of the Riipen podcast (we would love suggestions on a name)

Riipen translation project

We are growing rapidly and we are expanding our services to the French speaking population. We are already working with 5 French speaking colleges and universities and will continue to partner with francophone institutions. We have translated the main interface of the Riipen app into French but the template library, help center and www.riipen.com have not yet been translated. We need your help to translate our app and website from English to French to serve our new customers. Our goal for this project is to work with the students to: Translate selected templates in the course templates library as well as the project templates library Translate selected documents from the Help Center (question mark button on the bottom right) Translate selected content from the riipen.com website Link to app Link to website

Finding Our Ideal Industry Customer Profiles

Riipen has two groups of customers - academic institutions and industry partners (i.e. companies, non-profits, etc.). We want students groups to focus on our industry partners. We've analyzed the data of our industry customers and created a rough ideal customer profile that we try to use for our sales, marketing, and client success initiatives. However, as a growing company, we don't want to exclude any opportunities that may come our way. As such, we pursue opportunities that may have detrimental effects to our teams (i.e. wasted time and effort because a bad fit customer doesn't take a desired action). We are looking to gain a better understanding of out target market to ensure we are positioning ourselves in the right segment, offering effective benefits, and creating the best marketing messages.  There is quite a bit of data in our CRM on our customers as well as our prospective customers. We also have data of customers from our previous revenue model. We hope to get a few (if not all) of these questions answered: Where should we be focusing most of our resources? What are we missing about our ideal customer profiles? Who are our highest growth opportunities that we should spend more time on? How can we best use this information to improve initiatives and campaigns from the sales, marketing, and client success teams?

D2L-Riipen Integration

N/A

Marketing Project for new clothing brand

It’s important for us to have a better understanding of how our target audience perceives our brand and competitors. We want to develop clarity on our competitive advantages and optimize our marketing strategy.  We believe this project will involve: A complete brand and competitor analysis, including identifying our current and future competitors and their market share. Building a competition portfolio of our competitors, their features, services, price, and logistics. Conducting empirical interviews and/or questionnaires for feedback on our brand compared to competitors. We will give you access to organizational assets to support this project such as personnel, website analytics, sales and brand collateral, and more. We hope to gain a comprehensive understanding of the competitors in our space and how we can differentiate. 

Employee All Hands

Here at Riipen, we're very proud of our team. Our HQ is in Vancouver so most of our employees live and work here. However, we have a few employees working remotely across the country. Currently, we have 2 employees in Toronto, 1 in Calgary, 1 in Kelowna, and 2 on Vancouver Island. In 2019, we hope to have all remote employees visit the Vancouver office at least once. In addition, one of our core values as a company is ingenuity. This is exemplified most in our bi-weekly, company-wide "Innovation Session" meetings where we discuss topics and find ways to grow given the limited resources that we have. Combining these two ideas together, we'd like to have everyone at Riipen get together for an all hands/retreat of sorts. This will ideally be a 1-2 day event (maybe more) that combines social activities and innovation sessions. The goal of this event is increased team morale/bonding as well as the creation of more innovative ways to improve the company. Most importantly, this event is a "thank you" for all the hard work everyone puts in every day. A few things to keep in mind: As a growing startup, this event has to be budget friendly. No date has been set, but this event will ideally occur during the summer to take advantage of the beautiful Vancouver weather. However, our busiest season is the Fall semester, so late August will not be an option. All or a portion of the event can take place in our downtown Vancouver office. We are open to ideas outside of downtown Vancouver. We're open to any ideas for activities (both business and social) that we do during the all hands. How can we best handle our day-to-day tasks during this event (i.e. customers contacting our support line while we're doing an activity)?

How has use of "Requests" on Riipen changed over time?

In Spring 2018, Riipen launched a two-sided marketplace feature on our platform. This marketplace feature allows employers to apply to work with professors (as they could before), and also allows professors to apply to work with companies (a new feature as of April 2018). Internally, these applications are called "requests" as the other party must approve or decline the request to collaborate. Since launch, we've seen significant growth in the number of professors requesting companies. A challenge that was encountered early on was that some users were not responding to requests, or were responding very slowly, causing frustration for the other party. On November 21, 2018, we launched a "request expiry" feature which requires users to respond to requests with 14 days, or they will expire. We would be interested in having students look into how requests have evolved over time. Number of requests per user, by user type Volume of requests (of both types) over time Request response time Request acceptance rate Request expiry rate With respect to the metrics above, it would be interesting to look at how (or whether) the Nov 21 launch of request expiry has changed user behaviour. Do users now respond to requests more quickly? Send more requests? Less? Our hypothesis was that they would respond more quickly, and send more requests due to the improved response rate. We can provide anonymized data up to the launch of the project, from April 2018 forward (approximately 2400 requests to date). We can also provide complementary data sets if needed, such as new user accounts created over time.

Sales Process and Operations Audit

There are several avenues that students can take with this project, and we would like students to tackle what they see as most fitting to their skills and learning outcomes. We would like to better understand A) how we can improve and automate the workflow of tasks completed by our staff to improve our sales conversion, customer experience (NPS) and churn rates. We want you to investigate our sales funnel to help us understand why prospects are falling off and what changes we should make to increase sales and decrease churn. B) What we need to do internally as a company in order to be prepared to expand to new markets. This includes planning what new roles we should add to our team. C) When should we be expecting to see a proportionate saving in our costs due to increased volume of sales, and when should we expect more overhead cost from our management team? You will have access to our Sales Manager, CRM and Sales/Marketing Automation tools for information and we will provide all current sales collateral for review. You will also be provided high level data, but not individual account information. In summary, your focus may include, but is not limited to: Identifying areas to improve efficiency in sales and renewals. Capacity planning for expansion. What internal roles would Riipen need to hire in order to add 25 new schools? When/Where can we expect economies of scale? When/Where can we expect more overhead cost from management? The final report may include: 5 to 7-page report detailing recommendations for improved operations management. Reports will include a title page, table of contents, and reference page. A 5 to 7 slide presentation deck (executive summary) highlighting key findings/conclusions. We would like to see presentations (via video conference) of the top groups.

Invoicing Process Analysis

As a startup, we have been learning and changing a lot. However, our processes never have a chance to catch up. As such, we're often developing new processes on the fly. Last year, we introduced a new payment model for companies. In this model, companies purchase a subscription and then get access to the platform. After a few very confusing weeks, we managed to iron out our process for invoicing companies. Most invoicing is now done online through our online platform and Stripe payments. However, now that the year is starting to end, a lot of subscriptions are up for renewal. We've managed to create a basic process for handling renewals, but it's not the greatest. With an emphasis on the renewal invoicing process, we'd like help on improving our invoicing process at Riipen or establishing a new one that would be better. This project would help answer these questions and challenges: What would be the best process to handle renewal invoicing? What would be the best way to handle refunds? How do we handle payments not done online (i.e. the company pays with a cheque) and implications of this for renewals? Is there anything we're missing with our payments system (i.e. internal risks, compliance, other business processes) that could affect our growth as a company? If there is time available, we'd also like our invoicing process analyzed to make sure it works well.

Competitive Analysis - Riipen Test

It’s important for us to have a better understanding of how our target audience perceives our brand and competitors. We want to develop clarity on our competitive advantages and optimize our marketing strategy.  We believe this project will involve: A complete brand and competitor analysis, including identifying our current and future competitors and their market share. Building a competition portfolio of our competitors, their features, services, price, and logistics. Conducting empirical interviews and/or questionnaires for feedback on our brand compared to competitors. We will give you access to organizational assets to support this project such as personnel, website analytics, sales and brand collateral, and more. We hope to gain a comprehensive understanding of the competitors in our space and how we can differentiate.  The final project deliverables include: A 10-page final report detailing our competitors and our competitive advantages with recommendations on how to improve brand awareness. A 15-minute presentation on your finding and recommendations. 

Sales Process Audit

We would like to better understand how we can improve and automate the workflow of tasks completed by our staff to improve our sales conversion, customer experience (NPS) and churn rates. We want you to investigate our sales funnel to help us understand why prospects are falling off and what changes we should make to increase sales and decrease churn. You will have access to our Sales Manager, CRM and Sales/Marketing Automation tools for information and we will provide all current sales collateral for review. You will also be provided high level data, but not individual account information. Focus may include, but is not limited to: Mapping our customer journey. Identifying problem areas where prospects and customers disengage from our sales funnel and/or product Developing recommendations of how we can improve our sales process and increase customer engagement/activity. The final project deliverable is a 10-page written report detailing our current sales process and your recommended changes. The report may include: A visual graphic of current sales process. Current customer touchpoints with sales team, customer success and account managers Current sales collateral that is exchanged. Drop-off rates between customer lifecycle Recommendations for improvement through workflow automation Improve our sales and lead tracking system Improve our sales conversion rates Decrease Churn Optimize human resource allocation

Riipen - Career Advancement Mentorship Training

We would like you to assist us in developing a management training on career advancement mentorship. We see this as an individual learning plan. To accomplish this, we believe you should focus on: Developing a bias-free, anonymous survey to administer to our employees. Compiling a training needs analysis, based on survey data. Building a training program, based on the needs analysis, that each manager will undergo. The training plan should prepare management to implement career advancement mentorship with each of their team members. The final project deliverables will include: A 20-question customized, unbiased, and anonymous employee survey. A 2-page training needs analysis. A training manual for management-level employees that will guide them in providing career advancement mentorship for their team members. A presentation detailing the survey content, analysis, and findings with an explanation of the training solution (optional). We are hoping to provide our managers/supervisors with more confidence when working with their team by having more direction in their training and for the team members to feel that they are receiving beneficial training and mentorship while working at Riipen.