Hello World! New Updates on Sponsorship Packet and Newsletter

Hi everyone! My name is Taylor Do, and I am joined by Jason Wang; we are the newest members of the Project Management subteam of Cornell Custom Silicon Systems. In the first quarter of this semester, we primarily worked on the redesign of the sponsorship packet and the creation of a newsletter for alumni and sponsors. The first project that we will be reviewing in this blog post is the sponsorship packet.

The purpose of a sponsorship packet for an engineering project team is to show the world who we are, what we do, and ultimately gain support for sustainable development. The previous PM team members and alumni put in efforts to develop a clear, concise, and professional packet (discussed in the previous blog post).

As the team progressed this year, there were updates of different projects from each subteam, so our motivation was to design a new, clearer, and more informative version that matched C2S2's fast-evolving culture and actions. The previous packet used the iconic red and contrasting colors, but this year, we decided to go with a white background with red elements to enhance simplicity and aesthetics. We also incorporated more visual designs, graphs, and updated team pictures to guide the audience to quickly arrive at the main points while maintaining the joy of reading about our team.

Two additions to the existing structure are the "Message From Our Founders" page and the "Acknowledgement" page. As shown in Figure 2, the message page included Professor Batten and Dr. Adams' words on the story of C2S2 and our core values. Team lead Aidan followed with a paragraph to speak from the student perspective as well as lead into the purpose of this packet to seek support and subteam details. The addition of this page provides more context to our sponsors and reinforces C2S2's values and founding purposes that are demonstrated in the actions of the 6 subteams explained right after. Figure 3 shows one of the subteams' pages - System Architecture! The addition of the "Past Achievement" session to the last version provides potential sponsors with the most updated team progress to be transparent about how their funds will help the team. For the "Sponsorship Tiers" page, we adjusted the amount based on the tape-out cost and changed the format to focus on the equivalent benefits of each level of support. Finally, we added an "Acknowledgment" page with essential contact information, campus partners, current sponsors, and team members' names.

Working on the sponsorship packet was an experience practicing design skills using Canva and Figma, but it also prompted discussion within the PM team for holistic presentation and with other subteams to ensure concise updates from the technical aspect. The process of acquiring sponsorship is a pitching process, so it requires the packet to be clear, professional, and visually appealing. While making it, we also collected many photos with the help of subteams and made adjustments to them to align the design, e.g., the change of the analog subteam photo's black background to a white background for better presentation.

The new packet will undergo some final updates and will be sent to sponsors when the project management team reaches out to companies in late fall and early spring, when the companies begin the financial year and allocate funds to new investments. The project management team will utilize a spreadsheet of companies and contacts to keep reaching out and expand our team's support network.

The second project we worked on was making this semester's newsletter. The newsletter is a formal communication with both our alumni and current sponsors about the detailed progress of each subteam as well as some future plans. Previously, these updates were communicated through emails and other informal conversations, but the newsletter can fit in more technical information and has a better presentation with an additional documentation purpose. We began working on the template Jay created, and each member of the PM team focused on one or two subteams to communicate and research the ongoings of the subteam. Below is the digital subteam's newsletter page.

The structure of the newsletter includes an introduction followed by each subteam's page. For each subteam, we wrote about their past achievements and ongoing projects. For example, the digital subteam is currently working on FFT optimization. To gain more information, PM members went to several subteam meetings and reached out to team leads for details of their progress. This process formed a big picture of C2S2 in general but also with adequate details to keep our alumni and sponsors updated with our ongoing improvements. After the recent design review, we adjusted our pace to focus on quality rather than quantity, making the newsletter per semester instead of monthly. Therefore, the project management team is getting ready to send out this version and starting to prepare for the next!