Blog Post Due 9/11 Organizations

My experiences with organizations have been quite extensive. The one I would like to specifically focus on is my work with the Evans Scholar Foundation. This organization is close to my heart as it is a scholarship that I am a part of that is sending me to school for free. Without them, it is unlikely I would have been able to attend a school as great as the University of Illinois. Currently, the scholarship is going through some aggressive expansion. With currently 870 students enrolled in school through the Evans program, they are trying to get to 1,000 by the year 2020. In the past few years, the scholarship has built new houses in order to house more scholars in Indiana, Miami, and Ohio State, and most recently; they have opened a new chapter in the University of Oregon. Something else they are doing is creating a new program to begin the next generation of scholars even earlier, the Fairway to the Future program. It is essentially the Evans Scholar program except to private high schools.

With all this change, the Evans incurs some transaction costs. Most of their costs consist of search costs, searching what viable candidates there are for the Evans program, along with searching for new schools in order to open chapters. In addition to that, they obviously have to pay for all the new houses they build or renovate. In these cases, they second party to which they are exchanging the transaction costs change. When looking for new schools to open up chapters, the second agent in the transaction will be the schools themselves, while when dealing with renovating or building houses, the other agent would be the construction companies and the real estate agents.

As president of the house, I was privy to see behind the scenes of the Evans Scholar foundation on multiple occasions. Even though I was not directly involved in the expansion, I did help out in many of the fundraising efforts they have throughout the year, the largest one being the BMW Open. Every year, the scholarship puts on a golf event that professionals play in that raises money for the scholarship. As the scholarship continues to grow, it relies heavily on this, the largest fundraising event of the year. This means the event itself has to continue to grow to match the growth of the scholarship. This incurs another transactional cost as now the Scholarship has to find more and more sponsors for the event so they incur as little to their bottom line as possible and maximize the amount of donations that the scholarship can put towards paying caddy tuition. I was personally involved in helping sell more tickets and finding volunteers to help staff the event. Thankfully, the event went off without a hitch and they raised more money than ever before.