We are often asked what other schools do to source projects for their Experiential Learning programs and courses. Some schools have an overflow of projects, but sourcing enough, high quality projects, was a top challenge identified in our 2024 Experiential Learning benchmark report.

There is no single silver bullet for project sourcing, but we have observed several best practices over the years and built features into EduSourced to make these easy to implement. The following steps will make it easier to recruit projects over time and help create a sustainable flow of projects:

• Create a project intake form for your school (not institution-wide, but school-wide) to supplement faculty and instructor project recruiting. This is in addition to any project intake individual faculty and instructors do.
• Encourage career offices, alumni relations, and corporate relations to promote this school-wide project intake form to their existing connections. Ensure anyone at your school who engages with community organizations and employers are aware of your Experiential Learning programs.
• Keep central records on all past projects and relationships across the school.
• Consistently measure project client satisfaction levels at the end of every project. Satisfied clients are future project leads.

School-wide and Department Level Project Sourcing

Schools sometimes think of project intake as being handled centrally or entirely distributed and left up to individual faculty and instructors. The middle-ground between these two options is the best practice.

School-wide project intake: All schools have an employer network, but fewer have a structured process for engaging that network for live classroom projects. This is changing: faculty and instructor personal networks have historically been the top source of project recruiting until 2024, when alumni and Offices of Experiential Learning overtook them. Having a school-level project intake allows school staff, who may not know the detail of each and every project-based learning course or program, to promote projects to these contacts in a generalized way.

Department or course-specific intake: Faculty and instructor networks remain a powerful source of projects. Recruiting all projects centrally is likely to cause friction with faculty and sidesteps an important source of quality projects. Maintaining course and program-level project intake is critical and supplementing it with school-wide intake is best practice. EduSourced makes this easy by providing each program or course with their own customizable project intake form alongside an optional school-level intake form along with tools to move projects between programs when needed.

Below is an example EduSourced intake form. Project intake in EduSourced is much more than just a simple form. Project clients now have accounts with your school and everything collected here feeds into a project profile where students can be matched into teams and work on securely with the client.

Project Point(s) of Contact

Have more than one client contact whenever possible. With a second, if your point of contact leaves the department or organization, you have a backup contact.

EduSourced allows for multiple contacts and even multiple types of contact with varied access levels and notification settings. This is helpful for managing both active Point of Contact people and leadership or management contacts who are an important part of the relationship but not involved in the day-to-day of your project. This feature is customizable but comes with a primary and secondary contact type out of the box.

Retain Ownership of Client Relationships

If you are considering using a third-party service for project sourcing, be sure to read their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These services generally claim ownership of your own project client data which is shared with other schools for their project sourcing. By recruiting your own project client network, your school retains ownership of these relationships allowing for sustainable project recruiting over the years. EduSourced is committed to protecting the privacy of our schools’ project clients and we believe schools are better positioned to represent themselves in recruiting projects directly from community and employer partners than any third-party service could be.

Measure Client-Project Satisfaction

EduSourced automatically tracks project client satisfaction with a client feedback survey you can put on autopilot. This survey can be set to auto send every time you complete a project in EduSourced and its results are tracked over time.

By following the steps outlined above, your program will be on a path to sustainable project recruitment. And of course, successful projects mean happy project sponsors which means repeat customers. For more on optimizing Experiential Learning programs and courses, this article documents the impact alumni and professional mentors can have in the success of Experiential Learning projects.