CPA CEO Alex Malley with the QUT team.
A proposal to encourage shoppers to “round up” their grocery bill with a charity donation has helped win two QUT business students $20,000 in the annual CPA Big Break Project.
Sam Senior and James Robertson were crowned the national Big Break champions this month in Melbourne after tackling a real-life business challenge involving the Make-A-Wish children’s charity.
They beat tertiary teams from every Australian state and New Zealand to win their prize money, plus another $50,000 for their university.
Sam said Make-A-Wish had a backlog of $3.71 million of wishes for seriously ill children and had been forced to put a freeze on new wishes, due to the increasingly difficult challenge of raising donations and lack of government financial support.
“That’s why they were involved in the Big Break – they are in need of help and good ideas,” Sam said.
“Our brief was to look at the use and benefits of social media, potential corporate partners and potential workplace giving programs.
“We provided research and ideas on all those areas but then gave them an additional ‘X factor’.”
That X factor was a quirky idea to recommend that Coles supermarkets (already a Make-A-Wish corporate partner) introduce a “round-up to Make-A-Wish” idea at its check-outs.
“If somebody is buying $29.72 of groceries, the staff member can ask them if they want to round up the total value of their basket and donate the difference to Make-A-Wish,” James said.
“We ran 1000 simulations to account for variations in customer participation rates and donations and – given that Coles has 78 million customer transactions per month – our models found that Make-A-Wish would receive $10.8 million over the month-long campaign.”
Only time will tell whether or not James and Sam’s idea comes to fruition, but they are optimistic that the charity will pursue some of their recommendations.
The two QUT students have not yet decided how to spend their $20,000, but are considering putting it into a social enterprise of which they are founding partners and are still keeping under wraps at this stage.
The additional $50,000 prize money which went to QUT is likely to be used to help students attend international business competitions.
James and Sam are already focused on their next challenge – representing QUT in the next Citi Bank international business competition in Hong Kong in November.
The CPA Big Break Project is an initiative of CPA Australia, one of the world’s largest accounting bodies. James and Sam also each won CPA Program Scholarships as part of their prize.
The QUT team was mentored by Andrew Paltridge, the QUT Business School‘s international director.