Last year, members of the Export Historical Society were looking to move their web presence from Export Borough’s website to one exclusively focused on the society.

“We started that project with good intentions, but like a lot of things, we didn’t have the people or the time to do it the way we wanted,” said society member Melanie Litz.

Luckily, the society had also been contacted around the same time by students from Franklin Regional Senior High School’s social entrepreneurship program. The program connects groups of students with local nonprofits , who are treated as clients.

“I had some tech expertise but I’d never designed a website before,” said FR senior Andrew Arrigo. Using the Wix.com web design platform, Arrigo and fellow senior Ian Slippy began creating a website for the society.

“We added a history page, and they want to sell items too, so we set up a page for that and talked with Melanie about stuff like a PayPal account,” Arrigo said.

Slippy, 18, said it was a good way to gain some real-world marketing experience.

“We weren’t working under people, we were working with people,” he said.

Sophomore Danny Sisk and members of his group worked with the Westmoreland Conservancy to update their current website.

“It definitely needed updated,” said Sisk, 16. “We got them a new Wix website that looks a lot more professional. I’ve also been working on a video talking about what the conservancy does and their plans for the next few years.”

Sisk and team members Nicholas Rose and Matt Mazak presented the updated site to the conservancy board earlier this month, and Sisk said he expects it to go live by early June.

Senior Meghna Iyengar was interested in the environment, so she connected with the Friends of Murrysville Parks group to help redesign their website, creating an events page to publicize the group’s regular walks and filming one such walk to create multimedia content for the new website.

“It was nice that they gave us the freedom to design it the way we wanted and put a theme together,” Iyengar said. “I’m interested in computer science and design, and this gave me some insight into what I might be doing in the future.”

The program began with a grant, written by FR teachers to try and make better use of their multimedia equipment.

“We wanted the kids to work with a real live adult person,” said teacher Becky Magness. “I think it’s one of the most valuable things they could learn here.”

Teacher Roger Crider said students learn basic marketing, how to satisfy a client’s needs, how to manipulate photos and video and other concepts.

“There’s also the communication part of it,” Crider said. “This is a real group that is looking to get a job done. So the kids have to check their email to make sure they’re meeting the client’s needs.”

Magness agreed.

“It’s real-world work,” Magness said. “Time management is a big issue: you don’t get an extension because you were absent.”

Arrigo said he definitely felt the pressure of having a real-world project due.

“It was my first sort of adult experience,” he said. “It was cool to directly impact an organization as a high-school senior.”

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