A couple of months ago, I championed an online campaign on
indiegogo, an online crowdsourcing platform. The campaign was aimed at getting
financial support to enable Afchix
Uganda, together with the rest of the world, to celebrate the International
Girls in ICT Day. Our goal was to bring together 1000 school girls in the rural
schools in Uganda.
Incepted in 2004 by Dorcas Muthoni, the vision of Afchix
Africa is a gender diverse ICT Industry, for we believe that women have a role
to play in the social-economic development of this continent as a whole. Currently,
we are active in Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho & Tanzania. Our simple strategy is to reach out to the
very young girls in schools, expose them to the various opportunities in ICT,
give them testimonies and change their attitudes about STEM, as we help them
uncover their potentials in Technology. For the past years, the kind of
questions we have received from the girls and the testimonies are evidence of
the need to provide career guidance in schools and thus the reasons Afchix still
exists.
For this year, AfChix Uganda decided to take its career
guidance activity to the next level, by exploring a different approach -bringing
together 1000 girls from 20 schools from the rural, as opposed to our previous
approach of visiting an individual school and talking to a few girls. Our hope
was to reach numerous girls at the same time, save time and resources and
create an environment where students can mingle and share with their peers from
other schools. This was to be held on the International Girls in ICT Day. Like
any other function, this meant mobilizing resources, hard work, with a
dedicated team.
We did not meet our financial target, nor did we meet the
targeted number of students and/or schools. However, I am glad to say our event
went on as scheduled –thanks to our supporters, schools that participated,
students and our dedicated #TeamAfchixUganda.
You might be or know of an individual, an organization or
group that might engage in a similar task. As the lead person at the forefront
of all our activities including the campaign, I consider it a privilege because
I was able to learn a few things which I thought I could share and maybe
someone out there will be able to learn one or two things.
Much as we tried to systematically plan for our online
campaign, there were some challenges we faced and some things we learned that
we needed to have done before launching our campaign.
Identify a chief
partner of your event.
Identify and get a chief partner to endorse your proposal. The
chief partner should be an organization or (an individual if it’s a personal
campaign), that identifies with your activities, is famous and is capable of attracting
the necessary traffic. This must be well in advance of the event. You do not
have to rely on approaching one chief partner because they might have already
committed to a similar event. For our case, after failing to get Uganda
Communications Commission (UCC) on board, and considering the time frame, we
then went ahead with our plan anyway, with no chief partner. This affects your
campaign to a great extent. Sometimes your only identification is that
“Partner”. People or organizations would like to be a part of reputable bodies,
so you definitely would not go wrong.
Network of friends
What is your network of friends like? Both as an individual
(championing the campaign) and as the organization (Afchix Uganda) in this case.
Knowing your network of friends will highly determine the success
of your campaign and/or help you make informed decisions.
As an Individual:
As an individual who is acting as the “face” of your organization, how many of
your friends do you have that you can count on? Forget about the over 2000
friends on your facebook. How many are
willing to go with you all the way through your campaign? Remember some will
start with you but will drop you along the rough side of your journey. How many
are willing to contribute financially or even share your campaign with their
networks? Bear in mind that there are a number of dependent-minded people;
those who make decisions based on other people’s decisions. Naturally, some
people just never believe in themselves. Even when they really agree with you
and want to support your cause, such people will support you when they see that
the people they look at as their “superiors” are supporting you. So how many of
them do you have? Definitely you cannot bank all your hopes on such friends.
During the first week of our campaign, as I continued to
reach out to friends to help me share our campaign with their networks, I
received a couple of emails from a few friends who indicated willingness to
help share our campaign with their networks but it was on condition that they
saw some money raised in the account. That brings me to my next point that its
human nature that people will want to associate themselves with success; they prefer
to jump into success to maintain a certain ‘reputation’. A handful would put up
their throat and be part of the rough side of the journey. So yes, be
expectant, you will actually have a list of such friends plus many more and you
have no right to blame them. It’s a bitter pill to swallow but bottom line is you
need to sieve your friends to help you know your position, not just for the
campaigns but in your daily life too.
As an organization/Company/Team:
This can be sub-categorized into two; 1) the kind of co-workers you have & their
network of friends and 2) the network of friends the organization has, such as partners/sponsors/well-wishers,
etc.
The idea is you will need to ask your team mates or
co-workers to share the campaign to their networks, tweet about it, etc. But
how financially strong are your team mates and their friends?
Your team
Afchix Uganda for instance is a network of women in
technology, comprising young girls, some are still at university, some are
about to graduate, others just graduated and are looking for jobs, a few have
just joined the working class while a number of us are working on our own
start-ups. Majority of each of these categories are most likely surrounded by
the same class of people. My point is given the respective situations, by
tweeting and sharing, this team and its networks may not be in position to
raise all the funds simply because of their financial statuses at the time. So you might want
to consider the other networks outside your team. For our case, we were
fortunate because we had on board friends from other Afchix chapters. Analyzing
this will help you rate how much connections you can have once you launch the
campaign.
Sponsors/Partners/Collaborators/well-wishers
Take time to identify all partners, sponsors and
well-wishers of your organization. This could be those that have sponsored you,
are aware and support your activities. You might consider having face-to-face
meetings with them as opposed to just online communications. In the process,
some might choose to provide financial support while others might share with
potential supporters.
Target Audience
What is your target audience?
This being an online campaign, it automatically means that
your campaign will reach even beyond your demographic area and to people you
have probably never met.
But what is your target audience? Are you targeting crowdsourcing
from individuals or companies/organizations? Knowing your target audience and
what they expect of you will help determine a few things:
If you are targeting sourcing from individuals, how do you
intend to give back to them? You need to know that the output will solely be
dependent on how close your relationship is with your friends and how willing
they are to support you. This means this target group works better if it’s a
campaign for a personal thing as opposed to an organization’s. However, if they
are individuals and friends to the organization, then you are in the right
track.
If its an organization, bear in mind that in some cases, an
organization will be willing to support you financially and even share your
campaign to their networks. However most organizations will go through some
protocol before providing financial support for a project or cause. One of the
things an organization will consider is “How they benefit”; they have
conditions about fellow competitors coming on board. So, considering this
scenario, what is your plan about giving back to them? How about a scenario
where over 10 organizations would offer varying support, how do you plan to
give back according to their level of support? How will you address the issue
of competitors? Indiegogo for instance has “perks” or some gifts that you could
choose as your reward to your funders for your campaign but how many of these
organizations would be interested in the perks? Are the perks equivalent to the
expected rewards that the sponsoring organization expects anyway? How will you
deliver? You might as well consider doing away with the online campaign and
instead drop hard copy proposals with outlined benefits to organizations if you
want their financial support.
…..In my next phase, I will talk about how people around
you view your cause, the unfriendly modes of payments, the timing of your campaign, my experience with a local
online crowd-sourcing platform, the budget, impact of what you tweet about, all coming up in a week’s time.
