We are a PREMIUM group working in a consultancy-based project for COMMEET, a global fellowship that aims at community empowerment. Our project investigates and develops policies to measure COMMEET's social impact; and develops a communication plan to position COMMEET in the global market of sustainable development.
PREMIUM is about to end! After five months of meetings, presentations, posts, research and ideas, we are quite proud of the work we have done to contribute to COMMEET. We sincerely hope that you have enjoyed to follow our journey though this Tumblr page, because we sure did love to share. Here we present you a personal experience of PREMIUM from each group member of Commit2Commeet!
Source:Â Delightful Short Film Traces A Rock's Journey Over Millions Of Years
Anna:Â Premium has been a powerful learning experience, composed of a challenging task and a meaningful purpose. Multiple zoom meetings, few bumps along the way, minor disagreements and many well thought recommendations later Commit2COMMEET has produced concrete solutions that will significantly improve COMMEETâs work. This program has enriched my knowledge, enhanced my communication skills and exposed me to multiple perspectives. Most importantly, this experience started with a team of colleagues, but I am happy that it is now ending with a group of friends.
Camila: PREMIUM has been an experience that allowed me to evolve not only different professional skills in a multicultural environment, but also to find some good friends. To have the opportunity to develop a communication plan for a social impact organisation was something unique about the PREMIUM experience for me, together with the ability to work on web design skills with this Tumblr page. Most of all, I hope the connection between me and my team members stay with me along the way!Â
Jasmijn:Â I joined the premium program to better prepare myself for exploring the professional skills I thought I would need for finding a job after my masters. I got not only that via workshops and coaching premium provides, I also got to work with a great non-profit organisation to which we really made a difference, be part of the premium community, and create friendships with my five wonderful teammates! I am very happy I joined the program and would recommend it to all master students!
Kim:Â PREMIUM has been a blast! During my journey here, I met 5 girls who I can now call my friends. They are all so sweet and kind, working with them was just lovely. I can only say the same about our client, they were kind with us and showed a lot of appreciation for what we did.
Marlene:Â I have learned to be part of a team and to work towards a result for a real client. I got to know inspiring people and enjoyed working with them - even at distance.
Suzanne:Â What I will remember from the PREMIUM experience is meeting inspiring people. I loved working with COMMEET because they are dedicated to making a better world from little resources yet so much motivation. They were eager to grow and learn from us but in the end, it was more than a one-way benefit!
We thank the PREMIUM programme and Maastricht University for providing us with such an enriching experience.Â
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We have mentioned before that our communication strategy for COMMEET includes the framework of multimodality, which is the idea of making a composition with various modes (such as writing, video, photos, gifs, maps, and others) to communicate a message and express meaning. Therefore, one of our main goals during our PREMIUM project was to enhance the audience engagement and comprehension about COMMEET by producing a video about the fellowship!Â
Source;Â A Level Media: Evolving Media
This strategy enables the audience to gather information of COMMEET through different literacies, as we used video, letterings, writing, icons, symbols, voice over and music. The concept of plural literacy is recognised by the United Nations as a strategy to enhance learning processes, and we do believe that engaging with plural modes and literacies is a good practice to provide meaningful content for the diverse audiences of COMMEET. In addition, we intend to provide captions in several languages for the video in order to make it more inclusive for different communities around the globe.Â
Today we are proud to present our creation, a short video explaining COMMEETâs mission, goal and values, raising awareness of the organisation through audiovisual content. Hope you like it!
We also need to thank Joe Culhane, a fellow of COMMEET who helped us by recording the voice over for the video. In addition, Jos Hermans and Maarten Schrevel, for providing us with valuable information about COMMEET through interviews (you can check them on the video!).Â
Don't forget to subscribe to the COMMEET Youtube channel!Â
As part of our communication strategy for COMMEET, we advice the fellowship to post regularly and consistently on their social media accounts. Up until now, the fellowship faced troubles coming up with content to upload. Fortunately, we are here to change that.
Source:Â Simon Super Rabbit
We are currently creating a number of posts that can be uploaded including topics ranging from the history of the fellowship, to the explanation of their toolkits, to their contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and so forth. Today, however, marks another milestone of our project: our first post is ONLINE!
Our first post introduces COMMEET and tells what the fellowship stands for. Interested in more? Then please check out COMMEETs Instagram account (@commeet_fellowship) and hit the follow and like button. Stay tuned for weekly posts!
Presenting to you Commit2COMMEET off duty! Last Thursday our team took the day off from working to make a change and enjoyed a fun burrito night! All our members came together to enjoy Mexican food and good wine (even the oneâs not living in Maastricht). The night was a big success and involved lots of talking, laughing, yummy food and drinks, bonding and enjoying each otherâs company.Â
Source:Â JLRReyes
Highlights of the nightÂ
BABS burrito is really hard to finishÂ
We all love nachosÂ
The wine cocktails made by Suzanne (we got you covered on the recipe)Â
This get-together helped us learn some fun facts about each other, and now you will get to know us better too:
Kim: rarely finds people that like the same music as her, because her taste might be a bit atypical. She loves a good german ballermann song or EDM songs with lots of beats, and even studies to them!Â
Suzanne: likes to write poems. A very creative side of Suzanne we came to discover!
Anna: has zero sense of direction. She was late to the gathering because she went in circles around the same houses (she gets lost in every city, no matter how long she lived there)Â Â
Camila: has read all the Harry Potter books a thousand times and knows all the lines by heart (this also applies for the movies). She is still waiting for her Hogwarts letterÂ
Jasmijn: drove a van all the way around Australia. She is the most adventurous member of our team who started exploring from a young age!
Marlene: once danced Waltz under the pyramids in Egypt (this is what we call dancing with a view!)
And here it goes our wine cocktail recipe...
Source:Â carmelacaldart
Ingredients
White wine
Lemon syrup
Fresh lime
Sparkling water
Frozen blueberries
Instructions
1. Prepare your fancy looking wine glassesÂ
2. Add ice to fill ž of the wine glassÂ
3. Mix 1 tablespoon of frozen blueberries and 1. Oz lemon syrup
4. Top with chilled white wine (to cover the ice cubes)
5. Add some sparkling waterÂ
6. Squeeze fresh lime for a perfect finish
Hope you enjoy your drink in one of the sunny spring days we will have soon enough! Keep tuned for our last posts as PREMIUM students - we cannot believe that our project is almost over!Â
What has the communications team done for the last weeks?
As we approach the ending of our time with PREMIUM and COMMEET, the communication team is setting up the three pillars of half of the project: the website, the social media, and a video.
Source: Illustration by Fonzy Nils and animation by Paolo Luca
In the update on the 28th of April, we updated you on the first pillar, the website, so today, we share our goals and outcomes for the other two pillars.
For COMMEETâs social media, we saw the chance to use these platforms to spread the message and create awareness about the organisation. As our client informed us they struggle with social media, we wanted to create a sustainable, long-term solution for an active social media presence. To do so, we came up with a long list of topics we think should be posted on the social media of COMMEET, created the content and writing to go with it, and scheduled a post a week for the coming months. This way, even when our PREMIUM project is over, COMMEETâs social media will stay active. In addition to this, we also created a style guide (see the post on this for more details). A style guide is a document that contains information on how a brand appears and acts on social media. With this document, COMMEET can change whoever is responsible for upkeeping their social media without losing the overall appearance of their online presence.
Secondly, the team has been working on creating a short video to share on social media and the website and for introduction or speeches at universities or conferences. In this video, the fellowship of COMMEET will be explained in a short and concise way to solve one problem our client was facing: not being able to tell people who were interested in their organisation what it actually entails. Once the video is finished, it will also be posted on our Tumblr, so keep an eye out for it. Keep tuned for our next posts in this final stretch of the PREMIUM programme!
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Our trajectory to increase COMMEET's reachability in a digitally-mediated society had to contain, of course, guidelines to a better use of social media platforms. Our team is proud to have built a document to instruct COMMEET in how to take advantage of Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin to pass their message and help more local communities around the globe.Â
Source: Bestarion
The document we have produced establishes aesthetic choices for social media, including correct logo usage with examples, a colour scheme, font and text. These items are really important for COMMEET to be consistent and have an aesthetically pleasant image in all platforms.Â
Another important point for us was to suggest good practices of how to post on social media platforms. For instance, for Instagram, we have made a selection of hashtags for COMMEET to use, as Instagram is a hashtag-heavy platform with many of its users searching for keywords and hashtags to find good content (or even following hashtags that theyâre particularly interested in).Â
In addition to our suggestions, we are producing social media posts to show how to put the guidelines into practice! We are extremely excited to provide this document and also the posts, as we believe that they can improve COMMEET's online communication, which consequently can help to build a broader network with communities that can benefit from COMMEET.Â
Do you have any tips for communication for social impact organisations that would be valuable for COMMEET? Don't hesitate to tell us and keep tuned to our next posts!Â
It would not merely be an ideology but it would also be a matter of improvement of living together. People in Africa have a world for this, they call it Ubuntu. Ubuntu means I am because we are, we cannot live without each other
Jos Hermans, Founder of COMMEET, talking about the community empowerment toolkit
On top of research about social impact measurement, three interviews with five different people have been conducted through Zoom. We asked questions about the theory of change, the fellowshipâs work and organisation. Thanks to them we got much insight that will be core to design the perfect medium for measurement: a questionnaire, interview guideline or contact form. The importance of dialogue with the communities was underlined in every interview as being the most valuable actors for change. The fellows were also depicted as necessary brokers to a successful implementation of the toolkits among communities. At last, but not least, interviewees had the space to voice their point of view on what and how should be measured and the different issues they were facing. With all this information, we are confident our social impact measurement propositions will fit the client and methodological requirements. Our next post will be a nice quote that we gathered from one of our interviews! Keep tuned!
A Website to remember: Update from the Communication Team
After weeks of brainstorming and researching, we were proud to present some first output to COMMEET. As part of our Communication strategy, we intend to increase the findability of the fellowship and their toolkits and attract a greater audience to their website. To achieve these goals, we find it important to transfer COMMEETâs website into a website to remember!
With this mission in mind, we met up with COMMEET to present them with our ideas and solutions and discuss what is in their scope of action. The fellowship was just as excited as we are about our solutions. To give you a little sneak peak into our solutions, here are a few examples:Â
- placing links to their social media accounts onto their website
- adding a page for the toolkits to the menu bar
- adding a contact form before downloading the toolkits
We are now in the process of finalising our solutions before we will schedule a workshop with our client beginning May. Within this workshop we will implement our solutions. So stay tuned for a website to remember!
We know you have waited long and are just as excited on where our journey will go as much as we are.
After further consideration on the time limits that are set in this program, we had to make adjustments to keep our work on a high qualitative level and will not finish with only half of what we planned done. We therefore decided to work on the first part of our idea with even more room for detail and dive further into analyzing first what really makes COMMEET as unique and rich on potential as it is. For this reason we are diving deeper into what impact does COMMEET has at the moment to find out options on how their impact can be measured in the future.
To reach this goal we have chosen to use the theory of change. The theory will provide the perfect guidance for discovering the potential of COMMEET and how the goal of community empowerment is achieved. In order to get the qualitative data needed, we will conduct interviews with not only the communities that are currently using a toolkit, but also the team developing the toolkit. This will give us a deeper insight about how the toolkits are used and what thoughts went into it.
Theory of change template | Source: diytoolkit
We will keep you updated about our further progress and what new horizons we might discover!
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Some weeks ago COMMEET (with a mention of our team!) was featured in a local newspaper! As âinternational top students from Maastricht Universityâ we are very proud of this feature and of COMMEETâs mission, so we wanted to share it with you all. Since it is in Dutch, our Dutch team member translated the piece to get more of an insight into what COMMEET is about.
COMMEET, worldwide help from South-Limburg
From arranging jobs for migrants in Geleen to building roads in Bangladesh: with their non-profit organisation Jos Hermans (73) and Maarten Schrevel (67) from Maastricht support people worldwide. Below the meterâs high baobab tree, the South-Africa chieftain repeated: âCome and meet!â. Curiously villagers come to him.Â
When they hear this cry, they know: something is up. When everyone is gathered, they discuss what's going on and come up with a solution with the whole community.
Four years ago, the non-profit organization COMMEET was founded on this philosophy, says founder Jos Hermans. âA similar tree in my garden gave me an idea: like the South African community, we believe that local communities know best what is good for them. Together with people from villages, neighbourhoods and regions from all over the world, we look at what they need in areas such as education, infrastructure and workâ.
COMMEET works both in Limburg and far beyond. They connect local communities with the right people, says secretary Maarten Schrevel. âFor example, the Sittard-Geleen region is now faced with the quest of how they can better integrate migrants into society. That is why COMMEET puts refugees from this area in contact with staff from Zuyderland, where the migrants receive training and then get a job in the hospitalâ.
Local internship
Furthermore, the organization is currently aware of young people leaving South Limburg, Hermans adds. âThere is a lot of concern about this, people want to keep them here. Together with Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, we are looking into whether students can get extra credits if they opt for a local internship. International top students from Maastricht University are also conducting research into our social impact.â
To connect the right people, COMMEET works with a global network, says Hermans. âThis includes about 40 volunteers from all over the world. They support local communities with the help of coaching and toolkits, among other thingsâ.
With Maastricht and Geleen as its epicentre, the organization works on sustainable development goals of the United Nations, such as quality education and economic growth. Because of these global ambitions, COMMEET works not only in South Limburg, but thanks to sponsor help in dozens of countries. For example, two Dutch professionals travelled to Bangladesh on behalf of the organization, says Schrevel. âIn a village there, the only road to the plaice was always flooded in the rainy season. The road was raised and paved on the advice of the professionalsâ.
Credits: Giphy
Westerners
Such learning processes should always be central, Hermans emphasizes. âWesterners too often go to a developing country to tell them how things should be done. Don't talk about locals, but talk to them. Only then will you discover what they need and will it have a long-lasting impact because the motivation comes from withinâ.
Hope you liked to discover a bit more about COMMEET! We are really proud to see the this mention highlighting the organisation's mission, and we are working hard to help them to achieve a long-lasting positive impact in communities around the globe!
Drumroll⌠to our first big pitch! On the 17th of March we had the chance to share our progress story with the rest of PREMIUM. Our virtual presentation evening was nerve wrecking but also thrilling; we got to connect with other teams and get inspired by their progress. We took part in the Mid-term presentations where we showcased what Commit2Commeet is all about, answered audience questions and got positive feedback and improvement points. The atmosphere was positive, friendly and supportive. Even dancing was involved! Many thanks to D&I Office for their supportive feedback boost, Politie Limburg for their points of improvement which we are actively working on, and ATOS for their interest in our project and their question.
This gif from The Office is an accurate representation of us celebrating our teamwork after the mid-term presentation!
If you missed our pitch, here is what was included:
1. What is COMMEET - a global fellowship that aims at community empowerment. Its vision is to accelerate regional sustainable development through empowering local communities with the provision of toolkits which they can apply themselves. Now under the UNESCO umbrella, COMMEET is looking to expand its practices and reach out to even more people.
2. Our challenges:Â
a)Â measuring social impact in a time frame of 4 months and no existing data. This requires reaching out to toolkit users, figuring out inventive strategies to track activity.Â
b) facing inactive social media platforms that have limited reach, and are not informative and up to date with COMMETs current presence.Â
3. Our solutionsÂ
a) impact measurement of COMMEETâs toolkits through feedback loopsÂ
b) raising awareness of COMMEETâs message through our website and social media.
Moving on, our team is working to operationalize our ideas with the goal of making a relevant contribution to COMMEET! Stay tuned on our Tumblr page for the next two months when we are going to implement and finalise this soul-filling project!
Raising awareness for COMMEET through an effective communication strategy
Our mission to raise awareness for COMMEET is an important one â after all, as more people get to know the organization, more people can engage with the toolkits and grow the number of benefited communities around the globe. Thus, the COMMEET Communication Strategy plan aims to support the organisation in reaching its strategic objectives in the global market of Sustainable Development, and advises on how to tell the market the right story about the COMMEET Fellowship; raising awareness about the organisation.Â
Credits: Microsoft
Our communication's team is focusing on further developing the digital presence of COMMEET. This includes the digital infrastructure of their website and their presence on social media platforms.Â
For the website, we are implementing a design thinking methodology. Design thinking is a method that uses a human-centred design as its ethos which combines analytic thinking and decision making, considering aspects such as empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism and collaboration. A fundamental principle of design thinking is that it is an iterative process, in other words, it is all about creating and testing options to solve problems. In our case, we are testing the best ways to present on the website the main product of COMMEET, the toolkits, as we believe they need to be presented with more contextualisation, providing the audience with all the necessary information to use them in the best way possible.Â
Credits: Visme
We are applying the design thinking methodology with a multimodal framework. Multimodality has been described as a field of research and practice that analyses the co-presence of different modes to pass a message. By doing that, multimodality helps people to enhance cognitive processes using diversified approaches. Thus, multimodality is the idea of making a composition with various modes (such as writing, video, photos, gifs, maps, and others) to communicate a message and express meaning. You can experience multimodality in our tumblr page, for instance, as we always try to bring gifs, images, and videos to help to contextualise our posts! Multimodality is connected with the idea of plural literacy recognised by the United Nations as part of a world aspiration towards education for all. According to Unesco (2004), a partner of COMMEET, it is necessary to use different modes to create literate environments, aiming for human rights and socio-economic progress.Â
Credits: LearnUpon
Our goal when considering the idea of multimodality is that we need to apply different modes of communication to enhance the audience engagement and comprehension on COMMEET's website. To do that, our main goal for now is to produce a video to explain COMMEET's mission, goal and values, raising awareness of the organisation through audiovisual content. In addition, our report will for sure include other ideas such as a podcast production, infographics, and more.Â
For social media, our plan is to produce content for Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin, sharing COMMEET's ideas through these platforms in order to engage more people to contribute to such an important goal as the one that COMMEET has. In order to do that, we are developing a post schedule and a style guide to be used in all COMMEET's designs. The style guide is a foundational document that ensures clarity and consistency on social media. It will guide and make it possible for future teams working for the organisation to follow the same aesthetics, contributing to a more coherent and consistent social media presence.
All in all, we are working hard to put in practice the best strategies for COMMEET, and we are quite proud of our work until now! Keep tuned here to check our progress in the next two months!Â
Laying a sustainable foundation for measuring social impact by designing a feedback loop
Hello again!
Just as promised, we are going to reveal in this post what strategy we developed for tackling the task of measuring COMMEETâs social impact!
COMMEET's unique approach for creating social impact is to present the communities with a tool they can then use to improve the issues themselves. As much potential as this design has, it does not come without its just as unique challenges. One of the challenges is to establish contact with communities on the grassroots level and therefore to get a deep understanding of the user communities.
Credits: What is social change | Today Tech Help
The solution our team came up with is a feedback design that allows COMMEET to not only get advanced knowledge about their user communities but also get feedback from the individual level that eventually will help to give the toolkit concerning migrants and displaced persons an evaluation in user- friendliness, also taking language and technical barriers into account. Furthermore, we are confident that the received feedback of design elements could make a significant difference for the other toolkits!
In a short video, Anje-Margriet Neutel describes some common positive and negative feedback loops, examining how an ecosystemâs many loops come together to make its âtrademark soundâ. Watch it to understand our choice of feedback design:
All in all, the potential of designing questionnaires and design elements that allow direct feedback from users hold great potential for the further development of the toolkits and with that also how significant the social impact will be! Moreover, it is a long-lasting improvement that will profit COMMEET for many years.
If you want to know our strategy, on how we want to spread COMMEET Ěs message further - stay tuned for our next post!
As much as this Tanzanian proverb fits the idea of slowly but steady growing effect of social impact it also fits the idea of Commeet, to bring change to the world, community by community. As there is no one size-fits-all approach when it comes to a variety of complex situations that life is made of, there is also no complete & definitive definition of social impact.
Gif Credits: Sofia Abellera
Hence we decided on presenting you two definitions that we - also in hindsight of Commeet's engagement - prefer.Â
The first, more straight forward one, reads:
"Social impact is a significant, positive change that addresses a pressing social challenge"
Since this definition is rather broad it manages to focus on the most important aspect: social impact is a (hopefully positive) development concerning an urgent social issue. As easy as this might sound, assessing social impact following this definition might will not be as easy. For this reason, a more detailed alternative is given by the following definition:
"Social impact is the effect on people and communities that happens as a result of an action or inaction, an activity, project, programme or policy."
This definition categorises social impact as an effect, which is important when thinking about ways to measure it. Although the first option only includes positive social impact, the essential message stays the same: social impact is a development and therefore happens step by step, little by little.
The definition of social impact is especially important to us, since it was the starting point of our project, from which we - little by little - have already come a long way! If you want to know more, stay tuned for our next posts telling more about our strategy we developed for tackling the task of measuring COMMEET's social impact!
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Internal organisation of Commit2COMMEET and our progress
Through our work with the client and research process, Commit2COMMEET defined two goals:Â
Raising awareness of COMMEETâs message through the development of a communication strategy
Designing a tool to measure the social impact of the toolkits
To work on both goals at the same time and in an organised and efficient manner, the team decided to create two sub-groups, one dedicated âcommunicationâ and one dedicated to âsocial impactâ. The communication team is composed of Anna, Camila, Kim and Jasmijn, while Marlene and Suzanne are focusing on the social impact aspect of the project. Nonetheless, we keep on to meet all together every week to give each other updates and share our ideas.Â
That's a screenshoot from our first meeting with the client and mentor, when we decided on our two goals!Â
Here are the preliminary results of both teams:Â
The communication team highlighted two domains to improve the communication strategy: the website and social media. A new page will be created on the website to present the toolkit, as well as a blog section to share articles and display the experience of the toolkitâs users through interviews. Moreover, the website will be modified toward a more user-centred design including language accessibility.Â
Regarding social media, the main challenge is to create a consistent presence on the different platforms to engage with the target audience.Â
The social impact team chose to develop a feedback loop to collect data that will help to measure the social impact of COMMEET. It will allow the fellowship to get insight into their own product and improve the toolkits and user experiences.Â
Our team received great feedback from the client who is excited about our progress â and it gives extra-motivation to accomplish the work still ahead of us!
We have been working in tangible outcomes for our project, which lead us to our project timeline! This is the structure that will help us to achieve our two goals in this PREMIUM's project: 1) to create a communications strategy plan for COMMEET and 2) help to measure their social impact! We are pretty excited to work in the check in and implementation steps in the following months!Â