commit2 commeet

Anna: 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 COMMEET’s 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! 

Jasmijn: 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: 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: 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: 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!

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. 

Today we are proud to present our creation, a short video explaining COMMEET’s 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!). 

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!

Highlights of the night 

BABS burrito is really hard to finish 

We all love nachos 

The wine cocktails made by Suzanne (we got you covered on the recipe) 

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! 

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)  

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 letter 

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: carmelacaldart

Ingredients

White wine

Lemon syrup

Fresh lime

Sparkling water

Frozen blueberries

Instructions

1. Prepare your fancy looking wine glasses 

2. Add ice to fill ¾ of the wine glass 

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 water 

6. Squeeze fresh lime for a perfect finish

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 COMMEET’s 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, COMMEET’s 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.

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. 

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 they’re particularly interested in). 

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. 

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: 

- 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

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

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 meter’s high baobab tree, the South-Africa chieftain repeated: ‘Come and meet!’. Curiously villagers come to him. 

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. “A 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 work”.

COMMEET works both in Limburg and far beyond. They connect local communities with the right people, says secretary Maarten Schrevel. “For 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 hospital”.

Local internship

Furthermore, the organization is currently aware of young people leaving South Limburg, Hermans adds. “There 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.”

To connect the right people, COMMEET works with a global network, says Hermans. “This includes about 40 volunteers from all over the world. They support local communities with the help of coaching and toolkits, among other things”.

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. “In 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 professionals”.

Credits: Giphy

Westerners

Such learning processes should always be central, Hermans emphasizes. “Westerners 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 within”.

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: 

a) 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. 

b) facing inactive social media platforms that have limited reach, and are not informative and up to date with COMMETs current presence. 

3. Our solutions 

a) impact measurement of COMMEET’s toolkits through feedback loops 

b) raising awareness of COMMEET’s 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!

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

In a short video, Anje-Margriet Neutel describes some common positive and negative feedback loops, examining how an ecosystem’s many loops come together to make its ‘trademark sound’. 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.

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.

Here are the preliminary results of both teams: 

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 toolkit’s users through interviews. Moreover, the website will be modified toward a more user-centred design including language accessibility. 

Regarding social media, the main challenge is to create a consistent presence on the different platforms to engage with the target audience. 

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.