#commit2commeet

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

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

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

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.

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.