Community Service Initiative

 

Group: Eco Warriors

Kai Yi / Kyra / Jenani / Jonathan / Mokshanah / Ridho / Sihyun

Part 1 - Brainstorming (Week 1 - 3)

We decided to work with APE Malaysia and focus on their plant a tree campaign, and over a call on Discord we tossed a bunch of ideas back and forth for how we can market this campaign further. Our ideas included:

1- A virtual forest microsite: Each donor's name could be seen on each tree and you could "walk through" the forest to find your name

2- A gatcha game with digital trading cards

3- Physical merchandise

We settled on ideas 2 & 3 as the virtual forest may have been a really large workload for us to do, and would require constant updates to credit new donors.

INITIAL PLAN FOR OUR PROJECT:

Goal :

100 trees -  RM2000

Attraction:

1. Microsite + Digital Trading Cards

2. Physical Trading Cards

Marketing :

1. Instagram -Stories, Reels

2. Collaboration with other Environmental Activists to gain traction

Duration:

6 weeks

Digital Trading Cards 

1 week to complete design

Insert link to card microsite when sending the certificate

Physical cards

RM40 – 100 business cards double sided (up to 5 designs)

Taylor’s X APE = gofundme 

Goal= RMXk

People can donate any amount of money, not fixed on RM20

Problems:

Microsite– payment method is a problem

Link to gofundme – who the money goes to (Bank account)

Social media: Instagram

Informational video: documentary type

Can use Canva templates: story

Use Taylor’s name, get permission from Mr Charles

Environmental activists

Part 2 - Planning (Week 4-5)

Week 4 consisted of a lot more discussing and ironing out details of our project, task delegation, and communicating with APE.

We held another meeting to finalise everything. Summary below brought to you by Kai Yi

Problems: time, importance of this module

Different ways to attract audience:

1. infographics

2. fundraiser (sharing by word of mouth - individually)

More of a fundraising vs awareness campaign

X Taylor's - student council

Gacha website - use as marketing tool instead of just being a reward

Option to donate

Aesthetic / style:

Pixel /? (moodboard)

20 sets (5 cards each) RM10

Name of the campaign

pokokpon: sebab pokok pon perlu kasih sayang ye

Launch on Wednesday next week

We presented our plans to APE, and also to Dr. Charles during class - Here are the slides outlining our finalised project plan

Part 3 - Preparation (Week 5-6)
We planned to launch the campaign on Wednesday in week 6, so we took the days leading up to that to finish up everything. I (Kyra) worked on the html/css of the website while Jon created the gatcha game widget in Unity, Mox helped coordinate our plans with APE, and the rest of the team worked on artwork and instagram posts.

Discussions with APE

Website

Initial site I messily put together before we properly planned the direction for it. Was still useful as I was able to lay out all the different sections and buttons from here, and only needed to add in content and mess with the styling moving forward.

Web design progress - Jon later adjusted the game to be vertically oriented and I still had plenty to fix in the styling, especially as the website appeared differently on mobile compared to on desktop

What the finished site looks like on mobile!

Card designs

PUT PIX OF THE ART HERE

As soon as we confirmed all the designs, we sent them off to a print company and ordered our physical merchandise

Part 4- Launching & running our campaign (Week 6-12)

Moks emailed APE to update them on our final plans and campaign launch - here was their response

Intro posts to our campaign were sent to APE to post as well

From here on out we didn't have any more meeting calls and stuck to discussions on our group chat as we mainly only needed to discuss plans for instagram content . Here's a bunch of screenshots of those. Imagine a mini-montage of us tirelessly discussing, laughing, arguing, as you read. I truly miss getting to discuss things in person and imaginations of mundane scenarios is one of my favourite coping mechanisms.

To keep track of all the money coming in and out for the campaign, we put everything into a spreadsheet to ensure we donate the correct amount to APE at the end of the campaign. 

Running the campaign:

Our main channel for promoting the fundraiser was through our instagram account! Here's some of the posts we created to make sure there was a consistent stream of content across the weeks. 

To garner more attention we created a few instagram story games such as this bingo one that people could fill in then share on their stories too

We also posted weekly (except weeks with no donations) progress updates of how much we raised and how close we are to our goals for transparency and to further promote donating to the cause.

Bank info for donation tranfers.

We didn't only post on stories! We also posted on our feed every few days, with facts about trees and with promotional posts for our merch.

In week 13, right before the end of our campaign, we got the opportunity to speak at a forum by Project OWL, talking about the issues we've faced trying to conduct a project like this during the pandemic.

Week 14 - Wrapping up, final presentation, reflections. 

For our presentation to Dr Charles, Jon, Moks and I represented the group.

Reflections:

Jonathan

During the whole duration of the semester, for this module, I believe I have learned a lot of things and faced through a few hardships. A few of the things that I've learned is to be able to delegate tasks and organize a team to carry out a project/task, coding in unity, advertising and marketing as well as environmental facts and issues. One of the challenges that I believe we faced as a team is that we had unrealistic goals set in the beginning. We wanted to plant a 1000 trees within 2 months. After we spoke with Mr. Charles about it, we had to brainstorm about it again and considered our limitations during the pandemic. So we dialed it down to 100 trees. Secondly, even reaching our newly planned goal was hard to achieve. So we decided to at least reach perhaps 50% of that goal if that was possible but even if we didn't fulfil that, we still managed to do our part in doing a community service. Finally, there has been a lack of communication within our team that created tension. I was deciding for myself the best course of action but after talking to my groupmates regarding their troubles I decided to put their voice as a priority and listened to them. After a meaningful discussion, everything went right back on track. This module has really helped shaped me to become better as an individual and more knowledgeable on the topic of the environment. I hope that our community service has made a positive change, even in the slightest.

Kyra

To be completely honest, I enjoyed this module / project a lot more than I thought I would. I'm so grateful for my teammates, as I wouldn't have been so driven to find new creative ways to contribute towards a good cause if it wasn't for the energy that they had in the initial planning stage. While we were unable to achieve the monetary goal we had set for our fundraiser, I do feel as if we reached some more "soft" goals. Learning how to communicate with and be patient with eachother. Learning to navigate the world of social media marketing. Learning to think out of the box, doing things like creating games as promotional content (and in that same vein, me and Jon got to brush up on our coding and game/website developing skills as well), and even speaking in an online podcast/forum. Besides, we raised enough to plant 35 trees! That's like 5 trees for each of us! I greatly appreciate the independance and creative freedom that APE gave us, making it more as if we were our own organisation rather than a group collaborating with an existing one. I feel as if we gained a lot more from this, as we got to experience what it's like to even try and start any sort of campaign/organisation. Mad respect to all the actual organisations out there LOL

Ridho

In this module me (ridho), I’m given the tasks as the social media admin that manages the Instagram posts and the instagram stories. I’ve managed to post the content regularly throughout this end of our campaign for the Instagram post. On this campaign, I’m given a chance to participate in making instagram story game to gain more viewers and donators, i created “Pokokpon Teka Gambar” where we asked our audience to guess our plant picture used on our cards merchandise. We also promote pokokpon Instagram( stories and posts) using our self social media. By completing this module, I’ve learned that this fundraising event could help so many environmental NGOs. This also spread awareness to the society and accommodate them to channel their help to the NGOs. Although our campaign didn’t reach the target due to time constrain. from my point of view, our campaign open an opportunity for society to conduct the same movement for supporting Community or NGOs

Lastly, this module taught me to manage our time correctly to prevent any congestion that causing us to achieve the targeted goals each week.

Mokshanah

Initially, I decided to do the CSI module just so that I could connect with my friends. Being in lockdown for so long, this module helped me stretch my social muscles that’s been progressively growing weaker and weaker. Initially I was indifferent about the project but as we were in the planning stage of things, my passion for the subject grew. I’m glad we got to work with APE, they were open and easy to communicate with. It really brought me a lot of joy when working on this project. I’m truly grateful.

Kai Yi

In the start of the module, I was excited on working with my friends. Throughout the entire module, there are several problems faced as a group and individual. For problems faced as a group, we discussed among members to come up with the best solutions. I have learnt that communication is key when it comes to group work. As an individual in the group, self discipline is important to ensure that we do not affect one another.

As a group, our progress was a little slow in the start as we were spending time on listing out and segregating tasks. But as time goes on, the campaign progress went quite smoothly. Although we only reached 35% of our donation goal, we are still happy that we have collected donations for APE Malaysia. Besides, I am grateful for having such cooperative groupmates in this module.