Chuyện của Nguyệt

When I was a last-year student, I spent time & and effort building a personal project related to media and communication. Previously, I have tried many failed projects which I closed because it not run effectively, but this is my most successful one till now.

Below is my journey when working on this project that I would like to share. Firstly, I want to say that there are so many useful articles out there, but thanks so much for choosing to spend time with my article 🙏🙏🙏

I – Define the problem

As a last-year student, after spending year after year experiencing my university’s communication approaches, I found out some problems needed to be improved:

1. Poor communication: My university has a very very good USP but not mentioned much on social media, most of the things are connected with the students via the website or admission counseling which is traditional, and no emails are sent to us which is terrible (so sorry but to be honest, it’s the fact).
2. Lack of connection: Our university has tons of communities for students on Facebook for each course, but they almost turn into a spam place after the students graduate, which remains in the short term, just in the circle of 4 years. Moreover, it’s really hard for students to connect with the senior students/ alumni as we don’t know how.

II – Create a solution

I have thought of the above-mentioned problems many times during my college years, but I did nothing, just complained to my friends and the university’s confession. Then I decided something to change the situation as I thought ‘Nobody does it? Okay, I will!!!’

I started with some questions to tackle the problem:

1. Where to build the project

As I cannot become a staff of my university at that time, also cannot use a physical area at my university to do a thing. So the online world is a perfect fit – an online community – a place to gather all-related-HUB people in one. (HUB stands for HCMC University of Banking)

2. What is the purpose of this project?

• Improve communication between students and students as they can keep the information up-to-date with word of mouth effect. Plus, supporting each other with useful information and tips, lifestyle, etc.
• A place for those who care about my university can explore the most interesting viewpoints that have never been mentioned by advertisements or other places on the internet
• A place where alumni can ‘turn back to school online’ and share useful tips and lessons learned which creates a close-knit circle for the community.

3. Who is the target audience?

We have a community that shares the same cares about my university, so they mostly can be: potential and current students, alumni, lecturers, and university employees.

4. Here we go the solution:

• Community name: Động HUB
• Link for your reference: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hubwarts

P/s: Don’t be ‘shocked’ at the cover of the group, as we just want to create an outstanding thing, the content is ‘innocent’ btw 😅

III – Build – Being a Creator

A community – as its name, has to ‘show its value off’ whenever someone visits it. Therefore, I put my effort into creating extremely valuable content for students at my university at that time, turning it into a lively online ‘student handbook’.

My point of view in creating content is ‘every touch point is content‘.

I tried many different types of content:

• Shared lessons from my experience at university: fun facts, useful tips, etc.
• Told the story that touches on the memorable thing of almost every student
• Crawled manually information on my university website, and student handbook and then ‘translated’ them into ‘student’s language’ which is fun, clear, and easier to understand.

The main method I used was leveraging the power of memes, and as a matter of fact, it worked.

IV – Engage – Being a Connector

After nearly one year, I realized a self-run project is not easy, a community should become a place consisting of interaction between people and people. If it just has one-way interaction, to me, it’s a ‘dead’ community.

I decided to recruit 4 members to support me in building content for the second phase, triggering the members of the community to actively join in creating content. Mini Games, Photo contests, Content seeding, etc, everything was created, we just tried and retried until people started to change their behavior and engage with each other.

Paid off, we gradually received more posts and participants from not only students but also lecturers and other students from other universities.

So what I have learned so far?

Learning by doing, to me, offers so many valuable skills, below are the 3 biggest skills that I’ve got when working on this project.

1. Content Creation

I am a Content Creator part-time, but answering the question: ‘How to turn long, boring content into small, attractive, fun, and useful content?‘ is always a challenging thing.

However, as I mentioned previously: ‘every touch point is content’, so I paid more attention to details, and observed around to find out the content. The hardest thing is we need to use suitable words, and images to make sure it a good content.

Via this project, I experience the full process of making a video: writing the script, recording voice-over, choosing suitable music, memes, and editing.

Last but not least, one of the skills related to content creation that the project equips me with is making meme skills :D.

I think this is a really good skill for those working on social media, as meme is easy to understand, and fun. It can express many “pain points” of people when words only can’t, and especially, most people use memes in daily life, regardless of age.

2. Community Management

Throughout the project, I learned to read data and analysis which helped me have a better understanding of the members of the community and then offer them the right things that meet their needs.

Tools usage also is one of the valuable skills to me: learned how to use Meta Business Suite, Group Management tools on Facebook, Youtube Dashboard, etc.

3. Small Team Management

With this project, I experienced the role of a Team Leader. From a project run by myself to a team of 4, then 9, after 3 years. Till now, I feel, I am more responsible for the project and also the development of my teammates, and started to think of the development of the project in the future: How to structure the team to run more small projects within the main project effectively? How to create a ‘self-leadership’ spirit for team members making sure the project runs smoothly without my attendance? etc. A ton of questions did come to my mind.

The biggest lesson that learned from this experience is complex problem-solving: how to tackle a problem but still keep everything harmonized so everybody can accept and feel comfortable with the solution. For instance, when my teammate does something wrong that affects badly the project or when ‘drama’ appears in the community; etc.

And what’s next?

Through this sharing, I’m looking forward to some partnerships for my project. The partnership can serve many purposes, but currently, my project focuses on:

• Education: From a community for students to a better community with better education opportunities for students to be better.
• Brand Awareness: Should you have any campaign that targets Vietnamese students (18-25 years old), I appreciate it if you could have a good offer for my community.

Maybe it’s small to you but big to my team. DM should you have any opportunities that might fit and we can have a short coffee talk to discuss more.

Once again, there are so many useful articles out there, but thanks so much for spending time with my article. Hope that the shared information above can support you in some way when building a community or your project.

Cheers,

Minh Nguyệt – Amy.