This was our plan:

• Zero in on an issue that we wanted to create awareness about
• Identify our target audience
• Find effective and creative ways in which to engage our audience and put our point across
• Measure the impact created

I think we spent the most time brainstorming. This went on for a couple of weeks; we’d have long conversations every night, but somehow couldn’t manage to focus on any particular issue. We discussed a host of ideas – religious issues and identity, violence against women, education for the less privileged, loss of rural livelihoods, farmer’s suicides. Though it took us a while to reach anything conclusive, I’m reluctant to slam the whole process and the time it took. We got to know each other as a team and I have to admit, those conversations were some of the most interesting I’ve had.

We finally decided on the issue of farmers’ suicides. We were all a little apprehensive about this; we weren’t sure if we had the time and resources to put together the mini-documentary we were planning. I think that given our initial concerns, we should have realized how important it was to have Plan B (and perhaps C as well) in place. Another reason it was so important to have a backup plan was because Plan A depended so heavily on other people. We required permissions from the hospital and hospital staff, not to mention the patient and his family’s consent.

Given all these factors, we were still caught off guard when the ‘farmer’ we had identified suffering from organophosphate (OP) poisoning turned out to be a young girl. Having seen so many cases of OP poisoning in his work, Husain was positive that we could identify another patient in Bangalore. However repeated calls to government hospitals in Bangalore proved fruitless. It was election time and hospitals didn’t want anything that seemed like a ‘sting operation’

Although we spent a fair amount of time trying to contact other hospitals in Bangalore, I think we realized pretty quickly that if it wasn’t working and we needed another plan. This time our brainstorming process was much quicker, (I think it really helps for the team to be in the same place!) and after a sortie into the field, we gathered that voter awareness was really high enough not to warrant another campaign.

I think one thing that hampered my thinking process (and I’m not sure how much this holds true for the rest of Spokes) is that once we’d decided our campaign was going to be online, I kept evaluating ideas in terms of how we could make a video on it. There were so many ways in which we could have been creative, but somehow in my head, campaign was superglued to video.

So we finally settled on You Matter. The idea wasn’t to come up with anything radically different, we just wanted to remind people to take the time to do those little things, because in the long run, they mattered.

The execution was pretty simple (thanks to Susa, really) and we quickly put together the posts and videos that went up on the blog. We then began the process of publicizing our blog. We’d decided that our target audience would be today’s urban youth, which very conveniently mapped to our social circle. We also intended to approach corporate and academic institutions but dropped the idea when we found out it was being implemented in most places. (NIT, Trichy and Accenture have strict policies on turning off computers when not in use.)

We did think of a way of measuring the impact of our campaign when we considered the issue of farmers’ suicides. We had planned a sort of survey – before and after our campaign – to see how it affected people’s opinions. Although not as formal, our blog had a view counter which measured the amount of traffic our blog was getting. We also solicited opinions from people we knew, but I think we should have encouraged people to comment on the blog itself, (we got some pretty interesting feedback) instead of mailing us their comments. This perhaps could have instigated a discussion which would have brought in more people and made them more involved. 

Overall I think we learnt a lot about what not to do. The last couple of weeks have been really interesting because of the feeds we’ve been getting in our daily ROTD; these mails and the orientation program as well should give us much more input on what to do.