How does listening to online fans make for a successful social media campaign?
How do you eat an Elephant?
Why seek out people smarter than yourself?
Eugenia shares three key lessons she learnt during her time with Innovaid and Mewsic - A Brett Lee Foundation
This summer, I interned at Innovaid Advisory
Services, as well as a non-profit that they set up and manage – Brett Lee’s
Mewsic India Foundation. It was privilege learning about working in a corporate
organization and a non-profit through this arrangement. Here are some thoughts and
lessons about my time there :)
Listen. My core area of responsibility was in managing
both Innovaid and Mewsic’s social media, on Facebook and Twitter. My
personal project was to head an online publicity and fundraising campaign
through the sale of limited edition Mewsic t-shirts. I enjoyed this very much as
I had the space to experiment with the use of social media. More importantly, I
had the opportunity to connect and connect with many Mewsicians (volunteers).
This served as a feedback channel to gauge their response to the work we had
been doing. The energy from Mewsicians was infectious, and that motivated me to
brainstorm innovative ways for engagement.
How to eat an elephant. Setting
up and managing foundations sounds like an enormous task at hand, it becomes
much easier when you break it down into smaller, more manageable components.
Namely, they are governance, human resources, fundraising, programs, marketing,
and operations. As I worked on projects and prepared documents for clients, I
learnt much about the specific systems in place that were used. On a personal
level, this was also a useful tool and reminder for self-leadership and
management – after dissection, the big things are less scary, and it’s easier
to see what next to be done.
Seek people smarter than yourself. I
had the privilege of sitting in the Mewsic Strategic Plan meeting and later,
the Advisory Board meeting. In the Strategic Plan meeting, the Mewsic core team
gathered to critically look at how Mewsic has been, decide where we want to go,
and brainstorm possible pathways. However, there were also many questions that
we were not able to resolve satisfactorily on our own. When Emily graciously
let me sit in the Advisory Board meeting, I jumped at the chance! It was truly
eye-opening, meeting experts in their respective fields who were incisive with
their feedback and provided great advice on how Mewsic could be pushed to the
next level.
All
in all, I had a blast at Innovaid and Mewsic! One month on and back home, I
miss India, the chai, but most of all the amazing people I got to meet.
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