This is an important lesson learned from our Innovation competition organized recently.
Creating awareness and recognition of a National Forum for Advisory Service can be a challenge but we found a way to attract audience and interact with them without having to spend huge amount of money and time in mega-meetings and expensive sensitizations.
Here are the key steps:
- plan a national competition on a relevant topic, not just for extensionists but something that will be profitable for the agricultural and rural development sector in general. In our case, we decided to organize an Innovation Competition
- for any Competition you have to plan and decide on cretia, jury members, the timelines, the submission procedures ... this is the heavy process
- and here is the tip: to create awareness and involve audience, you use social media for voting and start evaluating the Innovations
- you just ask the "competitors" to invite their friends and families and all their surroundings to vote and comment about their Innovation
That's it!
In one week, we increased our FB page Likes by 35% and we got so many interactions including with new actors who want to join the FCA network.
We were even astonished to find out that there are more people from Europe voting compared to those from Madagascar. Malagasy diaspora is very active in Europe.
The key: good organization, transparency, relevance, innovation and social media.
Must try, it works!
For more information about the FCA Innovation Competition: www.fca-madagascar.org/2016 and www.facebook.com/fcamadagascar
Increase in the website audience during the voting period:
Comments
This is very timely information Andre and comes at a time for when we are seeking ways of popularizing the country fora. It is my hope that other members will be able to benchmark and share their success stories too. Thank you very much for sharing these tips.