#premiumprogramme

[commit2commeet]

Our PREMIUM burrito night!

Presenting to you Commit2COMMEET off duty! Last Thursday our team took the day off from working to make a change and enjoyed a fun burrito night! All our members came together to enjoy Mexican food and good wine (even the one’s not living in Maastricht). The night was a big success and involved lots of talking, laughing, yummy food and drinks, bonding and enjoying each other’s company. 

Source: JLRReyes

Highlights of the night 

BABS burrito is really hard to finish 

We all love nachos 

The wine cocktails made by Suzanne (we got you covered on the recipe) 

This get-together helped us learn some fun facts about each other, and now you will get to know us better too:

Kim: rarely finds people that like the same music as her, because her taste might be a bit atypical. She loves a good german ballermann song or EDM songs with lots of beats, and even studies to them! 

Suzanne: likes to write poems. A very creative side of Suzanne we came to discover!

Anna: has zero sense of direction. She was late to the gathering because she went in circles around the same houses (she gets lost in every city, no matter how long she lived there)  

Camila: has read all the Harry Potter books a thousand times and knows all the lines by heart (this also applies for the movies). She is still waiting for her Hogwarts letter 

Jasmijn: drove a van all the way around Australia. She is the most adventurous member of our team who started exploring from a young age!

Marlene: once danced Waltz under the pyramids in Egypt (this is what we call dancing with a view!)

And here it goes our wine cocktail recipe...

Source: carmelacaldart

Ingredients

White wine

Lemon syrup

Fresh lime

Sparkling water

Frozen blueberries

Instructions

1. Prepare your fancy looking wine glasses 

2. Add ice to fill ¾ of the wine glass 

3. Mix 1 tablespoon of frozen blueberries and 1. Oz lemon syrup

4. Top with chilled white wine (to cover the ice cubes)

5. Add some sparkling water 

6. Squeeze fresh lime for a perfect finish

Hope you enjoy your drink in one of the sunny spring days we will have soon enough! Keep tuned for our last posts as PREMIUM students - we cannot believe that our project is almost over! 

[designcommodus-blog]

Good evening! 

This is Ruben and today I want to share with you my design inspiration.

Modern design draws my attention, however it runs the risk of being cold and impersonal. By using the coziness of an attic, modern design can be given a 'gezellige' twist, and is therefore the best combination in my opinion. 

Hope you like my tip!

Have a good sunday :)

[commit2commeet]

New horizon: updates from the impact team

We know you have waited long and are just as excited on where our journey will go as much as we are.

After further consideration on the time limits that are set in this program, we had to make adjustments to keep our work on a high qualitative level and will not finish with only half of what we planned done. We therefore decided to work on the first part of our idea with even more room for detail and dive further into analyzing first what really makes COMMEET as unique and rich on potential as it is. For this reason we are diving deeper into what impact does COMMEET has at the moment to find out options on how their impact can be measured in the future.

To reach this goal we have chosen to use the theory of change. The theory will provide the perfect guidance for discovering the potential of COMMEET and how the goal of community empowerment is achieved. In order to get the qualitative data needed, we will conduct interviews with not only the communities that are currently using a toolkit, but also the team developing the toolkit. This will give us a deeper insight about how the toolkits are used and what thoughts went into it.

Theory of change template | Source: diytoolkit

We will keep you updated about our further progress and what new horizons we might discover!

[commit2commeet]

A Website to remember: Update from the Communication Team

After weeks of brainstorming and researching, we were proud to present some first output to COMMEET. As part of our Communication strategy, we intend to increase the findability of the fellowship and their toolkits and attract a greater audience to their website. To achieve these goals, we find it important to transfer COMMEET’s website into a website to remember!

With this mission in mind, we met up with COMMEET to present them with our ideas and solutions and discuss what is in their scope of action. The fellowship was just as excited as we are about our solutions. To give you a little sneak peak into our solutions, here are a few examples: 

- placing links to their social media accounts onto their website - adding a page for the toolkits to the menu bar - adding a contact form before downloading the toolkits

We are now in the process of finalising our solutions before we will schedule a workshop with our client beginning May. Within this workshop we will implement our solutions. So stay tuned for a website to remember!

[commit2commeet]

What has the impact team done for the last weeks?

On top of research about social impact measurement, three interviews with five different people have been conducted through Zoom. We asked questions about the theory of change, the fellowship’s work and organisation. Thanks to them we got much insight that will be core to design the perfect medium for measurement: a questionnaire, interview guideline or contact form. The importance of dialogue with the communities was underlined in every interview as being the most valuable actors for change. The fellows were also depicted as necessary brokers to a successful implementation of the toolkits among communities. At last, but not least, interviewees had the space to voice their point of view on what and how should be measured and the different issues they were facing. With all this information, we are confident our social impact measurement propositions will fit the client and methodological requirements. Our next post will be a nice quote that we gathered from one of our interviews! Keep tuned!

[commit2commeet]

Raising awareness for COMMEET through an effective communication strategy

Our mission to raise awareness for COMMEET is an important one — after all, as more people get to know the organization, more people can engage with the toolkits and grow the number of benefited communities around the globe. Thus, the COMMEET Communication Strategy plan aims to support the organisation in reaching its strategic objectives in the global market of Sustainable Development, and advises on how to tell the market the right story about the COMMEET Fellowship; raising awareness about the organisation. 

Credits: Microsoft

Our communication's team is focusing on further developing the digital presence of COMMEET. This includes the digital infrastructure of their website and their presence on social media platforms. 

For the website, we are implementing a design thinking methodology. Design thinking is a method that uses a human-centred design as its ethos which combines analytic thinking and decision making, considering aspects such as empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentalism and collaboration. A fundamental principle of design thinking is that it is an iterative process, in other words, it is all about creating and testing options to solve problems. In our case, we are testing the best ways to present on the website the main product of COMMEET, the toolkits, as we believe they need to be presented with more contextualisation, providing the audience with all the necessary information to use them in the best way possible. 

Credits: Visme

We are applying the design thinking methodology with a multimodal framework. Multimodality has been described as a field of research and practice that analyses the co-presence of different modes to pass a message. By doing that, multimodality helps people to enhance cognitive processes using diversified approaches. Thus, multimodality is the idea of making a composition with various modes (such as writing, video, photos, gifs, maps, and others) to communicate a message and express meaning. You can experience multimodality in our tumblr page, for instance, as we always try to bring gifs, images, and videos to help to contextualise our posts! Multimodality is connected with the idea of plural literacy recognised by the United Nations as part of a world aspiration towards education for all. According to Unesco (2004), a partner of COMMEET, it is necessary to use different modes to create literate environments, aiming for human rights and socio-economic progress. 

Credits: LearnUpon

Our goal when considering the idea of multimodality is that we need to apply different modes of communication to enhance the audience engagement and comprehension on COMMEET's website. To do that, our main goal for now is to produce a video to explain COMMEET's mission, goal and values, raising awareness of the organisation through audiovisual content. In addition, our report will for sure include other ideas such as a podcast production, infographics, and more. 

For social media, our plan is to produce content for Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin, sharing COMMEET's ideas through these platforms in order to engage more people to contribute to such an important goal as the one that COMMEET has. In order to do that, we are developing a post schedule and a style guide to be used in all COMMEET's designs. The style guide is a foundational document that ensures clarity and consistency on social media. It will guide and make it possible for future teams working for the organisation to follow the same aesthetics, contributing to a more coherent and consistent social media presence.

All in all, we are working hard to put in practice the best strategies for COMMEET, and we are quite proud of our work until now! Keep tuned here to check our progress in the next two months! 

[commit2commeet]

Internal organisation of Commit2COMMEET and our progress

Through our work with the client and research process, Commit2COMMEET defined two goals: 

Raising awareness of COMMEET’s message through the development of a communication strategy

Designing a tool to measure the social impact of the toolkits

To work on both goals at the same time and in an organised and efficient manner, the team decided to create two sub-groups, one dedicated ‘communication’ and one dedicated to ‘social impact’. The communication team is composed of Anna, Camila, Kim and Jasmijn, while Marlene and Suzanne are focusing on the social impact aspect of the project. Nonetheless, we keep on to meet all together every week to give each other updates and share our ideas. 

That's a screenshoot from our first meeting with the client and mentor, when we decided on our two goals! 

Here are the preliminary results of both teams: 

The communication team highlighted two domains to improve the communication strategy: the website and social media. A new page will be created on the website to present the toolkit, as well as a blog section to share articles and display the experience of the toolkit’s users through interviews. Moreover, the website will be modified toward a more user-centred design including language accessibility. 

Regarding social media, the main challenge is to create a consistent presence on the different platforms to engage with the target audience. 

The social impact team chose to develop a feedback loop to collect data that will help to measure the social impact of COMMEET. It will allow the fellowship to get insight into their own product and improve the toolkits and user experiences. 

Our team received great feedback from the client who is excited about our progress — and it gives extra-motivation to accomplish the work still ahead of us!

[commit2commeet]

Our timeline and progress

We have been working in tangible outcomes for our project, which lead us to our project timeline! This is the structure that will help us to achieve our two goals in this PREMIUM's project: 1) to create a communications strategy plan for COMMEET and 2) help to measure their social impact! We are pretty excited to work in the check in and implementation steps in the following months!