During the second half of 2018, five students from the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht were connected to Health[e]Foundation as part of their studies. Fons Nijenhuijs, Marnix Bunnik, Kevin Korrel, Maxine Valkenburg and Burak Önal participated to a program within their study, called Nieuwe Dingen Doen, which is Dutch for: doing something new.
With the goal of improving their project management skills the students’ objective was to answer one of Health[e]Foundations’ burning questions: How can we use social media to strengthen our connections with (former) participants, partners and funders and to spread the word about what we believe in and what we do.
Working closely together with Health[e]Foundation’s communications manager Myrna Derksen the team dived into the topic how social media platforms are used by 1) organizations with similar mission and/or ambitions as Health[e]Foundation, and 2) people and organizations we aim to reach in the countries where we work.
In their report the team advised Health[e]Foundation which platforms to use (such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter) and for each platform they formulated a set of minimum requirements that should be met for improved impact on each platform (frequency of messages, design, wording etc).
At the end of the project, to empower his presentation skills but also as a skill building session for our team, Fons presented three project management methods: PMC, Prince2 and Scrum.
The extensive report on how we can increase the effectiveness of social media for our work is definitely useful and will be further explored. We thank the students their interaction and time and wish them the very best for the next steps in their careers.
