Reported by: Nguyen San Polang, Phan Thuy Binh, Duong Gia Bao, Nguyen Tan Tri Nguyen
1. Key takeaways:
- The 6 types of strategies to make a campaign successful we learned at the ERIA office;
- The alarming rate of plastic pollution in ASEAN countries and the damage that it has done to the environment and the human life;
- The key questions to make a campaign narrative persuasive and how to convince an indifferent audience to the problem we are aiming to solve from the professional advocates invited to the first day’s training.
2. Main highlights:
- “Why should we care?” is the main defining question for the whole narrative campaign in order to successfully reach the audience. Because if people do not care about an issue, it is clear that they will not take any action.
- The waste hierarchy focuses on Preventing – the most effective path to stop waste from occurring in the first place. Once the pollution occurs, making the environment become as fresh as before is challenging. Therefore, Preventing, though difficult and taxing, is the most effective way to cope with our recent plastic pollution. Although having known the advantages of Preventing, we had no idea what we should do until the training. The hierarchy we had learnt is indeed practical.
- Some of the life skills required to make a project/campaign work in the ERIA meeting: Time management is considered to be the most important skill. The soft skills we had learnt in the ERIA meeting are helpful, useful and practical. Without those, our campaign cannot be held effectively.
- The AJYELN fellows used the hashtag; “#PLASTICISNOTFANTASTIC”
3. Next steps:
- Using the campaign strategies learned at ERIA, such as Social Influence, Emotion Targeting and Information, to enhance our campaign’s persuasiveness and improve the engagement of our own campaigns.
- Define the type of audiences we’re targeting and make suitable content to reach more people. For our campaign, our target audience is high schoolers. Therefore, we are making content including trends and Gen Z language to attract them more. This includes short but informative content with a catchy opening.
- Having clear communication among teammates is very important to execute plans. Therefore, we will be more active in discussing our current issues and plans. Moreover, we will use Notion to list out all of the tasks and the person who is responsible for them in order to avoid the situation of forgetting tasks.
4. Feedback:
The training in Jakarta really helped us a lot. We now have a clearer vision of how to implement our project more efficiently. Thanks to the opportunity to meet with the environmental leaders in the ASEAN region, we now have a more feasible project plan since the key takeaways and the lessons we learned from them are practical.
