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Invitation campaign through localised marketing material

Page history last edited by Sonja Kovacevic 13 years, 1 month ago

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Overview

This deliverable details the marketing materials to recruit and support participants for the AVALON courses. Grenzenlos used this material to invite language learners to become Action learners. The efforts to carry out the campaign in this deliverable included the Grenzenlos test sites (and their associated partners) and TALKADEMY and in their final report Partner Grenzenlos details the efforts, achievements and pitfalls of their invitation campaign.

AVALON Marketing Report by Sonja Kovacevic (Grenzenlos)

Our marketing campaign was started by searching for possible multipliers for our project. We aimed to get a very diverse group of participants for the AVALON courses. So we decided to promote the AVALON project through different means.

Partner organisations and conferences

Grenzenlos has various partner organisations in the whole world.  We informed them about the AVALON

project at international conferences, education fairs and through our website.

Conferences and Education Fairs:

2009

05.-08.03.2009 - Vienna (Austria) - Best - information about the project was distributed

05.-08.03.2009 - Venice (Italy) - Alliance technical meeting - information about the project was distributed and the project was introduced to our partner organisations

2010

04.-07.03.2010 - Vienna (Austria) - Best - information about the project was distributed

04.-07.03.2010 - Berlin (Germany) - Alliance technical meeting - information about the project was distributed and news about the project were reported to our partner organisations

02.-08.05.2010 - Tulln (Austria) - Training on Inclusion (Diversiy Tool) - information about the project was distributed and the project was introduced to the participants.

06.-12.09.2010 - Sevilla (Spain) - Employ Mobility - information about the project was distributed and the project was introduced to the participants.

30.10.-06.11.2010 - Ankara (Turkey) - Alliance Meeting - information about the project was distributed and news about the project were reported to our 
partner organisations. Additionally a workshop about the AVALON project in Second Life was held.

10.11.-13.11.2010 - Catania (Italy) - Yams Meeting (Young People Active for an Intercultural Society) - information about the project was distributed and the project was introduced to the participants.

Grenzenlos members

We informed our Grenzenlos members and sympathizers, in total around 500 people, about the project. We sent them the information about the AVALON project via our frequently published Grenzenlos Newsletter and our Magazine.

The public

Our Grenzenlos Magazine “Das Fenster” is sold in various bookstores in Vienna. This was another way to promote the AVALON Project in the public.

New Multipliers

We promoted the AVALON project at organisations that are catering for further education in Austria as well as organisations for migrants in Austria. The AVALON language courses offered a benefit for their clients.

- I contacted 66 possible multipliers who are working with migrants and/or further education in Austria and informed them about the AVALON project.

- I also worked with the local job agencies, as they are promoting further education to their clients and we wanted to find as many participants as possible from a Grundtvig target group. I contacted 112 local job agencies about the AVALON project.

The Marketing Process:

All the above mentioned organisations were informed about the project. Many organisations wanted to know more about the AVALON project. It soon got obvious that for many of the organisations that were contacted the method of learning languages in a 3D environment was very new. A personal appointment with these organisations was conducted to give them an introduction in our 3D environment as well as more detailed information about the AVALON project. Out of all the organisations that were contacted in Austria 16 organisations found the time for a personal appointment. The feedback from this first information process was, that the job agencies and organisations for further education as well as the organisations catering for migrants showed special interest in the AVALON project. We started to promote our first courses with them.

Our cooperation with organisations catering for migrants in Austria proved to be the most efficient of these cooperations. Many students who applied for our courses came from this source. We enforced our information campaign with these organisations for our further courses. The cooperation with the local job agencies showed to have the problem, that the AVALON courses were completely voluntary and could not be embedded in their already existing educational programmes.

A second attempt to promote the AVALON project together with a organisation doing educational programmes, Interface in Vienna, didn`t show a better outcome. Here we tried to link the AVALON project to an already established educational programme. The preparation of the course went well but in the end there showed to be the same problems as in our collaboration with the local job agencies, even though the course was this time linked to an already existing educational programme. But attending the course of the AVALON programme was still voluntary and it showed that the combination of embedding a voluntary course in an educational system where certain classes have to be taken to achieve ones goal is difficult.

This was the main difference between working with these organisations and the organisations catering for migrants in Austria as well as our international partner orgainsations and our Grenzenlos members and sypathizers. We learned that it was very important to have participants who are independent and interested in the new learning environment on their own behalf, and not because they are asked to apply to the courses by their main learning environment, like a school for further education or an employment agency.

The organisations working with migrants in Austria were helping their clients with further education as well, but their clients seemed a lot more active and interested in our courses. Trough our cooperation with organisations catering for migrants in Austria many people contacted me about the AVALON courses and in the end we got many of the participants for the courses through these means. If their clients were interested in the AVALON project they were asked to contact me directly. I then answered all their questions and sometimes helped them with their first steps in Second Life. Our Grenzenlos partner organisations, members and sympathisers also showed special interest in the AVALON project. We found many of the participants for the courses through these means.We informed our partner organisaions about the AVALON project at international conferences, education fairs and through our website. Our Grenzenlos members were kept up to date about new courses through our Grenzenlos newsletter, our magazine and our website.

Generally, it proved that just sending out the information about the project was not enough to get people to apply for the courses, because for many of them the concept of doing a language course in Second Life was very new. They were not familiar with a 3D learning environment at all. People could be interested in the courses at first but lost this interest soon because the 3D learning environment seemed too difficult to handle. In order to prevent this I tried to get in touch with every applicant personally trough e-mail. This aproach proved to be very effective. It was important to let the people who applied for the courses know that even though this course was an e-learning method, it was not impersonal. Our courses were carried out in a way that the student could feel very much like in a real classroom with close contact to the teacher. E-Learning can often be a very impersonalized experience. By contacting each applicant individually and answering their questions about the AVALON project I think I achieved to keep the applicants interested in the project and help them taking the first step towards this new way to learn a language. I also established the contact between them and their future teachers and helped them with their first steps in Second Life.

All these different steps finally helped to get the AVALON project widely known and to find a very diverse and interested group of participants. The students recruited by Grenzenlos came from different backgrounds, some were students but most of them had a multicultural background and/or fell into the Grundtvig criteria.

**** End of report ****

Resources

The main AVALON Learning poster, which was created by the Partner 7 British Council, was sent to all of the project partners and was distributed at numerous conferences. It can be downloaded from here. The back of the poster was used to advertise up-coming events.

All of the project partners were invovled in recruitment for the language courses, but as part of their role in the project project partner Grenzenlos conducted an extensive invitation campaign throughout their larger European network of volunteer workers and created the following marketing material.

a) Italian Beginners Course

Avalon Italian Project Information_E-Mail Letter_Engl..pdf

Avalon Italian Project Information E-Mail Letter German.pdf

Avalon Italian Project Information_A4 German.pdf

Avalon Italian Project Information_A3 German.pdf

Avalon Italian Project Information English.pdf

Avalon Italian Project Information German.pdf

b) German course

Avalon German Project Information_E-Mail Letter_Engl..pdf

Avalon German Project Information E-Mail Letter German.pdf

Avalon German Project Information_A4 German.pdf

Avalon German Project Information_A3 German.pdf