Spreading the Name (Outreach!)

By SuetMui Yu

April 12, 2021

As with any organization, one crucial step at the beginning of development entails getting the news about the existence of your organization out to the public. With that in mind, Nitya and I created Facebook and Instagram accounts for The TEA Proposal in early January—a week or two after we decided on making The TEA Proposal an actual thing—to utilize the power of social media (big thanks to the social media users that give the medium its power). We originally planned on delaying this step until we had our services finalized. However, we figured that it would be helpful to create these accounts early on so that it could give more time for people to learn about us before we launch our program, basically making extra-early advertisements. In addition, perks that accompanied creating these accounts early include it giving each of us one additional follower on our personal pages (who wouldn’t want more followers?).

After establishing our social media pages, we brainstormed what next steps we should take regarding finding opportunities for high school students. As many of you may already know, we decided to make a pre-launch survey to research the needs and interests of current high school students. Even though we drew inspiration from our difficulties with gaining experiences specific to our areas of interest (such as law, biochemistry, and medicine) as then high school students, we figured that other students have passions in different fields such as astronomy, nutritional sciences, arts. We wanted to ensure that we are reaching out to professional organizations that correspond to their interests. We uploaded the links to the survey to our social media platforms in order to gain participant responses. (Again, thank you so much to those of you who found us on Instagram and/or Facebook and submitted a response!) We also reached out to certain schools to aid us in the distribution of our surveys--but this is still a work in progress!

We are still looking for survey responses to better tailor our services to students, so please take our 5-10 minute survey if you can! And thank you so much to those of you who have submitted a response! In addition, since the creation of our social media pages, we have heard from many of you who have expressed your support for The TEA Proposal. Nitya, David, and I really appreciate these warm words of encouragement and it makes us feel like we are going in the right direction with The TEA Proposal!