By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Project Leader and CEO, QMed
About a month back, we sent you a report titled - "We could not take off". We had imagined that if we got funding to hire a venue for 12 months, we would announce a series of dates and get registrations fairly easily. In the very first instance we were unable to get participants. We never knew the exact cause. And we also did not do our full bit to raise the whole amount we needed.
Just as we felt that we were experiencing failure in this attempt, we got a call from a resident that 10 of them wanted to attend our workshop. They wanted an early date, we re-hired the same venue (they were nice enough to hold the money that we had paid earlier and let us use it this time) and had an excellent workshop session.Another wonderful thing that happened is, that through GlobalGiving, we joined the Social Impact Academy program. And the second week's webinar was all about understanding and learning from "failures", and taking things ahead. The main ingredient here being - involving the community and getting clear feedback from them. And ask whether we did something wrong, or could some alternate effort work better.
We decided that we would work on getting some detailed feedback. The resident who called us was a 3rd year resident Rukman, who had attended our workshop earlier. He had told many colleagues about our session. In medical residency programs the 3rd year residents often mentor the fresh residents for their thesis .Rukman had apparently told the fresh group that to find a suitable topic for their dissertations, they needed to search the literature and for this, it was vital that they attended QMed's program. And he stressed that it would be much easier for seniors to guide them, if they did the workshop. This made ten fresh residents join. Additionally, Rukman made one of them take charge and ensure that all registered online and did all that was needed to attend.
Having learned this, we asked Rukman how we could replicate what he did. He said he would think about it and revert. Meanwhile, we at QMed have decided that we would follow up with 47 residents who have done our workshop and find a way to encourage them to get their juniors to join.
Earlier, we had tried several promotion methods - notice board leaflets, whatsapp messages, social media posts and more. But in this case, we realized that a word of mouth promotion works best and now our focus will be more on that!
Once we get this going, we could revive this microproject to ensure that we can have a series of workshops, with lots of participants!
By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Project Leader and CEO, QMed
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