I haven't got a chance to write about my learning at OpenGyan for a while. It is very easy to write something [for me it is even easier as i m currently reading some books and i can vomit that i learnt in my own horrible language] but i thought that it has to be a honest review/reflection. These posts should not appear as a mere "accomplishments" but rather i always felt that it has to fuel me to overcome the obstacles. In that aspect, i wanted to think and write about one of the challenges we have in OpenGyan - Word of Mouth and it is taking a while for me to think through.
As far as i understand, we stand bad in terms of Word of Mouth [read it carefully, we dont have bad mouth :-)]. Yep, we miss the masala and marketing and I should say we miss it terribly. It is good as it paves way to learn something, it paves way to be successful at something new. It is always exciting when you think it is only matter of time and keep changing the strategy and be patient until fruition.
Our story goes like this. We were writing emails to people at colleges and there was only a little traction. Then we wanted to start a Facebook page as we thought the social media is so powerful and the traction was little more. While we were clear on what we wanted to do, we weren't quite clear on how it should be done. Blame (which is very easy) the lack of experience in marketing, sometimes we thought the things are not working out. For a while, we even thought the content was not good but time and again the participants prove that in fact the content and delivery as excellent (on an average we score close 80 on a 100 point scale). But again, we didn't cash on this feature - good feedback. We never requested participants to share it with their friends. Was it a bad decision? We thought that the participants would actually share OpenGyan's workshop with their friends but it seems like they didn't. Was it out bad reasoning and decision? May be yes. We should change this in future.
Nevertheless, being close to heart, i feel that we have not learned the trick, holy grail or the magic it. There are few initiatives in pipeline and i feel all those will take us to next level in realizing our vision - "providing cost free workshops for students' community". The failure in marketing making us to do many things and i would be very glad to share with you once some of those are put in to action. Like you, i sincerely hope we turnaround this and continue to provide/host workshops with impact.
For all those supporters out there, a very big thank you. I shall wrap up saying, "we are here because of your support and we will live up to your expectations". Thank you again for supporting OpenGyan.
