A Story Of GRIT - Leveraging The Power OF You-Tube For Scaling Community Engagement
Hi, Let me start off with a bit of self-introduction.
I'm Nithin. I'm one of the 4 community leaders for ACE-Trivandrum, India.
My fellow leaders are Manjith, Nazin & Jithesh.
You might not even have heard of the place Trivandrum. So, FYI, we sit in the southernmost
state of India called Kerala. People call our land "God's own Country".
2020 was a very tough year for us as community leaders (I' am sure this was the case for all humans in the globe).
Back in 2019, we were almost regularly conducting monthly physical events and we were attracting community engagement exponentially.
We had high hopes for 2020 and great plans to improve our community engagements 3X times.
But, since the Pandemic struck us by early Feb, we were clueless and afraid.
None of us knew what to do and how to go ahead with the community.
We saw a sudden spurt of webinars and virtual events all around us. But, somehow, we did not feel right about it.
At ACE-TVM, we always followed one core value - Whatever we do must be empowering learning, knowledge sharing, and maximum justice to the time that is invested by each member
Sadly, we were so stuck with a shock that we could not run any events for 6 months consecutively.
I felt so bad that I could not resist the self-pity.
One day, I initiated a coffee chat with the rest of the leaders over Zoom and we brainstormed on thinking out of the box solutions to overcome the crisis. What came out of that meeting was a Game-changer !!
We arrived at a common conclusion that we are going to start a youtube channel and create content OTT. We had solid reasons to do that:
1) Leveraging the power of social OTT for future scaling
2) Adding more value to each community member in terms of reusable content and flexibility in terms of engagement time
Since that day, we were putting constant efforts to find speakers, learning to create, edit and mix video contents and so many things that were totally out of our comfort zones.
Today, after 5 months, I feel so proud that we literally resurrected ourselves from our own grave. ACE-TVM could not only regain our consistency and engagement but also, were able to scale the community reach beyond geographical and cultural constraints.
On a closing note, I would like to thank @Tamanna Godara for extensive support, care, and love.
Also, I would like to thank @Rachel Wright for her awesome YoutTube LIVE session on Jira Admin Best Practices yesterday. We loved working with her !!
We know it's only a small win and we have miles more to go. But, as a leader, I believe in embracing, the small wins and acknowledging the people who make things happen. Kudos !! Thank you !!
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Nithin Balachandran
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