Dietriffic, MEGA project- more than just awareness
Dietriffic started off as an initiative to foster better dietary habits and promote a healthy lifestyle. Awareness through online platforms was our goal in the beginning. However, as we proceeded, we realized we had to do just more than awareness. Dietriffic has been successful to reach few of it’s goals, more to be described below.
As a group of six individuals, we decided to create an online platform (Instagram-Facebook) to raise awareness about certain health issues and then we also talked about healthy eating habits and exercises, and how they can be incorporated into our lives. The aim is to seek holistic living by promoting natural, nutritional and healthy diets.
As we proceeded with this idea, few of us realized that since they weren’t from the same field of interest so they couldn’t connect well with the idea of nutrition being from engineering backgrounds themselves. And this is where we realized the problem of our audience as well. We had a great content created and curated but we also felt it wasn’t delivering the actual message. That is why we had to make it more simplistic to be translated into actual meaning of what we wanted to deliver.
As for as the group members, we all started brain storming yet again to do this project more do-able and achievable. Our agenda was to make it convenient for everyone to contribute rather than a challenge. We had to re-write our goals down and break them into weekly agendas to follow. This gave more clarity to our thoughts, we were able to know what each one of us thought of the entire project. The weekly meetings ensured everyone was on the same page and we made sure to discuss ideas, even failures in our circle and came up with solutions.
- The content was made simplistic
- The delivery of content was made better, each member was made part of the process of the project, not just one of two of us.
Since the last blog, we realized that our outcomes and future goals needed more clarity. We had been doing really well in terms of making an impact and captivating a great audience number but we also saw that our plans wouldn’t have an impact once the fellowship was over. We really worked in the direction to make this a sustainable idea.
The impact we were able to make through social media:
This project has great potential, keeping this in view, we talked to feel collaborators who agreed to reach out to more people using our platform to give their services. One of our members, Areej, used the best of her networking skills to reach out to a sizeable number of collaborative partners and talked about Dietriffic’s sustainability. During the last week, she was able to become part of a medical camp and reach out to people who did not knew us through social media i.e. the general public. She explained everything about holistic living and how they could incorporate that into their lives. She also made custom-made diet charts for them.
This also made us see and realize the possibility of reach that we might’ve had if we were not locked-down and this project could’ve been down by reaching out to people face-to-face and interacting with them. The power of word of mouth can not be denied but the power of social media made us reach to a huge number of people as well. We also turned adversity into opportunity when we saw the world in a lockdown and saw people had been suffering from stress which affected how and what they ate and this is when we arranged a live session with a certified nutritionist and health coach, Ms. Ansa Khalid.
This had a reach of 1.1k, 196 post engagement in the form of in-session live comments and we received an overwhelming response from people, mainly students (64% females, 36% males) aged 19–24 years and they told us how amazing our stress management strategies were for them.
After this we had bi-weekly posts, which again had amazing reach. For the past two month, our focus was quality, so we had a content that allowed an audience to connect in the long term. Initially we were skeptical about people reaching out to us but 8 people have contacted us for custom diet charts for weight gain and loss, a template is attached as a reference.
As far as organization to collaborate are concerned, we aim to make this a platform for nutritionist, health experts and mental health specialists to come and speak to an already established audience. Rabia Trust hospital Faisalabad, Chiniot General Hospital Faisalabad, Spring Clinic Multan, Poly Clinic, Faisalabad, and Ambulatory Care Centre have been approached so far, for collaborations and medical camps. Since we all are from different domains so what we offered them different roles from the role of a nutritionist (Areej), to moderators (Hasnain, Ahad, Shahzeb), to content creators and graphic designers (Shahnoor), and last but not the least we offered them to make a Social media marketing plan for their brand which will will allow them to connect to an online audience which could be translated into potential customers.
Dietriffic has been able to reach out to a diverse audience of people from all ages ranging from 19–55, primarily the youth. We also noticed that people who attended the 1st session were present in the second one as well. This allowed us to see a subset of potential clients.
Dietriffic stands no where without the amazing team that helped it build in these two months. Amal batch 161, Circle 5 dispensed all it’s efforts to make Dietriffic a realistically surving platform not just now but for the future as well. We hope the impact we’ve created continues beyond this fellowship!
Group members: Ahad Ullah, Areej Ashfaq, Gulsha Rauf, Hasnain Baloch, Shahnoor Shakil, Shahzeb Sultan
