Citizen Digital Foundation

NBS alum, Nidhi Sudhan studied her MBA at Nottingham Business School and since graduating has been very active in setting challenges for postgraduate students herself.

Nidhi is the co-founder of CDF and had a new challenge idea about one of the organisation’s new information literacy project, Litt: https://citizendigitalfoundation.org/litt-live/.

CDF needed fresh ideas for marketing and communication strategies that would help to encourage users sign up for courses on Litt – CDF’s online information literacy initiative.

A team of four MSc Marketing students were assigned the challenge as part of their Consultancy Experience Project Module.

Their task was to carry out research and propose actionable recommendations that would help their client understand what messaging and communication strategy would most likely attract users, institutions and communities to sign up for Litt and in the process understand and familiarise themselves with CDF’s work.

The students quickly discovered that they needed to recommend something that would hold its own in an already crowded and noisy digital environment, and to offer recommendations that touched people emotionally.

As part of their work the student team analysed the organisation’s current marketing approach and carried out primary research to support a social media audit. This work helped the team to identify areas of improvement that CDF might make to help them increase interest in CDF’s work and raise awareness of the Litt programme.

The students, Nidhi said, “Did an excellent job”. She continued, “They went above and beyond with the research, kept in touch with constructive questions to ensure they were on track and delivered a well thought out, structured and insightful presentation and report.”

One of the student team members, Josh Allan, reflected on the challenge of making the step between academic work to the ‘real-world’ challenge presented by this project.  He explained it was, “Slightly unnerving starting a project with a real-life client as we weren’t sure what to expect from the project and wanted to ensure all work was completed to a standard which the client would be find acceptable.”

His project colleague, Marium Nassir confirmed that making that step was one of the biggest challenges the team had to face. “We had to balance academic rigour with real-world practicality”.

Despite these challenges, another of the team, Mathews Pothoor Jose, explained how fulfilling the project was, on both a professional and personal level: “The most enjoyable aspect was witnessing the tangible impact of our efforts”, and that, “Contributing to a cause as vital as digital literacy was fulfilling, knowing that our work directly improved the lives of those we were assisting.”

Josh went on to highlight the professional development opportunities gained through the project: He said it, “Gave us opportunity to test the knowledge we have learnt through our MSc modules using theories and models to analyse current strategies finding opportunities for improvement.”

Reflecting on the benefits of the project client-side, Nidhi said that “As a non-profit operating in an entirely new space, it helps to validate our strategies and approaches from a trained set of eyes. We are exploring actioning some of the recommendations provided in the report.”

As such Nidhi and the wider organisation of Citizen Digital Foundation are keen to be involved again in the next round of projects.