Whenever we survey our readers and writers we ask them for suggestions on how we can improve what we do. We get a lot of useful feedback and try to put into action whatever we can, if realistic and possible.
Apart from requests for more content, more courses and more competitions, another suggestion frequently put forward is that we need to do more traditional marketing and spread the word further. In answering the latest survey, a respondent commented: “I think FunDza is not exposed well enough – many people still don’t know it”.
Another said we must “advertise it on television or radio”, and yet another wrote “more adverts would really help in letting more people know about fundza and its services”.
Of course, we’ve always wanted to do this… but we’ve never had the committed funding to run large media campaigns.
Thanks to a number of fortuitous conversations with Arena Media’s Educational Consultant Patti McDonald, FunDza has now negotiated a fantastic six-month partnership with the media house. This will help it boost reading for pleasure, writing for meaning and learning for life on FunDza’s platforms, and grow its Fanz reader base.
The partnership is with Arena Media’s Sowetan print and digital newspaper, the online TimesLive site, as well as its radio stations Vuma FM and Rise FM. Through these platforms, FunDza will run a series of online, print and radio promotions over the next few months.
It includes extensive promotion of FunDza’s ‘My Father essay writing competition’ – a collaborative project with Heartlines – that runs for the month of June, the planned September ‘Literacy month’ celebrations, and then ongoing promotion digitally and on radio of FunDza’s stories and courses.
Arena Media CEO Andrew Gill writes in response to the partnership: “Arena Media is thrilled to host this partnership with FunDza. We commend the work FunDza does to enhance literacy levels, enjoyment of reading and course content that helps to improve the lives of young South Africans.”
We are so excited and we look forward to seeing how this partnership will help us to grow our brand, and we hope it will mark the beginning of greater collaborations for the future too.
Here are links to the first two articles to be published online:
Enter the My Father Essay Writing competition for 13 to 30 year olds
FunDza writing competitions discover new talent
Be sure to keep an eye out for further promotions down the line.
A big thank you to Andrew Gill, Patti McDonald and all the staff at the Sowetan, Timeslive, Vuma and Rise FM for their enthusiastic and generous support for getting South Africa’s youth reading, writing and learning!