A major aim of FunDza is to develop new writing talent amongst young people in South Africa and to provide a space for young people to share their stories, and grow in confidence as writers. Young Fanz writers are invited to send in their work for publication on the fundza.mobi platform. Our internal staff give the work a light edit, and then the work is published in the Fanz section on the platform.
Since inception, we have published the writing of more than 5,200 Fanz writers. By the end of May 2021, we had published 16,954 individual pieces of writing – 72% of this is poetry, 21% essays, 6% short stories and the balance plays. While the majority of content subjected is in English, we do have budding writers in all South African languages.
It is important for us to get to know our writers better. To this end, we’ve sent out several surveys over the years. The latest survey ran from 18 April to 16 May and had more than 700 respondents. To encourage participation, all respondents were entered into a lucky draw, and three winners received R500 in cash and a goodie bags of FunDza delights!
Congrats to these three lucky FunDza writers:
Thoka Percy Moroka
“I am so excited to be selected as a winner, I have been writing with you guys for quite some time now. Thank you so much FunDza”
Siphosenkosi Siph’esihle Jantjies
“Thank you so much FunDza, wow! I did not expect it!!”
Sanele Hlongwane
“This is such great news, ngiyabonga FunDza kakhulu! I still cannot believe I won!”
Needless to say, we have received valuable and interesting information from our Fanz and we now know a little bit more about the conditions under which they write and what writing with FunDza means for them.
In the survey writers were asked to self-report on whether they had noticed any impacts on their writing skills and on their personal development. In terms of writing, the top selected type of improvement was improved grammar and/or punctuation. This was followed by improved vocabulary, and then improved story-telling abilities and spelling in almost equal third and fourth place.
For the personal development question, writers overwhelmingly selected the following as an answer: “more confident to express myself through writing”. This was followed by “believing more that what I write about is important” and “improved self-esteem from seeing an improvement in my writing”.
We also asked for feedback on a planned upgrade to our offering – the launch of an open writing platform through which writers can directly submit their work on our datafree fundza.mobi platform. The response was overwhelmingly positive. More than 70% responded with “I love it – hurry up!”.
There were a number of questions that solicited open feedback and so we have received thousands of comments. Some of the themes that came up from these include:
• The desire for work to be published more quickly – this is just one comment expressing frustration at the time lag:
“You take time to publish the writings….some of my writings too more than one month to be published and I started losing patience as you didn’t give me a time frame of when I should expect it…so maybe you should address this and give longer time frames so that people can know when to expect them and also give yourselves a lot of time”
The open writing platform aims to address this issue and we are hoping to have a beta version ready by the year end.
• The ongoing writing challenges are fun, inspiring and give writers a chance to express themselves in new ways and to stretch their imaginations. Here is just one comment mentioning them:
“Your writing WhatsApp challenges are great! They motivate and inspire us to write more! however it feels like you’re only inviting English authors and only poets, not everyone is a poet we need debate challenges, essays, short stories, poems, blogs etc, so that everyone can be accommodated.”
This writer raises an interesting point and one that we’ll try to address in the future. Judging all the challenges is a challenge for our internal staff so it is easier to keep them short. But we may be able to find other solutions in the future.
• Many of the writers expressed their gratitude to FunDza for making the space available to get their voices heard:
“You guys are a helping tool in reading and writing, I was pleased to see a compilation book in stores the other day, I would love to see more of those more often, especially a collabo from different authors/writers in the fundza group”
“You are doing good so far, I like the fact that we can send our stories via WhatsApp and also communicate with funDza.”
“l thank whoever created this Fundza proggrame because it really doing a fantastic job and it give more enthusiastic to people to keep writing and hope that one day they will famous writers.”
“This organization should never stop doing what they doing. Most kids our there need this platform.”
“This is a great platform for budding writers who would like to blossom in the writing space, yet face gate keepers who make it difficult to get your thoughts out because, the publishing space is about what “sells” which is the bottom line, the top line is profit. What FunDza is offering is immense in terms of confidence and portfolio building”
It is gratifying to learn about how we are making a difference in young people’s lives and to find out how they feel about FunDza. To this end, we ask a Net Promoter Score question. We were pleased with a high score of 70.22% – a world-class satisfaction ranking!