Communication is key
“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.”, said Tony Robbins (and well said!)
Understanding our audience was our first goal set right when we first started to set up our communication strategy, in July 2017. Even though some of us had already been around during previous Shift APPens editions, every year is a different year and just like the world around us changes, our event also needs to grow side by side, especially considering the technological world we live in and the people we want to reach.
It’s not always easy to catch other people’s attention when we live in an age when every time you take a breath (to say the least), you post it online. We felt like it was time to start creating valuable and real content, in order to stand out in this amalgam of knowledge and information.
As being one of the main goals of this year’s hackathon to reach more tech people, we immediately felt the need to achieve a better understanding of all the social media platforms close to our nowadays community — like exploring other communication networks unused in past editions. It’s important to know where your target audience spends more time — and create content that suits their interests.
An important focus on our communication strategy has always been our lovely mascot that has been with Shift APPens since the beginning (a leopard named Tiger) and has helped us captivate our audience’s attention representing the awesome spirit of the event. If you already met him, you probably know what I’m talking about.
Tiger is definitely one of the key elements of our communication strategy, as it has already created a certain empathy with previous participants and sponsors. But this year we felt that we were lacking something, so we gathered all our team for four hours and we had an incredible brand sprint(that you will hear from us soon), for our Shift APPens. Taking a look at the overall picture of Shift’s past editions helped us understand mistakes that were made and also what we did well and should keep working on. It was very important for our team to know where the brand stands, so there are no misunderstandings that could lead to tragic events (yes, I know, shift happens, but we just want it to happen on those crazy 48 hours!).
Considering all of that, we were able to come up with the right mindset to face this new challenge: to make the best Shift APPens ever!
