A Brief History of Pubz in Operation Einstein
When Operation Einstein first began as a humble student-run project in early 2017, we followed the traditional path of other community service projects, and established an Instagram page @operationeinstein. However, when Einstein was passed on to the 2nd Organizing Team, or OT2, in May 2018, we began to question the real need to maintain an impressive online presence.
PDPA regulations were beginning to be strictly enforced, and photos from our small-group sessions and carnivals could only be posted if they only showed the side or back view of our beneficiaries. Some of our partner organizations would also request that photos taken at our sessions not be used in our publicity materials.
Given this context, we had to rethink the purpose of @operationeinstein. Initially created to give interested partners and volunteers a better idea of what we do in Einstein, the page now seemed to have little purpose.
Our Networking Efforts
One of the first events that OT2 coordinated was a carnival at Vibrance@Yishun in 2018. In an effort to bridge the CMIO gap, Singapore's four Self-Help Groups (CDAC, Eurasian Association, SINDA & MENDAKI) jointly set up a center located at Yishun Street 11. We were invited to set up a booth as part of the opening ceremony and carnival.
While we were busy sharing the many experiments that we'd brought to the carnival with the Yishun community, we were approached by a visitor who introduced herself as a manager at SINDA.
She praised our booth, and warmly invited us to manage a similar booth in SINDA's Back-To-School Festival 2018. Naturally, we were delighted by her request and immediately agreed to participate!
We soon found that networking through carnivals was an incredibly effective way to spread word about our programs to partner and communities we may not have heard about previously.
Another example would be how we met representatives from North-East CDC at another CDAC carnival, which subsequently led to our own booth at one of North-East CDC's carnivals, and eventually STEM Camps for beneficiaries from North-East CDC and CDAC.
This positive and exponential chain reaction (pardon the scientific jargon) meant we did not to go around cold-calling various organizing like the founding OT1. With each small-group session, carnival, and camp, Einstein's track record and reputation was boosted.
And we soon realized that our community partners like to see the real deal - us in action - and impressive Instagram posts would certainly not cut it.
Volunteer Recruitment
The second purpose of @operationeinstein was to recruit volunteers. But OT2 realized that while Insta was useful in raising our profile, it did not necessarily translate into sign-ups.
A far more effective way was using RI's own Stamford Portal which students check pretty much every week. So every month, we would post our upcoming list of sessions on Stamford and the volunteer sign-up form would be oversubscribed within a week.
In 2019, we was also invited to have our own booth at RI's open house, and we had two features in Lianhe Zaobao about our small-group sessions and STEM camps.
After we handed over Einstein to the 3rd Organizing Team, or OT3, in July 2019, they even held an assembly talk where they shared with over 1,200 of their fellow batchmates about Einstein.
This publicity allowed us to gain over 100 active volunteers in our WhatsApp Group, and greatly reduced the need to actively post on Insta.
As Einstein's programs expanded to involve more partners like Northlight School as well as new electives for our STEM Camps, we chose to focus our limited time on curriculum development as that would have the greatest tangible benefits for the kids that we work with.
CCAs and Word of Mouth
Many Classes and CCAs in RI are required to organize a compulsory VIA activity for their members. This poses an especially big challenge for CCALs of science clubs like Alchemy/Astro/BioSoc who want to do something meaningful with their members.
In 2018 and 2019, Einstein offered these class reps and CCALs to opportunity to book one of Einstein's sessions for their classes or CCAs. This avenue provided an ample source of volunteers, and limited the need for active volunteer recruitment!
COVID-19
This rather comfortable state of affairs was rudely disrupted when COVID-19 arrived in Singapore in early 2020. Our pilot programs with Northlight were thrown into disarray, and eventually scrapped. When school was suspended, face-to-face meetings with our volunteers and community partners simply could not happen.
In the past, we used to describe working with existing and new community partners as cultivating friendships. After all, collaborations involves face-to-face communication (initial stage), email liaising and managing expectations.
But while previous OTs once relied on trusting relationships, Einstein now needed to adapt to this 'new normal' and continually cultivate a respectable online presence. When the 4th Organizing Team or OT4, took over in June 2020, they revived our Insta page, @operationeinstein, and put in a lot of effort into curating interesting and meaningful content.
Fun Fact: the small group of us working on this site have been dabbling in "search engine optimization", or SEO for short. As its name suggests, SEO influences how high our pages rank on search results when somebody googles "Operation Einstein".
Having high-quality links between our various pages and media publications is critical for prospective partners, volunteers, and beneficiaries being able to find our site and Insta page.
One purpose for this website is thus to serve as a conduit for two-way traffic between our site and revived Insta page, deriving synergy and boosting views for both pages. In this very site, you can even view our Insta Stream and then decide to follow us with your personal Insta account!
Having set the background for the creation of this Wix site, let us now move on to the main meat for this post! While this website is certainly important for publicity, it aligns closely with some of our side projects that we've been working on.
1/ Inter-OT Bonding
Founded in 2017, Operation Einstein is now in its fifth year of operation. While it is currently being managed by OT4, many of the past OTs are still actively involved in Einstein.
Most of us are still actively serving our National Serving, but we try to help out where we can in our free time and utilize our various skills. Some of us help to develop and improve the curriculum and experiments for our STEM Camps, while others check in on OT4 and offer advice.
Once in a while, we even embark on side passion projects! During the circuit breaker last year, Simon from OT2 took a break from his vocation in the Singapore Police Force and translated our comprehensive volunteer handbook into Chinese.
This serves to better prepare our future volunteers for CDAC's small-group sessions and community carnivals where we often interact with Chinese-speaking members.
However, our regular OT meet-ups have been disrupted by COVID-19. Before Phase 3, we couldn't even meet within our own OTs because of the five person group limit.
So when we began proper work on this website, we made this a side project coordinated by Jed of OT2, Wan Lin of OT3, and Shira of OT4 who are passionate about web design. We've enjoyed getting to know each other better through working on this site together, and we often bounce ideas off each other.
We hope this collaboration can be a model for future OTs who utilize this site to continue working with past OTs so we can enable Einstein to more effectively bring our love for science to the community.
We also approach Einstein as a long-term project, and recognize that Einstein will grow increasingly complex in future years as we attempt to diversify our programs and partners.
We hope this site can allow future OTs to understand why we’ve made certain choices and created certain programs in the past, as these rationales may not be clear in our proposals and resources that we pass on.
Lastly, we hope that future OTs can utilize the Our Team also know who to contact when they want to discuss certain initiatives (such as Camp Einstein electives) or our specific roles (such as admin/networking/designs).
2/ Streamlining Processes
The three of us who work on this site also served as the admin I/Cs for our respective OTs. To briefly share more about what we do, we manage our passionate student volunteers who serve as the heart and soul of Einstein.
Our first task involves coordinating pubz & recruitment efforts through:
Word of Mouth - most effective in getting committed regular volunteers
Stamford/Insta Announcements - useful in getting rapid signups
Pop-Up Publicity - open house & CE01 exhibitions
Social Media Publicity - @operationeinstein
After recruitment, we strongly recommend that volunteers undergo short and chill training sessions to understand more about Einstein and our programs. Trainings also allow us to get to know our volunteers and their interests! As admins, we essentially oversee the entire process below:
Volunteer Signups: collect details of volunteers through Google Forms
Volunteer Trainings: collate availability of OT & Volunteers
Session Signups: provide suitable no. of volunteers for each session
School Records: Sorting Volunteer VIA Hours by Level & Class
As you can probably see, a lot of our existing admin work revolves around competency in Google Drive: organizing the myriad of documents and folders, duplicating and adapting Google Forms, and sorting records on Google Sheets.
This requires quite a lot of organizational skills, and frankly takes up a lot of time that we'd often rather devote to other focus areas of Einstein like planning modules and building our own set-ups.
We hope this Wix Site can change all that!
What we've tried to do is create our very own Members Area for our volunteers. After a quick one-time sign-up, all our volunteers can have easy access to important updates and resources.
Perhaps most importantly, accessing this members area doesn't require you to be on your laptop. You can simply download the Wix App on the App Store/Google Play and log in with your email account.
From the Wix App, you can immediately access the Einstein members area where you can see monthly updates about our upcoming sessions and plans. Within the app, you can sign up for upcoming sessions with just one click and you'll immediately be added to a sub-group for that specific event!
Each session may have different requirements, and we may prepare specific info sheets for that session. You can easily access these documents within the FileShare area of the app.
The Wix App also has a chat function where you can easily connect with your fellow volunteers and the OT. If you have any questions about upcoming sessions or other matters, this is a great way to contact us!
3/ Connect with Community Partners
As mentioned above, the temporary suspension of many of our physical programs due to COVID-19 has greatly impacted our ability to work with community partners.
While we still keep in touch with existing partners like CDAC via email, each new collaboration allows us to expand the range of our programs to cater to the diverse needs of the children that we aim to reach. These exciting new programs can then be adapted for our existing partners to complement our existing programs with them.
Through this website, we hope new partners can discover our unique set of programs, and contact us for potential collaborations. This site can also increase the efficiency of our communications by enabling partners to understand the structure of our programs.
Rather than asking us for proposals that we craft without proper context, we hope new partners can easily find out more about our small-group sessions and camps and advise how they can be adapted to meet their needs!
If you're reading this Einstein Diaries post as a potential community partner or volunteer, we hope you have a better idea of how this website works in the larger context of what we do.
We warmly welcome you to connect with us, engage us or volunteer with us today!
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