What's Next?

After experience on a one month event, our team has been trying to modify our event design in the future based on the challenges we faced in the actual event and feedback from our participants.

Our page is now trying to review other similar events that are aiming at cultural exchange as their event goal, and we will improve our design to make it a more entertaining and feasible event in the future.

Based on the challenges and limitations we observed from previous experience, we have several plans for making this project better and more sustainable.

1. Targeting problem on participants’ engagement within group

Our team observed some participants lack active participation when it comes to finishing weekly tasks and lack communication within groups.

We are planning to review and modify the role of group coordinators. As we understand that as group coordinators, it is difficult for us to make everyone engage in the event and weekly task completion in a group.

Besides offering incentives like tangible rewards for active participation, we would further clarify and modify the role of group coordinators. Group coordinators would regularly remind participants for the upcoming task and emphasise the importance of timely completion by sending regular WhatsApp messages in their group with clear description on the details of the weekly task. Also, group coordinators would emphasise more on the benefit and importance of making contribution to the group, so participants will feel motivated and actively participate in weekly tasks or communication within the group.

2. Scaling up to a larger and longer programme

Our page observes that most of the participants have given us positive feedback on this event and would wish this event could continue to run.

Our team is planning to scale it up to be a more organised event with more participants included. Also, we have been discussing making the event to become a two month programme in the future so there is more time for building up a closer relationship and cultural exchange. The weekly task would become a task that they just need to finish within half a month (total number of 4 tasks remain unchanged). Therefore, participants would not have a heavier workload but more time to finish each task, easier and more flexible to arrange meeting time within the group. It could reduce the dropout rate in the future.

3. Seeking support from other organisation

Our page observes that holding big events through a small project team is very difficult, we might need additional support when we scale up the event.

As CUHK is always placing emphasis on making our campus to be more culturally inclusive, there are a lot of organisations in CUHK that have the same target and goal as our event. We will try to contact these organisations for suggestion and support on modifying the event design based on their experience. We would even seek collaboration with these organisations for better carrying out events in the future if it is possible.

Besides these event support from other organisations, we will also seek for financial sponsorship on our prizes for the participants to increase their motivation to complete our project. At the same time, a better prize would also attract more people to join and less likely to drop out.

Our Future

Our page believes that these future plans not only allow us to provide students with a better and well-developed cultural exchange event for students in CUHK, but also through continuing the success of our project to future events, we could create a more inclusive and harmonious environment of our campus of CUHK.