Media

One of the most important things that we as a student foundation have to offer our potential sponsors is, besides a direct contact with the university, media attention. When we started working fulltime on the expedition in February, we made it our highest priority to make appointments with all the media that we could find. In the first week we contacted all the big Dutch newspapers via email, en we made sure every single one was phoned afterwards. After we did this, we made a list of all the magazines and specialty journals we could find that had a possible connection with the topics of sustainability, Africa, unique expeditions, and/or youth. After only a week, we had positive response from several of the big media, like Sp!ts who offered us a column, the Telegraaf who offered us a big article, and numerous university based journals, like the Delta.

We worked simultaneously on finding other media interested, like television and radio. We made appointments with RTL Productions, the Discovery Channel, AVRO, RTV West, RNN7, Radio1, and a several other big players in these fields. Some did not respond positively towards our ideas, with others we made tangible agreements about the material that we were able to deliver them, but every single talk we had, gave us a better understanding of the things we were able to achieve. Some of the best ideas came to us by talking to these big companies. We also visited some independent producers, who made the program Delft Blauw for example, a program of the Delft University of Technology, broadcasted by RTL. Like with some others, our ideas were received with great enthusiasm, but no tangible agreements were yet to be made, because the permission for another season were thus far not given.After only two weeks, with some informal and solid agreements given, we felt confident enough to tackle the first potential sponsors.

While we were earnestly looking for more sponsors, finding more media coverage was kept a high priority. It was not long before we fully realized that the direct lines we held with the universities of Delft and Rotterdam were of great importance to some of our prospective sponsors. We decided to broaden our focus of attention to student and university journals, and later we even added youth in general to our scope, by getting in touch with TED magazine.

Steadily the list of beneficiaries to our media campaign grew, and this made us more and more confident towards are sponsors to be. As time passed, we noticed that the attention for our expedition was growing. This became more evident after we got live on Radio1, when many people had heard us and responded very enthusiastically. After this live performance on the radio, we were approached by several newspapers and magazines who eagerly offered us media attention.

The week before the launch of our expedition we were offered to give a daily update of our preparations live on the radio. While media attention for our project grew steadily, the requests from other media grew exponentially. Some clear examples of this are mambopoint.tv, an initiative of the NCRV who are starting to broadcast on the web in October 2007, and Schooltv, who contacted us during the expedition, after hearing about us in the Dutch media. Also Llink, an independent Dutch television channel, showed interest in having us on one of their popular programs, after we come back.

The AfricAlive Expedition also has an exhibition in the Museum of Technology in Delft, during the period of June to December 2007, and in September and October there is a life sized model of the waterpiramid next to the A13 highway. Some fine examples to generate more exposure for expedition.

Another focus of our attention wend out to the concept of New Media, which is mainly web based. The trend that more and more people, especially the youth, switch their attention from watching television and reading newspapers as their mayor pastime to New Media, has not gone unnoticed by us. We therefore decided that web television, blogs, social networks, virals, and many other New Media phenomena, have to be fully appreciated. This way we manage to reach a large audience. Our website also makes use of search engine optimization, and this way we are able to generate hits for many years to come. We also changed our website, so we are now able to tell how we managed to pull of an expedition on this scale. We hope our internet site will attract visitors for the many years to come. A sustainable solution.

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