Mega Project (Blog 1)
Books 4 All
A student’s life can be tough life where they generally spend their day from small pocket money. There are times when you are in need of a book that is either too expensive to get or is not available near you, the worst comes afterwards when its a book whose soft copy is nowhere to be found on the internet.
So we came up with a solution, “Books 4 all” a platform that connects you with other students who want to sell/buy used books from other students.
Deliverables
For this project we defined our SMART goals and work accordingly.
S- To create a platform where people can buy/sell book at a cheap cost.
M- Measuring the success through people registering their books in our book bank and people placing orders to buy books.
A- During this pandemic situation, people face difficulties travelling to buy books. So by using this platform they can buy/sell books from their door step.
R- Starting with few areas of Karachi including Gulshan e Iqbal, University Road, Bahadurabad, Tariq Road, P.E.C.H.S.
T- To start operations within a week.
Book Bank
We have made a separate spreadsheet to record the books we have in the stock and will be updating it accordingly. It will also record data of who wants to sell the book and who wants to buy the book.
Social Media
We have made a Facebook as a platform for students to see we have on sell, they will also be able to see the condition by themselves whether they want to buy that book or not.
We have made a page on Instagram as well considering its a platform where where online businesses thrives more as compare to Facebook.
Challenges
Currently Constraint is Networking issue so we are trying to build network through social media. We are creating awareness among the students that they can easily sell and buy the books they wanted and it will take time to have a strong and big network.
Finding student who need book is big challenge for which we will contact some juniors. Even we are trying to promote and develop trust among students that we will be able to sell out their books.
Future Goals
Our aim is to contact teachers as well as educational institutions to link with our platform so we can have a network of potential buyers and sellers. We will be dividing tasks among circle members who will contact teachers and institutions for Matric, Intermediate, O and A levels and universities books.
Reflections
Ali Ahmed- “My work had been in blog, status and content write-ups for our books4all page on Instagram/Facebook and a provider of book either delivering it or supplying it to our #AmalBank repository.”
Muhammad Umair- “Being the graphic designer for this project, I designed logo and posters and shared it on social media platforms. Along with I am promoting this project on various platform for example Facebook groups and Instagram posts. In addition, I am collecting information and sharing the work in my network if someone wants to sell the book or want to buy a book can contact me.”
Fahad Ali- “ “You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.” — Beth Comstock, Former CMO & Vice Chair, GE
After creating a business page on every platform, we decided to promote and generate an audience on our project page. The task of marketing and promoting is given to me. Firstly, I used my personal and professional network and told them about our project. Then, I invited them to like our Facebook page. This helps me, and our Facebook page got 150+ likes within 2 days. After this, I decided to research, books related groups in the facebook group section. I got some Karachi base groups like BOOK SPOT, BOOKSHARE, BOOK REVIEWS, BOOKS PLANET, and IBA BOOK EXCHANGE. I have sent a join request on all these groups; my plan is to promote our page by sharing the post in these groups.”
Ali Haider- “ I worked on making the book bank and to update the sheet accordingly. I will also be providing delivery to the nearby areas. We all were asked to promote the page as much as possible so we worked on that whole week.”
Saleha Shakeel- “I have collected few books now, communicate social media pages to students also some advertisement post on status and try to communicate to more. Meet some students and collect some information regarding what books they are finding currently so we can provide them.”
Sameen Khan- “We started our mega project journey by presenting our project on all the social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook etc. being a part of the social media team our task was to drive traffic to these pages and for that we made several posts and stories and shared it with every friend and family of ours to let them know about our initiative and spread the message. We also decided to share these pages in the university groups to raise awareness. Other than that the task given to all of us is to collect the books which I’ve started doing by contacting family friends for any books they would like to donate as well as collecting books I have myself.”
Hafsa Hadia- “As we are doing our business online, so social media is a huge platform for us to connect with people as much as we can. I have been assigned to do the tasks related to YouTube. This week, I made our YouTube channel. Also, I invited all my Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp contacts to join our page. I talked to my family and friends about the mega project. Due to death in my family, I was not able to do much this week.”
