February 24, 2020: CODE PAKISTAN conducted the second day of training “How to Design an Effective Online Awareness Campaign” at the National Incubation Center (NIC) located within the NED University of Engineering and Technology. Before an audience of more than 50 student society members, Mr. Abrar Ul Hassan from Morango Films educated the participants of the training on the importance of generating unique and personalized messaging in the creation and design of online awareness campaigns. The day-long session involved engaging conversations and interactive activities for teaching the students how to identify relevant stories, how to approach the task of storytelling, and how to translate the process into an effective awareness campaign using social media platforms. The activities included a range of exercises from creating and uploading content on social media platforms using the material they were taught, to group exercises in which they were encouraged to develop concepts for campaigns and then formulate a structure for narrating a story for those concepts in a manner that allowed for sustainable impact. The importance of sustainability was especially stressed among the students using key factors for consideration such as the need for focused messaging, identifying the target audience and tailoring the message – both in terms of the actual script and language – to have optimal impact on the specified target audience.
The objective of the two-day training session on “How to Design an Effective Online Awareness Campaign” was to promote the positive use of social media among the youth of NED University by raising their online awareness on the issue of digital responsibility and by empowering the student societies of the University with the knowledge and skills necessary to create an effective online awareness campaign. CODE PAKISTAN’s collaboration with NED University of Engineering and Technology is part of CODE PAKISTAN’s ongoing engagement with the youth of Pakistan studying in universities across the country with an aim to counter on-campus violent extremism. Under CODE PAKISTAN’s Youth Outreach at Universities for Countering Violent Extremism (YOU-CVE), CODE PAKISTAN has already undertaken extensive consultations with faculties and students of various universities from across Pakistan. The process resulted in action plans for implementation on university campuses for countering violent extremism. The idea of the ongoing collaboration between CODE PAKISTAN and NED University actually originated from the consultative session with the faculty and students of NED University of Engineering and Technology in November 2018.