Commons Campaign- Save South Sudanese Orphans and Widows

Marissa L. Jackson

Savino Lebron

Christian Gaylord

Comm-250

Commons Campaign

Save South Sudanese Orphans and Widows

1) South Sudan has been majorly affected by a civil conflict and humanitarian crisis for the past 5 years, though it has been present for longer. In July of 2011, South Sudan gained independence from the country of Sudan. The group, called the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement who originally won over their independence from Sudan, is now trying to divide South Sudan, which is causing a fight for power. From this, many men, women, and children are either being imprisoned in camps or killed. Due to these unfortunate events and economic downfall, areas of this country are now facing famine and country wide displacement of 400,000 individuals within the first month of conflict. With our social media outlets, our plan is to spread awareness of this exigence to as many people as possible. When trying to spread awareness, our constraints faced will be the ignorance of the subject matter from not being publicized on social media in the United States. With our proposal, our goal is to inform others of the tragic events taking place in South Sudan. We want to put emphasis on what is taking place overseas, because, as Americans, we do not pay attention to what is beyond our borders.  This will be relevant to the Lincoln community due to the amount of Sudanese refugees that are here in Nebraska.

Our project is inventive, because we are  not just doing the average everday project, we are raising awareness that is out of our reach. Our creative aspect of this project is that we will be conducting a Facebook live video with the members of the organization, Save South Sudanese Orphans and Widows with our peers so questions and concerns can be answered upon request. We have created a Facebook page to center our project around. This will also help with our organizational element, because we will each be sharing a link to the page so our audience will be able to view the Facebook Live video. Our project will be memorable due to the story that will be told. The organization’s president, Jacob Maluak Manyang, faced displacement before South Sudan gained their independence, and he has lost most of his close family due to the war that their government started and has yet to finish. Manyang still travels to South Sudan to bring supplies to those in need. The medium of delivery will be through Facebook Live and each of our social media outlets. Through Facebook, the video made could be shared and possibly become viral.

2) As a group, Christian, Savino, and I, found out about this organization through my roommate, Anna Spethman, who’s the Vice President of Save South Sudanese Orphans and Widows. These is a very small community on campus that needed help projecting what’s going on overseas and how they’re trying to help while being here. So what we did was set up a Facebook page that would be dedicated to their inner workings and outer workings like what this organization is for and how it got started. Also, we made a hashtag for the event and page, #SSSOW and #SMIFAW. Both, Spethman and Founder of Save South Sudanese Orphans and Widows, Jacob Manyang, were more than happy to help us out with this project. As we set up their page, we shared it among all of personal Facebook pages and brought awareness to the page itself. With this new page we set up an event where we interviewed Manyang and Spethman through a Facebook Live video so that if people were watching it live they could ask questions about the club and what’s going on in South Sudan. Once the video was filmed and placed on the social media page, we amplified the shares and views of the video and the page. By the end of the week, the video had reached over 100 views whereas the page, itself, reached over 700 people. Once this class has ended, we will contribute to the organization by giving them the Facebook page so they can use it as their official social media platform.

3) With this project we created a Facebook page in order to spread awareness about what is occurring in South Sudan. The Facebook page is called Social Media Impact From Around the World, or SMIFAW for short. To get to our Facebook page, go to @savingssow, which means, “Saving South Sudan Orphans and Widows.” Saving South Sudan Orphans and Widows is currently a student registered organization that provides outreach services to refugees in the community along with serving a refugee camp in Sudan; They’re able to fund for the camp by gathering donations. With this Facebook page, our group provided this organization with the opportunity to spread their name and to inform others who may not know what is occurring overseas. On our Facebook page, we interviewed the founders of the organization to inform the audience about their organization and how others can get involved and how people can spread awareness .

4) First off, this proposal that was put together could not have turned out any better. We were able to contact and get a live interview with the Founder/President of Save South Sudanese Orphans & Widows, which allowed us a deeper look into what the organization mission and goals were for now and the upcoming year. Before this, the organization did not have any type of social media platform, and since the Facebook page has been made, over 800 people have seen the page and more than 120 people have watched the live video. As a gift to the up-and-coming non-profit, our group decided to give them the Facebook once we have completed the Commons Campaign project. After all that our group did for this organization, we feel as if we could have provided more things to make this campaign more effective.

Our group came up with three important things that we could have done differently for this campaign. If we were to start from scratch tomorrow, we would create more pages using different social media platforms. Facebook is a common social media platform used by many people, however, there are other platforms, like twitter and instagram, that can be beneficial to spreading awareness. Another thing we would do differently would investigate more about the non-profit in the video. Our group was informed about the Founder and the organization in more depth behind the cameras, however, we feel that it would have been more beneficial for an audience to hear. Due to the fact that the more in depth information was more of a personal story that Jacob, the president, did not feel like addressing during the live presentation. Besides these two things that we addressed, we felt like this was a successful campaign because it reached a lot of people that are not familiar with the starting up non-profit and it gave the organization another way to spread their word.