We spoke to the Impact Lab students interns at FSI during the Spring 2021 semester to find out their learnings and experiences at the Impact Lab, as well as their take on social impact.
In this series, meet Maidah Sultana, Communications and Marketing Intern at Foundation for Shared Impact.
Tell us about yourself? Which year are you in and what subject are you majoring in? What is one fun fact that people don’t know about you? What is the best thing about being you right now?
Hi, my name is Maidah. I am a year three BBA Accounting and Finance student, studying at The University of Hong Kong. One fun fact that seldom people know about me is that I love arts and designs, however, I seldom have the opportunity to do so. The best thing being me right now is that I am studying at HKU, and I am working hard for my future.
Tell us about your experience at Impact Lab? What are your roles and responsibilities?
As a communications and marketing intern, my role is to conduct social media marketing, create content and some graphics for the posts, doing research on newsletter topics, and engaging with social impact partners and Impact Lab students for content generation purposes. My experience at the Impact Lab is quite interesting. At first, I was quite lost about my work, I wasn’t sure exactly how to create content as I wasn’t familiar with the social impact issues very deeply. Mostly, I would follow my supervisor and make a lot of mistakes that needed loads of amendment procedures. However, near the end, I am more familiar with content creation and FSI’s work, what are the expectations of my supervisor, and how to maintain a good quality of work by communicating more with my supervisor and partner.
What is unique about the company that you work at?
I believe what’s unique about FSI is that they are a really hard-working and impact-driven community that strives to help impact-driven companies to expand their scale and highlight the social issues to raise awareness. It is really inspiring the work that they do, what I feel is that they are really trying to get more people’s attention on the world’s most pressing issues. Through their Community Connections Program, FSI acts as a mediator between the social impact partners and corporate partners, and to establish a stronger bond within the society.
What are the major learnings that you gained from participating in Impact Lab? How has the experience helped your understanding of social impact?
Through participating in Impact Lab, I have learned quite a lot of soft skills, such as communication skill, marketing skills, leadership skill, and confidence. I think I wasn’t so active in the chat group earlier when the semester started. I mostly followed what my supervisor suggested to us without really thinking of the content independently and absorbed the messages. Near the end, I realized that by communicating and sharing our own thoughts with the group, it really helped me to have more understanding of what messages should my content deliver, and I should be determined and confident in my work and ideas, and should be more active in sharing them so that everyone can have a clear understanding and discuss the work critically instead of just working according to instructions. I think it is quite nice that we have the autonomy to write up the content and create the graphics, it is a great experience for boosting confidence and being more self-determined.
This internship has also helped me build a better understanding of social impact. We all know that the world is facing many issues, but we never know what is really going on deeply. One of my tasks was to create social media posts on world international days such as World Water Day and International Women’s Day. I really liked working on these two posts because I had the opportunity to really express my own concerns over these issues, and get to learn more about real-life situations through research.
How has this experience benefited your personal growth? How will this experience benefit your future, in terms of your career and/or other endeavors?
Working with FSI helped me learn that social impact organizations really need a lot of support in order to scale, and sometimes it seems hard to promote the issues without any fun engagements and activities. Therefore, as an individual, I think I have learned to pay more attention to social impact and issues, and to do as much as I can to support these companies, such as donating or participating in their events, not just skip through the posts on social media, as they have been making a lot of efforts just to build awareness and to help building an impact-driven world.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you?
Because of the pandemic, we all miss the opportunity to attend classes face-to-face. I feel like it is much harder for us to make new friends and connections now, by just sitting in front of the laptops at home.
The pandemic has caused many unprecedented challenges for social impact organizations. From working at the company, how do you think the pandemic has affected the organization, its leaders, and its beneficiaries?
I think what is the most challenging for social impact organizations under the pandemic is that they lost the opportunity to organize activities and conduct meetings face-to-face. I feel like it is much harder to discuss matters and come up with solutions without physically being together. That’s why it is much harder to communicate effectively and to organize work efficiently online. However, the pandemic has given them a great opportunity to digitize resources and move everything online. Using technology to operate the business is much more efficient than manual processes.
If there is one thing you can do for the world right now, what would it be?
It would be to ensure justice for everyone, from gender equality to race equality, to equality for the LGBT community. Also, to have freedom and peace for everyone, no matter where they are in this world.
Would you recommend the Impact Lab to other students? Why?
Yes, I would definitely. I think Impact Lab is a great opportunity for students to learn what is beyond the book, it is a great chance to understand how communication and reality are in the workplace. Also, they will learn more about social impact organizations, their struggles and their impact through Impact Lab.
