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Community Service Initiative


 

7/4/2021 - (Week 2 - Week 14)

Group Members

Lee Yu Hui (0335787)

Zoe Wong Zen Yee (0336770)

Joseph (0336620)

Jasmine Teoh Lee Suan (033993)

Enos Ku Jihe (0338453)

Julius Teoh (0338487)


INTRODUCTION

For this module, students are required to work in groups to work with NGO's of our choice and come up with a project idea to help them. The goal for this module is to raise awareness and/or helping them through design. Due to the rising Covid-19 cases in Malaysia, our module lecturer Mr. Charles suggests us to execute the project online to reduce physical interaction.

My team looks forward to help out stray animals, therefore we reached out to various animal shelters and organizations in hopes of helping them to spread awareness and raise funds for their needs. We ended up working with Animal Care after several discussions with them, and we were pleased to know that they promotes the practice of One-Street CNRM (Care-Neuter-Return-Manage), which we were eager to help promote and spread awareness about this. 

INSTRUCTIONS




Progress Documentation

31/3/2021 (Week 1)
For the first week of class, we were introduced to the course outline of the module, and what we were expected from this module. Our module lecturer, Mr. Charles gave us a brief explanation for what we should prepare for the coming weeks, as well as giving us the headstart to form ourselves into groups. 


7/4/2021 (Week 2)
After confirming our group members, we started to look for lists of NGO's that we would like to work with. We decided to prioritize street animals as their lives are also heavily affected by the current pandemic. Below are the list of NGO's that we found:



  • Second Chance Animal Society (SCAS)
  • PAWS Animal Welfare Society
  • SPCA Selangor
  • Lucky Dogs Home
  • Furry Friends Farm
  • Mun Mun Sanctuary
  • Animal Care
After consulting Mr. Charles, he suggest us to narrow the list down and focus more on organizations that needs more exposure and aid. Therefore after group discussion, we decided to reach out to Lucky Dogs Home, Furry Friends Farm and Animal Care. 

Below are screenshots of emails that we sent and received from Animal Care:

Email Response from Animal Care #01



14/4/2021 (Week 3)
After reaching out to multiple shelters, Animal Care was the only one that actually replied to us, therefore we decided to approach them.






Animal Care is an organization that promotes the practice of One-Street CNRM (Care-Neuter-Return-Manage). This practice not only helps control the number of stray animals on the street, but it also help prevent them from having certain disease. 

Below are screenshots of emails that we sent and received from Animal Care:


Email Response from Animal Care #02


Email Response from Animal Care #03

Here's Week 3's progress slide:



21/4/2021 (Week 4)
After receiving reply from Animal Care, we started brainstorming on ways to help them out. As their mission and goal was to promote One- Street CNRM, we decided that we could do a social media campaign to create awareness and educate the public as well as creating stickers to help them raise funds. 


Our progress slide for Week 4:


28/4/2021 (Week 5)
This week we were required to present our proposal to Mr. Charles. We presented our ideas to Mr. Charles, and he seemed rather satisfied with what we came out with. He told us that he looks forward to our sticker designs, and that we can move on to start working on our proposed outcome. 

5/5/2021 (Week 6)
This week we started to work on the stickers design as planned, we discussed about the art direction and we ended up decided to delegate the sticker design among 5 people, where each of us is responsible of creating one set of stickers.

Below are some sketches and initial design for the stickers:






12/5/2021 (Week 7)
This week we compiled the final designs of the stickers and have it ready to be sent to printing. 

Below are the final designs for the stickers:

Cat Stickers #01

Dog Stickers #01

Cat Stickers #02

Dog Stickers #02

Cat & dog stickers



19/5/2021 (Week 8)

After making sure the design of the stickers is finalized, we proceeded to compile them into a preorder form to send it out to the public. 

Pre-order Google Form

Below was our final price list for the stickers:

Price List

26/5/2021 (Week 9)
While waiting for the responses for the stickers, we also started working on the infographic designs for the social media campaign. As this is for educational purposes, we made sure we're spreading the right information towards the public. We compiled our research into a document before designing the posts.

Research compilation

2/6/2021 (Week 10)

This week we decided to close the order for the pre-order stickers. After sorting out the orders, we were glad that we've raised more than our targeted goal. 

Below are the responses we've gotten:


Screenshots of responses from Google Sheet

In total, we managed to sell 132 sets of stickers, after calculating the amount of stickers that needs to be printed, we proceed to send the stickers for printing.

9/6/2021 (Week 11)

While waiting for the stickers to be printed, we've also finalized the poster design for social media.

Below are the finalized designs:

Poster Design #01

Poster Design #02

Poster Design #03


Poster Design #04


Poster Design #05


Poster Design #06

Poster Design #06


16/6/2021 (Week 12)

This week we collected the stickers and started to cut out the stickers individually. As there were quite a huge order, it took us some time to actually finish cutting all of them. 

Sticker cutting #01

Sticker cutting #02

Sticker cutting #03


23/6/2021 (Week 13)

After days of cutting the stickers, we can finally move onto packaging them. We used plastic sheets offered by Zoe and some decorative paper to pack the stickers up nicely. 

Below are the final results of our packaging:






Stickers were then packed into envelops to be sent out:




After packaging the stickers, we plan to send out the stickers to the buyers, however due to the current implementation of FMCO in Malaysia, the post office was closed in the area and we had no choice but to postpone the items for delivery.

Post Office was closed due to FMCO in Malaysia 

30/6/2021 (Week 14)

Due to the closure of the post office, we weren't able to send the funds to Animal Care before the presentation. However, we reported to Mr. Charles and contacted Animal Care about our progress, and we promised to send them the funds as soon as possible once the FMCO is lifted. 

Upon communicating with Animal Care, the person in charge also thank us for our efforts. Though they weren't able to conduct a video call with us, they offered to do a write up of our efforts in their blogs. 


Email response from Animal Care


Presentation slides:


Overall the presentation went quite smoothly, and Mr. Charles seemed happy that we were able to raise the targeted amount of funds for Animal Care. 


Week 15 (Update)

This week we finally got to send out the items for delivery. After deducting the costs, we managed to raise a total of RM656.50, and fully transfered the funds to Animal Care.

Proof of payment

After transferring the money, we also got a reply from Animal Care a few days later. They were thankful to us, and we're glad to see them putting the money into good use. 


Email response from Animal Care


Blogpost by Animal Care


Official Receipt from Animal Care

Animal Care also took the initiative to write up a blogpost to express their gratitude. The link to the blogpost can be found here.

Below is a write up that we did:



REFLECTION

Lee Yu Hui (0335787)
The experience of working with Animal Care has been fruitful. I'm happy and grateful that they trust whatever we do and allow us to do the decision making. Due to the pandemic, the economy in Malaysia has been hard on everyone, therefore I'm beyond grateful to those who are supportive and willing to help out to make a good deed for us to accomplish our goals. We would not have done it without them. I hope that with the funds acquired, Animal Care could reach out to help out more strays in need, and to build a better place for them. In this chaotic society, I believe its these small deeds that lit up hope within humanity. I wish all the best Animal Care, and to everyone who has been struggling due to the pandemic.  

Zoe Wong Zen Yee (0336770)
Through this community service module, first of all, I am glad that we were able to reach our ultimate goal of raising funds for Animal Care and not just doing some campaigns. I'm also really grateful for the NGO that we work with give us the freedom to do basically whatever we want, which really helped us especially in terms of managing our time with FYP at the same time as well. With the impact from the pandemic and lockdown in Malaysia, I am positive that the funding for NGOs, especially self funded NGO is severely impacted as well. I hope with the small funds that we managed to raised, we were able to ease out the financial in caring of the animals under Animal Care. On another hand, I would love to thank the people who had helped us out throughout the project, namely my aunt for helping us to promote the stickers fundraising to a bigger audience by posting in a cat community Facebook group. It is definitely heartwarming to see so many support coming from the community despite in a pandemic. I would also love to thank my team mates for going through this together, especially Yu Hui and Joseph, in which we almost become a mini sticker cutting/packaging factory. This is sure one of a great experience before ending my degree journey.

Joseph (0336620)
For Community Service, I’m happy that we were able to reach the target that we wanna achieve. In the beginning I was skeptical that we were able to achieve the targeted fundraising amount due to the odds being against us with Covid and all that. Well, despite the odds we pull through and achieve it anyways. I will say that managing time in this module was not an easy task, I definitely did not expect us to sell this many amount of stickers to begin with. It took us 4 days to cut and package all of the stickers and we did that during finals week. So there were definitely some ups and downs during this project. I’m also happy that I got wonderful groupmates that work with each other well and got through the module with no fuss and no hassle, it has been a fun project to work with my groupmates and animalcare despite the workload, luckily animal care has been kind enough to let us work on whatever we want to help them with their cause. It has also been a learning experience on the marketing side of things, I’ve definitely learned a lot during the duration of the project and hope to do similar activities like this again.

Jasmine Teoh Lee Suan (0331993)
Throughout these three months of working on our CNRM Awareness and Fundraising for AnimalCare project, I’ve managed to learn and experience what I couldn’t have in my core modules, and I am very thankful for that. The community service initiative module has given me the opportunity to spread awareness of CNRM through social media and raise and donate RM656.50 to AnimalCare, by selling our designs in the form of stickers. I felt happy when AnimalCare praised our sticker designs, and mentioned that they would include our project and the designs onto their website. There were unprecedented incidents such as the poslaju being closed because of MCO and some time restraints of printing and obtaining the stickers, but we managed to pull through in the end, sent the stickers to the people who had ordered them and transferred the funds to AnimalCare smoothly. I think that the most important takeaway of this project is that we managed to aid in one step closer to a community that embraces kindness towards animals while also having great synergy as a team by delegating tasks and working together to be of service to the community. I hope that our project will be a great ‘strike’ to society and that the funds raised will aid in the neutering and spaying of street animals, bringing forth a better future for the furry little friends.


Enos Ku Jihe (0338453)
The experiences I had during this project is a happy and exciting one. Throughout high school and college I had gone through few community service related projects and I can proudly say that this project stands out the most as not only the contents aligned with my interests and love for animals, and this project was done fully online, thanks to the pandemic. During this project we learnt the power of networking and communications and that we are able to raise enough funds to exceed our target amount if we put our heart into it. Usually when we communicate with clients, AnimalCare in our case, we will have physical meetups to get the discussion done, but due to the current situation, our communications are done only using email. Furthermore, instead of having a charity event to raise money, we put our designing and illustration skills in use, and we each designed cat and dog stickers to sell and raise the funds. Even though we were not able to avoid miscommunications and misunderstanding among our teammates, but we are able to overcome it and gained experiences from it. I must thank Zoe, Yuhui and Joseph for being the logistic team, the ones that prints, cut, package and ship the stickers out to our patrons, kudos to them. I hope that our efforts are a great help for AnimalCare to achieve their mission.

Julius Teoh (0338487)
This project has been quite the unique experience in terms of community service related assignment. Having done a couple of other similar projects in the pass, having to now do it in a completely online manner has tested my experience and understanding of the subject. Most jarringly different was the lack of face to face interaction with the clients due to the Covid-19 pandemic. All of our exchanges with AnimalCare, our organisation of choice, has been completely through emails due to the lock down. Moreover, the restriction to only online campaigns was another interesting twist as one would usually expect to conduct physical events when it comes to things involving charity or fundraising. Nonetheless, the team pulled through via the means of selling merchandise to raise funds through an online ordering form. Arguably the biggest challenge was definitely the lack of face to face communication in the team. Since we had to rely on online calls or text channels to relay information, we weren't completely free of misunderstandings or missing information. Fortunately, this has not resulted in any drastic problems for the team. Hopefully our efforts here could be of support to the organisation.
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