I'm a firm believer in storytelling as humanity's universal language and in trust as its most precious currency. My passion for both has led me to work in various forms of content creation. But, it won't stop there. I'm always researching and developing my skills further in order to speak people's language better and gain more of their special currency.
TKH-Coventry's approach to higher education is refreshingly progressive, a philosophy we echoed at pew. design bureau while managing its social presence.
Empathy guided our strategy. During peak admissions season, when it was time to do a deep dive into all TKH-Coventry programmes, we took a step back. We didn't want to spook and spam our audience with the names of our programmes without context. We wanted to get to the bottom of what it truly meant to study every programme, including the courses, the learning modalities, and the potential career paths. And to put all that into perspective, we enlisted the help of subject matter experts for every programme to send special messages to undecided students.
One of my first campaigns for Roche Middle East as part of the AKQA social team was the World Children's Day mini-campaign. The objectives were to raise awareness about children's health, particularly rare diseases like Spinal Muscular Atrophy and Hemophilia, and also to celebrate children's well-being in general. I supported with both copywriting and art direction.
Providing educational excellence for almost 25 years, NIS has built a reputation as one of the most distinguished schools in Egypt. However, this reputation had been an "if you know, you know" thing, as the NIS community was quite the close-knit one with limited outreach.
In 2021, I was fortunate to lead the school's most aspirational marketing campaign in a long time. To do the school's rich history justice, I did my research through campus tours, demos of e-learning platforms, and several meetings with staff, teachers, students, and parents.
Accordingly, I identified exactly what set apart NIS' legacy, teachers, students, and classrooms from other Egyptian schools. We communicated those through both paid media and organic posts. The campaign received resounding success and shares, including from parents who had long wished to proudly showcase their children's school.
Carrying on with another TKH-Coventry campaign; this time during our "off-season" when admissions weren't open. For us at pew. though, this time of year was anything but an off-season.
It was the perfect timeframe for us to build profound connections with our audience by immersing ourselves in their world and telling them stories they want to hear.
An annual tradition we had established on TKH-Coventry socials was "Mutual Unmute"; a campaign that raises the flag on social norms with insidiously deleterious effects.
This edition tackled FOMO. We looked at fear of missing out from a holistic perspective including what drives it, how some businesses exploit it, and the consequences of that. We also asked TKH-Coventry students to anonymously share personal stories about their FOMO struggles to alleviate the stigma. Finally, we shared a research-backed formula for calculating personal FOMO scores and tips on how to manage high ones.
Here are some snippets from the month-long campaign plus some of the feedback it received.
Advanced Computer Technology has been the hospitality industry's go-to provider of tech solutions for over three decades. With new competitors aggressively entering the market though, ACT needed to remind the industry of who the OGs of the industry are.
Enter: El Asleyeen!
The campaign started with teasers showing OGs of other domains, such as construction, furniture, and even comedy. From there, the audience reached the conclusion that ACT is the unmistakable OG of hospitality tech. The campaign then branched into three mini-campaigns with different objectives.
Canvas, a student organization that aims to bolster the entrepreneurial spirit on the GUC campus, has been an integral part of my life in college. After a successful founding year for Canvas and a rewarding one for me as social media manager, I decided to continue the journey with Canvas and be a part of its board for its second year; this time as content marketing manager. The major factor underlying this decision was Canvas' bold unorthodox marketing strategies that I got to contribute to in our first year such as creating a mascot, The Canvas Man, who won everybody's attention with his undeniable charisma as soon as he stepped foot on campus.
As we started preparing for our second ever recruitment, I knew there were two things that were unmistakable to students about Canvas: that we love yellow and that we have the Canvas Man. These were the two signals students were anticipating to announce the recruitment campaign. That's when I thought what if both of these went missing? What if The Canvas Man mysteriously disappeared and gone with him was our yellow color? I believed that having this story unfold in front of our audience's very eyes would create a whole new level of intrigue. And so that was the approach. The first thing we did was that we changed our social media profile and cover photos that screamed yellow to doleful black and white. It wasn't long before the buzz started. At one point, we got a message from one of our audience that literally said: "Are you guys rebranding or has somebody passed away?"
We kept them waiting for a little longer before we finally posted this:
We didn't stop there. We followed up by approaching students on campus and asking them if they had seen The Canvas Man and telling them how serious we were about having him back.
After a few days, we revealed our plan to bring back The Canvas Man:
The end result was this picture that I'm super proud of with amazing recruited members whose attention was grabbed by the campaign in a certain way whether by its mysterious start, its storytelling core, or its striking visuals:
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1st Canvas GUC Meetup: Karkadeeh
During the first few months of Canvas' founding year, we put a lot of effort into raising entrepreneurial awareness on campus. We hosted an awareness event with talks from prominent figures in the Egyptian entrepreneurial scene and we also hosted online awareness campaigns. But then midterms happened.
Every student knows the toll midterms take on any psyche. We knew we had to change our game for our upcoming awareness event to help students process entrepreneurial info after such a tumultuous period. We settled on having the event in the form of a meetup which is just a gathering of entrepreneurs and students to chat and discuss any and everything. So it was a lot less formal than our previous event which had talks. I was one of the board members responsible for the event's theme and direction.
One thing we agreed on as board members and also as students was that all GUCians needed to chill. We started to think about things Egyptian do to chill and we realized that a lot of us rely on beverages to do just that. Perhaps the most common of these beverages is hibiscus tea. We researched it and we found out that it has been used to help people relax ever since the days of the Pharaohs. Thus with that, we got very close to finalizing the theme for the meetup. To stay consistent with the theme of chilling, we decided to call the event "Karkadeeh" because why not?
Marketing for Karkadeeh itself followed the same principle of keeping things chill and not overdoing anything. We started by asking our followers this simple question:
We intentionally spelled the word what "waht" which made it fun for our followers as they first thought it was a typo before figuring out that the whole point of the post was to chill and forget about stuff like typos.
After announcing Karkadeeh, I pitched an idea for a quiz that used 11 questions to test for levels of Karkadeeh in a person's blood which reflected how chill that person was. The quiz quickly went viral among GUCians with all of them sharing their results on social media, granting Canvas unprecedented engagement. Here's one of the 11 questions from the quiz:
The meetup itself was so chill we actually served Karkadeeh all day long. The success of the meetup theme was truly seen as students just for one day put off all thoughts about their careers and actually focused on enjoying the event with the entrepreneurs.
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The Canvas Man's 5 Tips to Prepare for RiseUp Summit'17
After a successful partnership with RiseUp for 2016's summit that saw Canvas act as the official summit ticket distributor in the GUC, RiseUp approached Canvas again for a partnership for 2017's summit, except the partnership was much bigger that time around. The good people of RiseUp had been following our marketing channels and liked how effective Canvas was in reaching students so they asked us to create a customized online marketing campaign for the summit and of course we obliged.
The first thing we thought was that the campaign shouldn't only be targeted toward students who don't know about the summit. It should not exclude those who were already going to the summit, but didn't know what to expect there. We figured the campaign had to be entertaining and eye-catching for students who were yet to discover the summit and also informative for other students who were headed to the summit anyway. There was only one person we knew who could make that perfect balance: The Canvas Man!
Just like that, The Canvas Man presented his 5 Tips to Get Lit for RiseUp Summit'17. The campaign saw The Canvas Man act out his valuable tips in pictures, but still not without poking fun at himself and the summit itself to make the info presented light on students. The campaign got rave feedback from RiseUp and they made it known to us which student organization they would be contacting again for future marketing campaigns.
