Page 87 - Annual Report_2

Covid-Free Pera

Throughout the year, we have made continuous progress towards spreading awareness and helping

control the COVID-19 outbreak in the country through our COVID Free Pera project, carried out in line

with the Rotary Stop the Spread initiative. Our efforts were extremely successful and were published

twice in local newspapers, further strengthening our reach with the general public.

Project Abhiprerana, organized under the initiative of “Covid-Free Pera” was another testament to

this success, since more than 6.5k participants attended the event and more than 2k have viewed the

recorded video of the webinar uploaded on YouTube.

A marked increase in online presence and reach.

Moreover, the club has made use of other social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook,

Instagram and Whatsapp to effectively reach out to the media and general public. There are, at

present, two official YouTube channels which are namely that of Covid-Free Pera and the Rotaract

Club of University of Peradeniya. Since many of the projects were conducted online (as webinars) and

these webinars were live-streamed and recorded, the two channels proved to be highly instrumental

in disseminating knowledge (especially with regard to Covid-Free Pera), supplying information of our

projects to targeted groups and of reaching a wider public as the videos were made available to them

on these two channels. As a result of this strategy, the club was able to garner public support for

events, with over 1k views for all major project videos and a notable increase in the number of

subscribers. The recorded sessions from almost all webinars conducted as a part of these large-scale

projects such Covid-Free Pera, Waiwarna, You-Turn etc have been uploaded to these two channels,

allowing participants as well as all others to re-watch and re-visit them.

On the other hand, Facebook and Instagram were utilized as the chief instruments to execute the

major Public Relations campaigns for all projects and to promote the interests of various projects.

Owing to such well-orchestrated campaigns, the number of likes for the club’s Facebook pages has

increased by two-fold within the span of one year. Moreover, by live-streaming many project events

on Facebook Live, we were able to reach and attract a much wider audience than it would have been

possible if events had been organized in a physical setting. The recorded videos of almost all

webinars are also posted on Facebook to further expand the reach of these projects. Aside from

Facebook and Instagram, Whatsapp was majorly used to circulate project information amongst

current and prospective club members, to encourage them to circulate flyers of all project-related

events and to promote good fellowship and solidarity. In addition to Facebook, Instagram and

Whatsapp, Linkedin was also used to promote new projects related to professional development.

We have also carried out several other workshops to hone a variety of different skills and all of these

events were received extremely well with an active participation of over 150 people. As such, the

Public Relations efforts this year have been specifically aimed at increasing and ameliorating our

online presence as the club realized at an early stage how imperative it would be to create and

maintain a strong relationship with the general public and media during these tough times.

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