How the pandemic encouraged our Asia team to find new ways to support our authors and customers
25 October 2020
Last update: 27/10/20 11:25
The first in a series of posts from our global team on how they have changed how they communicate with our authors, readers and customers during the pandemic and how virtual solutions have opened up new opportunities.
Year 2020 the year where everything we know was turned topsy-turvy due a virus called COVID-19. Every year from March to August onwards, our Asia team will usually host a series of Author Workshops with universities across Asia. These on-site workshops were usually conducted by our visiting editors as they travel to this part of the world to meet authors and potential authors.
This year, when economies of Asia began their shutdown due to COVID, with China in January 2020. It spread like bushfires and borders and economies across Asia (such as South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia) started to follow suit as COVID spread.
By March 2020, we started to get cancellations of our editors’ travel plans and universities informing us of the restrictions put in place with for visitors. In late April, we anticipated all our on-site author workshop plans will need to be shelved with immediate effect. At the same time, we knew that research will not stopped due to COVID and we have to find an alternative way to engage with our users during such un-precedent times.
The Asia Marketing team then raise the idea of converting these on-site workshops to a virtual event with our local editor, Joe Ng. He bought the idea after conducting a virtual event with a HK customer in April. This was done then at the customer’s request
Our initial objectives for these online Author Workshops remains strategically similar to on-sites. Our key objectives was to engage more young researchers from Asia, at the same time driving more journal article submissions/book proposals from Asia. And of course, to provide our Library Customers an alternative solution during the COVID19 lockdown, to replace the on-site workshops that we used to provided prior the pandemic.
Within 2 weeks, we had our program ready, subscribed to the Webinar platform, and converted all our regular forms which we used for on-site event to online. We promoted the event using our own Asia list, on our own Chinese and English social media. We did not even do any advertisement for these event on our Social Media. We were actually not sure what to expect as we all know that Asia audience have all along do not respond well in virtual events. We were not even sure if we could attract anyone to sign up. It was really a trial and see project.
A key highlight of these events were that they reached researchers and countries outside of Asia, as we had a number of registrants from outside of Asia registering and viewing the recorded webinars that we uploaded.
Some excerpts from the attendees:
“To keep on educating audiences, whether learners or facilitators so that we can all be ready in moving on amidst this crisis in collaborating among student-peer or faculty-peer in accomplishing journals for future publication.”
ROMEO B. ALINEA JR., OUR LADY OF FATIMA UNIVERSITY, Philippines
“Excellent job. The speaker provides clear guide and description for this topic. I just now realized that as a publisher or author should prepare manuscript format with the right solutions of the entire set of articles. I learned about considering copy editing, type setting and proof reading and indexing to complete the set of your books or journal. Thank you for giving us opportunity to enlighten our understanding about submitting manuscript and for production.”
JOHN ROQUE ABELLA ESTOMAGO, English Program Sarakhampittayakhom School, Thailand
“Inspiring me to make monograph and how to publish it thank you so much.”
ReskiFebyantiRauf, Universitas Negeri, Malaysia
It was a steep learning curve as we had to learn a new software and all the logistic in such unchartered waters within such a short time. Overall these events were a great success and it brought a lot of brand awareness both to our researcher’s community and library customers. We will continue to bring more in-depth and variety to our Author Workshop to build on this initial success and continue the success story.
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