Per the conclusion from our social survey, general public don’t know much about autism. Therefore, we decided to spread our impact through social media so as to outreach to more people and increase the public awareness and social attention to our topic, autism.

We have not only created accounts on domestic social media accounts, like WeChat Official Account, Little Red Book, TikTok and Weibo, but also international platforms, like YouTube and Twitter. The purpose of this is to extend our influence from inside the country and abroad.

Our TikTok account is mainly used to promote short popular science videos, including the symptoms of autism, the influence of autism and the cause of autism, et al. So far, we have published 8 videos and many of them have been watched by more than forty thousands of times, in addition, we also received many comments from other Tik Tok users who expressed their relative stories, their sorry for autism and their support to our project which we have published in our account homepage. Even though this attempt is quite a surprise to us that we didn’t expect such many play volumes, we will continue updating our short videos to increase social attention to our topic.

Since WeChat is the social platform used by the largest number of Chinese people, we created the WeChat Official Account to post our work to attract attention to our project. Our first post received 589 reads so far which is the most popular one among our articles posted on WeChat. In this article, we mainly introduced the autism issue, our team, and our goal. Most of our other posts include the experimental design and its theory drafted by the wet lab and research progress and charity sale drafted by the dry lab. In this way, we are telling our followers that we are determined to proceed with our project and we are working on this to pursue our project goal. In the meantime, we could share some knowledge about biotechnology and social research with the public.

In addition to article posts of our team updates on WeChat, we also created a Little Red Book account which is also very popular in China, especially among young people. In Little Red Book, we mainly post our Vlogs to get closer to the public and attract more followers before we could further post other educational information.

We also have our Weibo account. Not like other social media, on Weibo we don’t intend to post many original works or articles, we mainly forward relative news and topics for sharing our opinions and communicating with other Weibo users. In China, people can talk about almost every topic on Weibo and we could search for some tags to find our own interesting content. We focus on the news related to autism and forward them to our homepage and make comments, sometimes with tags. In that way, we cannot only keep up with the related current affairs but also get closer to the general public so that we are accessible to every user to talk about autism.We also have our Weibo account. Not like other social media, on Weibo we don’t intend to post many original works or articles, we mainly forward relative news and topics for sharing our opinions and communicating with other Weibo users. In China, people can talk about almost every topic on Weibo and we could search for some tags to find our own interesting content. We focus on the news related to autism and forward them to our homepage and make comments, sometimes with tags. In that way, we cannot only keep up with the related current affairs but also get closer to the general public so that we are accessible to every user to talk about autism.

We also attempted to cover more space to outreach people abroad, thus we also have a Youtube channel and a Twitter account, but we have yet to receive much following like Tik Tok since we are not quite familiar with these two and the internet block also causes difficulties posting. But we won’t give up on these platforms and will figure out one day to promote our work for further education campaigns.

“The Autism Project (The Star Project)” is the first college student public welfare project in Jiangsu Province that focuses on educational support, family empowerment, and volunteer services for autistic patients and now it is the most influential family support and service platform for the mentally handicapped in Suzhou. Really appreciated their work, and we wrote an invitation to them for hosting an online workshop together about the topic of autism. Finally, we heard back from them with a positive answer.
In addition, we also invited another influential media, University Press to join this workshop to enhance the social influence. University Press is sponsored by the University News Agency of Soochow University School of Media and Communications. It was founded in April 1998. With the concept of "making a statement for students" and the goal of "building a mainstream media for college students", it has continued to develop and improve. At present, it is the most powerful media with the highest circulation and the highest circulation rate at Soochow University.
After discussion, we decided to make the online workshop on the night of August 9th. In the online workshop which was designed in the form of Q&A. Our team members were responsible for asking questions and the staff from The Autism Project as well as University Press would answer our questions and then start some discussion.

Our topics of discussion were mainly divided into two parts, the work they have done for autism and the methods for popular science. The Autism Project mainly introduced the administrative approval conditions, funding sources, activity forms and some current difficulties required to establish an autism non-profit organization. They specifically mentioned that in addition to behavioral intervention, non-profit organizations are not suitable for promoting edible adjuvant medicines, which are obviously very important. University Press mainly discussed how to organically combine the rational expression of popular science about autism with the public's empathy in the process of reporting.
During this workshop, we learned a lot about media operations from these two influential organizations and were quite impressed by their previous work.