Communication and Education
Overview
According to our survey, people usually obtain information from the internet. Therefore, our educational materials are mainly prepared and posted online and will be accessible to the public. Besides, the main content of these educational materials will involve feed, the digestion system of ruminants, and biotechnology applied in our project. By spreading these educational materials to the public, people could understand more about biotechnology and pay more attention to our project and feed industry. We hope people could realize that biotechnology could have an impact on our social life, not only in the food industry, and medical field but also agriculture and livestock.
Educational Articles on WeChat Official Account
WeChat is the most popular social media platform in China. Thus, it might be the more effective way to expose our project and related information to the public by posting on WeChat. We created our team WeChat Official Account with name Feed Family.
The first article we posted is the introduction of our project and our topic. In this article, we explained that our team is to adopt a multi-enzyme cooperative degradation strategy through gene engineering technology. In addition, we also introduced silage and grain feed which are the main kinds of feed we target on.
Our first post on WeChat Official Account
Another popular article is to introduce xylitol and the article name is “Do you remember that line? Is this your Yida?”. “Is this your Yida” is a very famous advertising line in a Yida chewing gum advertisement where the chewing gum uses xylitol to replace sugar as the substance. We quoted this line to elicit the topic, xylitol, and also catch people’s eyes to read this article. In this article, we introduced some basic knowledge about xylitol and then its application in the beginning, following that we further pointed out that xylitol will also do harm to the intestines and stomach due to its indigestion, and even causing flatulence and diarrhea. This article could be served as the background message to be delivered to the public for our proposed solution.
Screenshots of the article “Do you remember that line? Is this your Yida?”
Besides our educational articles, we also prepared some posters to promote our team and our project. In the early stage of running our WeChat Official Account, we wanted to attract more followers. Therefore, we designed a poster about our team and in the poster, we briefly introduced who we are and what we are going to do, and of course, the QR code of our WeChat Official Account. We encourage people to follow us if they are interested. We spread this poster online and finally we got more than 850 reads in total.
Poster to promote our team and our WeChat Official Account
Educational Video on Bili Bili
Bili Bili is one of the most popular video platforms and also a cultural community with a high concentration of young generations in China. Since nowadays many people get used to watching videos for acquiring information, we decided to prepare some educational videos to cover the need.
Our educational video posted on our Bili Bili channel
After our team discussion, we decided on our first video topic, one meal of a cow. This video is targeting on younger kids and mainly introduces some knowledge about the digestion system of ruminants, like cows. In this video, we introduced several kinds of feed and their nutrition, then we further displayed some animation to illustrate the characteristics of the digestive tract of cows and the digestion process of feed in it. Considering the target audience to be those kids at younger ages, we put some lovely illustrations and we tried to simplify the items when introducing some scientific knowledge to make them more comprehensible. In the last part of the video, we gave a mini-speech to introduce our project and our product that could help solve the indigestion problem of animals, including ruminants.
Team Vlogs in TikTok
QR code of our Tik Tok channel and its homepage
In order to create a channel where the public could communicate with us in an easier way, we created a team TikTok channel where we posted our team vlogs so that people could directly see what we did for our project and they could leave comments or their thoughts or questions. Since short videos are quite popular in China and abroad and there are many users who browse videos on Tik Tok a lot. Therefore, we could attract more people to pay attention to our project and enable mutual communication between us and the public.
Other Outreach to the Public
Besides those educational materials, we also grasped every chance to outreach to the public.
During the field trip, we also raised the discussion about our project with the interviewees, like pet store owners, feed store owners, and other passers who were curious about what we were doing.
In our fundraising activity, we could also promote our team and our project through our peripheral goods with our team logos on them.
In the future, we will continue this work and spread the impact of biotechnology.