In February 2020 Mr. Abinash Mishra, the Assistant Collector of Bastar district in Chhattisgarh tweeted a video of a student using Alexa. The school had adopted a ‘Smart Class Project’ using Amazon’s Alexa and witnessed a positive change in student behavior and interest to learn. This was an opportunity to drive home the potential for Alexa in supporting school education, especially in remote areas.
Strategy:
We developed a stakeholder engagement effort to promote Alexa in schools, which involved on-ground support for advocacy and community building, awareness building for key stakeholders, and a digital outreach campaign. To better understand the application of Alexa in the school, we visited Bastar and evaluated how Amazon Devices could support the school in its attempt to revolutionize learning methods.
To create consistent recall across all digital platforms, we created the hashtag #AlexainSchools and produced a video documentary showcasing how students in the government school in Bastar embraced Alexa, and how easy and comfortable it was for students to learn with Alexa. We also interviewed the Assistant Collector of Bastar, Mr. Abinash Mishra, which was featured on the Amazon India Day One blog along with the video documentary. We also created a media information note detailing the story and shared it extensively with all relevant media across India.
Results:
The #AlexainSchools campaign went live on June 10, 2020, showcasing the story from Bastar, and it was well-received in the media. The story resulted in inquiries from more schools and NGOs to make Alexa part of their student curriculum. The video was re-posted by two influencers in the education segment: Mr. Rahul Bose and Mr. Milind Chandwani, and the overall impressions across social media platforms for the video were more than 2 million.
The media info note shared with the media resulted in a total of 254M impressions, with publications such as News18, Hindustan Times, CNN, and Divya Bhaskar. The story reached relevant stakeholders across the nation, and more schools are adopting Alexa to improve their education methods.
As a result of our efforts, the Education Department in Bastar requested more Echo devices to extend the ‘Smart Class Project’ to all schools and close to 700 devices are now in Bastar, ready to be deployed. Teachers part of the Professional Learning Community have initiated a training module, to learn about Alexa capabilities that can be leveraged in schools.
