Jonge Harten Festival X RUG

We spent the last few months working on a research project on community-building for the Jonge Harten theater festival! This project was part of the career minor, which offered the opportunity to learn more practical things while working in interdisciplinary teams. We are all very grateful to be a part of such an amazing team and we want to thank Karlijn Benthem for this collaboration! Last but not least, thanks to Sipke De Hoopand Djamila Boulil for the career minor.

What we did

We conducted extensive research on marketing and community building strategies. Our research question was “How can the Jonge Harten Festival build and engage a diverse and young crew throughout the year?” On the basis of our research question, we examined every aspect of community building and engagement. Also how can the Jonge Harten community can incorporate new changes to build a more diverse and engaged community that stays relevant throughout the year. The team was fortunately able to come up with a thorough advice for the client which primarily consisted of a concrete and revised social media marketing strategy and a "human centered design" where you conduct only 5 steps of empathizing, defining needs, ideating, prototyping, and testing. This is basically based on the idea that design is more responsive when it is created from the needs of the users, rather than being based on assumptions about them. Our final product was a recommendations paper which includes both practical and theoretical changes for the jonge Harten community. These recommendations were completely based on academic research, experience research and quantitative analysis. We believe adopting these recommendations would help the Jonge Harten team to grow inclusively and sustain.

About us

The team consisted of five girls (Sanam Ali, Asmita Ray, Jodi Hensens, Tessa Albers, and Beaudine Wagenaar). Almost all of us are from different programmes. Jodi and Tessa study Media Studies, Asmita studies International Relations, Beaudine studies Arts, Culture and Media and Sanam studies Communications and information studies. We brought together different ideas and knowledge from our studies and collaborated effectively to make this project happen.