Introduction

It was a very interesting year for the Marketing function as after two covid generations, AIESEC in Belgium finally had a proper MCVP Marketing. As previous year the function was MoGX - there was not a lot of focus on the AIESEC Brand and attraction alignment to our creatives and materials - and hence this year was a pivotal one to set a base for the coming years for ensuring a brand aligned campaign and attraction strategy for AIESEC in Belgium. This translated into MC focusing heavily in creating new materials, content strategy and events portfolio that can be used as a template for the network.

Universities 1965 total Sign ups on our platform

239 youth applied to have an experience with AIESEC

A lot of investments were made in terms of templates and offline marketing materials for LCs to bring back the culture and familiarity of ongrounds and offline attraction. The main strategies of the year were broken down into the following categories:

Social Media Management

This year AIESEC in Belgium focused heavily on growing the engagement on Social Media, with a focus on National Instagram. There were discussions about closing local pages as per talks by AIESEC International around centralisation of social media channels, but at the end it was not implemented as no conclusions were made in it’s favour at the national level.

Our Social Media Engagement, post consistency, content quality and reach grew tremendously in the year as we had big social media structures and a clear campaign strategy. I would like to thank the National Social Media Team Leaders - Matilde Garcia and Mariana Bolivar for their excellent work.

Several ad campaigns and physical materials were also invested for the LCs this year

National Events

We planned two national event weeks during March and April where the local committees could have their event in the day and hour that suits their reality and time better. In March, the event had the name “Go to Europe with your friend” as we wanted to focus on exchanges inside the EU. In April, the event had the name “Find your Passion” as we wanted to focus on global talent for the short term, where the value proposition is to go in a short-term internship to find if you like a specific job.

University Relations

Some Local Committees of AIESEC in Belgium have strong partnerships with Universities. This is one of the biggest strengths of our outgoing exchanges and should be sought by all. In each semester there was a person responsible for the development of a framework for how to manage University Relations (UR) in the Entity Support Teams (EST).

Firstly we worked to understand the level of university relations in each reality and plan activities and next steps according to that. We created a “University Relations Memorandum of Understanding” which was downscaled to the Local Committee’s responsible together with an education cycle held by the EST.

Secondly the EST responsible held monthly individual meetings with the responsible that showed interest, to align on how to explore better the partnerships and understand the current situation of each LC. Based on that, materials for support (such as the UR Management booklet) were created.

Lastly, the Member Committee was responsible for creating an “app” on Podio, where the information about the management of each LC was stored for future reference. The last report can be found here.

Our Local Committees

We currently have 6 Local Committees with 6 Vice Presidents responsible for Marketing. Different Local Committees have different strengths and weaknesses in marketing. Most of them historically have good University Relations and really good word of mouth in the market. The Belgian market is quite extensive, and many students are interested in having an internship or a volunteer experience abroad. We need to develop our knowledge on targeting promotion and improve quality leads for our focus product, Global Volunteer - and ensure relevance in the Belgian market considering the growing competitors. This year the local chapter of VUB and Campus Brussel were merged into one Market of AIESEC in Brussel, following a similar merge of 3 markets into AIESEC in Bruxelles in the previous EB Term. The new growth path and OD model will guide a new direction for our Local Committees to grow in quality SUs and brand awareness.

Conclusion

This year we weren’t focused on running all the activities properly, so it’s really important to research each activity we can run next year and in which activities we should focus on based on the external reality that we have around us. It’s really important to develop our University Relations as it can grow our operations a lot. Last but not least, it’s important to focus on our Local Committees and on their knowledge to promote our programs in the best way possible.