How NOT to Fail a Service Project

There are many people who are now doing their service projects, or planning on starting their own projects. But there are certain aspects of a project that you must have before you start. This is a story of a failed project, that hopefully, you guys will be able to avoid, now that you have read this.

So, what is a service project exactly? A service project involves taking action for a certain cause, such as helping a school fund its library, or donating money or clothes or toys to an orphanage. It means that you are trying to create a positive difference for the communities that you have chosen to help, and are raising awareness for, and not asking anything in return.

When they were in 8th grade, around 4 years ago, 4 girls had decided to start a project called #oneyeonehelp. In theory, it sounded like a project that would have been really successful, but it was a failed service project. Basically, you had to take a picture of your eye, and post it on Instagram, and one post would equal 10 baht. All the money that they raised would go to an orphanage called Phayathai Babies Home.

After they finished making their poster, the girls sent it out to the internet, and stated telling their friends to take pictures and start posting them on Instagram with the hashtag. This was all without a supervisor. Suddenly, it started getting really big, and the had gotten up to around 37,000 posts. It had turned into a nation wide viral hashtag. Because of this, people started getting suspicious about their motives.

One day, they were called to meet with Mr.Mike, and were told that they had been getting calls about their #oneyeonehelp. Posts started showing up all over Instagram that the project was not real, for people to stop taking pictures and to not donate, because at the same time, they had opened a bank account for people to donate extra money to, but thankfully no one had donated anything yet.

Because of that, they had become quite famous, the service project turning up in lots of new channels and websites. Their project came up on one of the biggest Thai news channels, and they started telling people to stop doing it because the project was fake. They were also invited to attend a talk show, with a man called Woody, a famous talk show host. He wanted to talk about how they weren’t a fake service group, and that they were not scamming people, but the school did not allow them to attend. So he explained that the service wasn’t a fake project, and that it was a group of international school students.

Afterwards, they had to put a stop to it, but they couldn’t just say that they were going to quit or discontinue the project, because it would make the school and themselves look bad. So they sent out a message saying Thank you and that they would stop the project after receiving ten thousand posts of peoples eyes.

But that led to actually finding 100,00 baht to donate. Since they didn’t have any sponsors, they didn’t have anyone/anywhere to get the money from… So, where did they get 100,00 baht from? The school and their parents… so they have been in debt to the since 8th grade!

SO, as you can tell that project was a fail. Here are the things that they should have done;

A supervisor – an adult or someone to help you
A sponsor – someone to get all the funds from
Facilitate with the organization AND the school
NOT launching the project right after you finish making the logo for it (which is exactly what they did)

The stages of a service project includes;