HSE Goes Good

Charity at HSE: Go Good

Charity has always been a crucial thing for the modern society. Unfortunately, many of charity organizations in Russia face the problem with creating of promotion, advertising and communication strategies. Today Go Good is the first student communication agency for non-profit organizations, the main of goal of which is to help charity funds to tell about themselves

Moreover, this is a good way to involve more students in charity. Recently there has been a presentation of Go Good Agency when HSE students were able to get information on activity of the organization.

Julia Sukhanova, a third year student of Advertisement and Public Relations at HSE, the founder and SEO of Go Good, agreed to talk with me and shared some interesting facts about her project.

How did you come up with the idea of creating Go Good? What gave your inspiration and motivation?

Frankly speaking, I am quite a sentimental person. I am always on the verge of tears when I happen to see orphans or lonely old people, etc. I have always wanted to help, but I do not have enough money to donate to all I would like to support. There are a lot of people facing similar issues like lack of money, mental strength, time or other recourses prevents us from really important actions, but still so eager to lend a hand. Therefore, I decided to come up with my own way of helping people. I have made a small research and it proved my guess – charity in Russia usually perform poorly when it comes to self-promotion. They cannot really draw and keep attention of public, let alone make the public do something for them on the permanent basis. This results in them having troubles while recruiting people and raising money for their work. I am an AD&PR specialist, so that is exactly what I could do for them. With that in mind, I founded the first communication agency for charities Go Good. Working there students are improving their professional skills and their portfolio, fulfilling their social duty, whilst charities get free help and thrive.

How did your journey begin? How did you implement the project?

I came to Voronovo (HSE Study Center) with that idea. There was a convention of the brightest people of our university, participating in its extracurricular life. At the convention we had the opportunity to present our ideas to the committee that decides which students’ projects will be supported by the university. My project was shortlisted, I registered our organisation officially, put a team together and we started working.

Who is your team? Do you have any helpers?

Now there are 12 of us, but we are planning to expand very soon to 30 people. We have creators, copyrighters, designers, photographers, account-managers and many other positions just as a usual communication agency does.

How is your work structured today? What services do you offer to the client?

Every case with which our clients come is unique. We do not have any ready solutions we could apply every time. First, account-manager is appointed to the project. Then our creative team starts discussing possible ways to deal with the problems stated in a client’s brief. After that, they present their ideas to me and only then to the client. When everything is approved, production team starts working, creating the content. That is how we work in a nutshell.

Let us talk about your projects: the ones you have already completed and are planning to work on.

We have helped five charity organisations, four of which are based in HSE. We have made design and branding for them, created communication strategies, wrote some content-plans for social media and facilitated some of their events.

What are your future plans?

This year we are planning to expand our team as I said before and start working at our own offline charity events with sponsors and celebrities involved. We also consider taking more projects beyond our university.

How can one become a member of the agency? Do you have any requirements or criteria when you select people to your team?

Soon there will be a recruitment to our agency – you can find all the updates and news concerning that topic in our social media. There will be a questionnaire for candidates to fill in, so we could learn more about them and their motivation to work with us. Our team will carefully look through all of the applications and make the final decision. We look for very different people, but they definitely must be united by the great passion and love for the work they applied for. Sense of humour and eagerness to help people are crucial too.

Soon Go Good will be presented as a project at Project Fair of HSE. You will be able to get six credits and do the most important thing – good deeds.

Text by
Anna Bogun