Young people today are worse off today than their parents were. This statement might sound ironic given the relative affluence that our generation has been born into, but the saying that money doesn’t buy happiness rings true here – especially when, thanks to inflation, everything is getting more expensive.
A quick glance at the newspaper says it all. The Star Online recently reported that over the last seven years in Malaysia, a total of 1,940 youths under the age of 25 have been declared bankrupt, a third of whom became bankrupt in the first half of this year. In the same vein, the rate of juvenile crime has also shot up by 57 percent in 2013, which saw 1,632 cases among young criminals as compared to 1,042 cases in 2012, according to Malaysian Digest.
Jazz Tan knows full well what this sort of lifestyle can do to the lives of the youth. Her own father was a victim of unhealthy activities – engaging in gangsterism and drugs – and passed away ten years ago when Tan was just 14 years old. Since then, she’s made it her personal mission to move young people off the streets. She founded YouthsToday, an online platform for projects spearheaded by youths, for that express purpose in 2013.
“I identified a problem in this industry, particularly in Malaysia – there’s a gap between brands and young people,” recalls Tan. “When young people organize events, they always face problems in finding funding, resources, and mentorship.”
Brand mileage
Now, Malaysia-based YouthsToday works with several government agencies and multinational corporations who target the younger crowd – such as Maybank, AirAsia, and Sony – to get their support for youth-run projects in the areas of entrepreneurship, technology, and the creative arts. In return, these clients receive significant brand mileage in the respective events – a Sony-supported Korean-pop dance competition that was held last year, for example, received almost a million pageviews.
Here’s how it works. “Funds from our clients are disbursed in small sums for the youths to run branded projects in their respective colleges and universities – all run by youth for youth,” explains Tan. “So the clients help our youth to develop, while at the same time getting their brand name spread among the youth as well.”
The younger and tech savvier generation tends to share about the events they attend on social media channels a lot – surprise, surprise – and YouthsToday also does its part by bringing on media partners to provide coverage. Brands can expect to get plenty of exposure.
As an added bonus, youths who volunteer for, participate in, or attend YouthsToday events also receive points that they can exchange for rewards on the website. This way, its events are able to reach out to a wide group of young people, connecting them with the brands involved and fulfilling Tan’s mission to keep them off the streets. Two birds, one stone.
To Tan, it just makes sense dollar-wise. “We always advise our clients, instead of pumping in hundreds and thousands of dollars in billboards and advertisements, why not park your money with us, get the same mileage as you would have otherwise, and do good at the same time?”
Small to massive projects
National-scale projects, such as the aforementioned Sony KPOP Dance Showdown, require the joint efforts of youths from multiple schools to organize. With just a small team of 10, I wondered how YouthsToday was able to coordinate and rally young people from roughly 50 universities and colleges that they are affiliated with.
Simply put, there’s a system in place to cope with that. “We work closely with youth ambassadors who sign up with us, our ambassadors reach out to the presidents of clubs and societies in these schools, who then reach out to the students themselves. This way, it doesn’t strain our manpower,” explains Tan.
Since the launch early last year, Tan tells Tech in Asia that they’ve supported almost 1,500 projects to date. Their biggest annual project, is YouthJam, an enormous undertaking that Tan has been running since she was 19 years old – even before YouthsToday came into existence.
YouthJam: one of YouthsToday’s biggest events.
This year’s YouthJam, which was sponsored by Tourism Malaysia and local telco DiGi, brought together 2,000 students from three countries – Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines – for an “augmented reality hunt” in Penang. Incidentally, these are the same three countries that Tan is looking to expand into in 2015. She views YouthJam as a “soft partnership” of sorts with the relevant stakeholders in these countries.
Having won a six months tenancy in InnoSpace and two years tenancy at Kashiwa-no-ha Open Innovation Lab in a couple of competitions, China and Japan respectively might be on the cards as well. “Of course, before we expand we definitely want to strengthen our product first – we don’t want to go out there with a ‘leaking’ product,” Tan notes.
Not surprisingly, during such large-scale events their website traffic increases exponentially. For example, Youth Awards 2014 – another annual event that YouthsToday runs – saw 100,000 pageviews in three days, which almost crashed their website. On a normal day, its a different story altogether.
“Normally, we get about a thousand pageviews per day – it fluctuates according to projects. A Wang Lee Hom concert that was held earlier this year brought in a massive amount of traffic, for example,” she explains.
Self-sustainable
Clients currently pay a flat fee of MYR 50,000 (US$15,000) per campaign, and Tan reveals that over the past year – from January till November – the team has managed to secure 14 major clients, bringing their revenue to a grand total MYR 700,000 (US$208,000). This figure is close to triple their revenue in 2013, when they pulled in MYR 250,000 (US$74,600).
She adds that they spend about MYR 20,000 (US$5,900) per campaign doing all the legwork, such as paying for event expenses – the remaining MYR 30,000 (US$8,900) or so goes into their pocket.
In the coming year, Tan will be looking to change YouthsToday’s revenue model to a more scalable one – YouthsToday will take a 10 percent cut instead of the current flat fee. Apart from a MYR 150,000 (US$45,000) grant from Malaysia’s Cradle Fund, they’ve thus far managed to remain self-sustainable, and haven’t taken any funding. “Cradle did help us a lot in terms of how to strengthen our business model, and their mentors have given us a lot of useful advice too,” she adds.
See: Widespread forced labor in Malaysia’s electronics industry
This post This startup helps youths stay away from bad company and run awesome events instead appeared first on Tech in Asia.
This startup helps youths stay away from bad company and run awesome events instead
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