Innovative ways to harvest technology to connect emotionally with our audience - An idea. 

For all those who were born on this day - 10th April, imagine how you will feel when you suddenly receive a very birthday greeting card from the Nehru Science Centre. Yes that would have happened had any one of you enrolled in the online workshops that we have organised and filled up the form with your date of birth and also your email. Incidentally this day, 10th April,  happens  to be the birthday of Tanishka, one of our audience, who participated in the workshops that we have conducted online and filled up the database. Today we have sent her a special birthday greetings on her email. Alongside our birth day wishes, we have also informed her that she shares her birthday with a great scientists - Bernardo Alberto Houssay, who too was born on this date 10th April, 1887. He was the co recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947.

Last year when the lockdown was imposed and our centre remained closed to the visitors I had this idea of connecting emotionally with our audience digitally. Accordingly I assigned a job to some of our staff to research and create a database of all top level scientists, specifically the Nobel Prize winning scientists in science subjects,  and so also other well known scientists and other notable leaders from different fields in India. The main consideration in this database is to record them based on their dates of birth and also to record a small write up on their achievements. This work is an ongoing work and the date base is dynamic. Our main aim was to ensure that every single date of the year from 1st Jan to 31st December - 366 days in, all we must have at least one or may be more of the names of renowned scientists who are born on these days. Fortunately my colleagues have worked hard to complete this database and we now have a fairly rich data base of scientists, which means on any given date we have a name or two of scientists who are born on that date. 

In the meantime I had also asked my colleagues to keep expanding our visitor database and one of the fields in the database is the date of birth of the visitors. As can be seen from our social media and other platforms we have organised innumerable online programmes and activities and every activity has further increased our database of our visitors/ audience. We now have a database in excess of 20000 of our audience who have shared their dates of births with us. We had informed them that we are seeking their date of births, which will be maintained in strict confidence with us, so that the science centre could send them birthday greetings. I am not sure how many people believed that we would really be sending them birthday greetings but fortunately many of the students and other audience have shared their dates of birth and they will now be receiving a special birthday greeting card from our centre on their birthday.

Harvesting the two databases - the data base of the scientists and the database of our audience, we have now worked out an innovative method of wishing our audience by sending special birth day greetings by email. Two of our enthusiastic education staff believing in my idea have worked very hard for this and the result is something, which they are majorly enjoying and I can even see a sense of self actualisation on their faces. What we have done is to create a template of a birthday greeting card and the software and programming so developed picks up from the database of our audience the birthday boys and girls and send them a birthday greeting from the Nehru Science Centre, reminding them that they must feel proud that they share their respective dates of birth with the Nobel Laureate scientist/s. The feedback that my colleagues have received from the birthday boys and girls is so very inspiring and satisfying. My idea which started with some naysayers feeling I am unnecessarily giving some extra work to the staff, has in fact become the work, which they are thoroughly enjoying and I can even see a sense of great satisfaction among my staff. Our audience who are receiving such birthday cards from our centre are overwhelmed and their thanks messages are so very motivational that our staff are working that much harder to keep increasing the database of our visitors and so also the scientists so that even while we are physically closed we remain emotionally connected with our audience. 

This idea can be replicated by most public service organisations to connect emotionally with their audience and customers. 

I wish to thank my colleagues Sheetal, Rajesh,  Puliwar and some other interns and trainee boys and girls who were engaged in researching and preparing this vast database of scientists and our audience.