“I’ve found nothing is worthwhile until you take risks” – Denzel Washington
How do I begin this blogpost without saying it is kind of upsetting to give up ‘Amy’s Guide to Life’. However as the saying goes “all good things must come to an end” and after a lot of thought as well…I realised that my Digital Artefact wasn’t really going anywhere as much as I loved the idea.
Sometimes it takes a lot of venting to your friends about a problem to come up with a solution and that’s what I did.
Let’s start from the beginning…shall we?
At the beginning of BCM 114 I was trying to reframe my digital artefact in a way that would create more interaction with my Instagram audience. I was trying to find new ways to showcase my work and ways that would be interesting to students. However, I couldn’t seem to do what I intended.
I remember talking to some of my closest friends at uni absolutely venting about how it wasn’t going to plan and how I needed to change my digital artefact.
This is where the idea hit us.
Chelsea was doing an Art Instagram, Emma was doing a baking youtube channel, Hannah was doing a Lifestyle Youtube channel and I was doing my wellness page…It was perfect.
In the space of a few moments we created this amazing idea. We collectively decided to combine all of our digital artefacts, our talents, our passions to create…
Chàe Magazine: A digital online magazine dedicated to helping students. Our website will feature various topics such as; art, design, organisation, wellness, finance and so much more!!!!
In this moment I just remembered feeling so relieved and happy… I kept thinking something about us is going to work perfectly in this project.
So there it is! The big reveal of a new project and I got to tell you I’m looking forward to it! To continue to showcase my passions but with my friends, to be able to work alongside an incredible team who are strong, independent and incredible.
It’s a wonderful feeling to know that I feel the same passion for my DA as I felt creating Amy’s Guide to Life. As sad as it is to let my digital artefact go, this new semester has brought a new beginning and a new idea in which I love!!!
As the saying goes “as one chapter closes, a new one begins”… kind of reminds me of my first blogpost I ever made.
Amy Micallef 
I can really appreciate this DA idea! I think it’s great that you have incorporated something from your day-to-day life that will help other students. This will be very beneficial when it comes to creating content as there will be lots of people interested in sharing ideas and feedback. You should check out this blog https://elissacassidy.wordpress.com I think you could use it for inspiration! The ideating and brainstorming stage has been very beneficial for your project it seems. I’ll be interested to follow your progress!
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Thank you so much!! This means a lot! I’m looking forward to sharing what my team has to offer.
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Really love this idea but how often do you expect to be publishing a copy? remembering FEFO you don’t want to invest so much if it dosent work well with the group
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Hi there!! THank you so much for this feedback!! As we are an online journal we won’t be publishing a copy. Our aim is to be environmentally friendly, so we thought publishing our magazine wouldn’t be too good. I 100% agree with you thought and will take that into consideration 🙂
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I think its a good idea to combine four digital artefacts into one because when you do that, you have four times more content and four times the followers. Having faced a similar problem regarding audience engagement, I understand how important it is to have an audience to keep your DA moving. Also, I think it was a good move to identify the problem early on (#FEFO) and do something about it instead of hoping for it to improve with time. I checked out your Instagram account, however I couldn’t access your blog. It said that the profile wasn’t verified, you might wanna check that once.
I’ll be following the magazine for interesting updates and I hope your audience grows over time. All the best!
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Hi there!! Thank you so much for your kind feedback! I really appreciate this. It was definitely difficult to understand what the problem was as I was continuing from last semester. In regards to the verification it is all fixed now so feel free to go check out our links, thanks for letting me know.
Thank you so much! All the best as well.
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Hi Amy, I absolutely love your DA and I can’t believe I only just discovered it! I respect that you realised that your original DA wasn’t doing as well as you hoped and made the decision to change it. That is something I have been tossing up between doing and you’ve done extremely well in that transition to a new DA. Your Instagram and blog are incredible and super aesthetically pleasing I’m obsessed. My DA focuses on healthier living as a university student and I also have an Instagram and blog so I totally understand how hard it can be to gain interaction with audiences. I found that posting about my DA on my personal account really helped me gain more followers. I will definitely be following along with your DA from now on! Great job x
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I think the hardest thing to do is let go honestly. That’s what happened with me I could never let go of just a fail of a DA as much as I wanted it to work, to be good and for people to interact – I just didn’t seem to find it like Chàe! It’s a lot easier working in a group because you have people to lean on!
Thank you so much, I really appreciate the feedback myself and hannah work really hard to get the aesthetic for our Instagram and I do all the tweets on twitter I try my best to stick with the aesthetic as it’s important 🥰
Thank you so much for your wonderful feedback it means a lot to me and the team!!!
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Wooow, I actually love this idea! Being able to combine you and your mates ideas into one place where your followers can choose what they feel they want to read/watch that week is so cool, and means for 4 times more followers and engagement, while you also get to work with and collaborate with friends. Good on you for realising and accepting your DA wasn’t going to best, this is something I wish I was confident enough to admit to myself in the beginning. I totally get the struggle to gain and maintain and audience, could I suggest following pages doing similar things potentially? Love your DA! I will be following from now on!
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I 100% agree with you, as I do all the social media on Instagram and Twitter & I follower a lot of magazines that inspire us but not many follow back or other magazines so I’m definitely going to follow more 🥰 but thank you so much for everything you said!!! I really love this feedback and working with friends is really rewarding because we can be honest to each other as we are comfortable which is really good!!
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I hope that you enjoy all the Chàe has to offer and if you have any suggestions on future topics we should cover let me know xx
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Hey Amy!
I really love the idea that you and your other friends did here for the DA, all helping each other out but also using their passion for inspiration on this DA. The collaboration process and working within a group in my opinion, makes some extremely sick content and the more the better!
Your blog theme and aesthetic amongst your platforms has always drawn attention for me and I love what you do with the content. Although, when you brought up that it was getting hard to get more engagement and interaction, could I suggest to you to start using Instagram IGTV or even promoting your content as spoilers on your story?? This is a great way to interact with the followers and even using polls to see what they would like to see. My group’s DA Astrologylane had been stuck at a standstill – but we noticed with new themes and content our followers started to come back in.
Anyways, well done. This DA is honestly one of my favourites and I’m excited to see more! x
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Thank you so much!! I struggled a lot previously with being able to interact with the audience now whilst using our polls on twitter and Instagram we have been getting an incredible amount of feedback and interaction. We have posted I think 2 IGTV’s however it would be really good to get more audience interaction with them 🥰
Thank you so much for the feedback, I really appreciate it!! Xx
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