If you followed us during our Internship Summer 2019 campaign, then you are familiar with the material we have chosen for the UBB Workshop and the UTCN JobShop.

What was particularly tough about it is that we took this chance of having the incentive to put at work a CoP and we wanted to share our experience with you, as it offers a valuable insight about how we are exploring new “frontiers” here in UMT Software, also being an invitation for you to start using this learning tool simply because the energy that flows into such a project is very powerful, making you give it your best.

None of the CoP members had expertise in the marketing field, instead they had ideas and a strong desire to conquer this new acquisition. It might not be perfect, but it was certainly a big step forward.

What is a CoP?

A CoP is a group that has a common interest/passion for something, where the members are learning by sharing their knowledge and they do not have to be co-located. The main benefits are acquiring social capital (trust and accountability), a better knowledge management (sharing, transferring and archiving knowledge, establishing best practices) and a lot of FUN!

In order a CoP become functional you need (in our case):
(1) a domain – the marketing campaign for the Summer Internship 2019 fairs,
(2) community – the ones with an interest in it,
(3) practice – useful insights/resources to share related to the domain.

If you want to find out more about CoP you can do it here.

What happened?

The upcoming fairs were on the schedule and we thought why not use this opportunity to learn and practice new skills. We started to ask around about ideas for the marketing campaign, mainly from our student colleagues who graduated our Summer Internship 2018 program. Cezara Moldovan had the winning idea, an invitation to coffee alongside with great companions – UMT Software team: “Why don`t you have your morning coffee with us?”

Wandering around the promotional materials we agreed they necessarily had to be in line with our invitation, keeping in mind the usefulness from the student’s perspective but at the same time being distinctive.

A sample of our daily freshly grounded coffee accompanied by our brand stickers and the receipt for a memorable cup of challenge were the right answer coming from Crina Muresan and Daniel Chirica and Mihaela Mihai. The next challenging step was to implement the idea and come up with some copyright. Mihaela Mihai created in a dedicated design software the flyer, the stickers, the coffee label and the catalog page and took care of all social media posts in collaboration with Adriana Trifon, Crina Muresan, Mihaela Pop and Raluca Dudila for the copyright part. The concept for the spider raised a small debate in our Marketing CoP, the credit for the final result were adjudicate by Mihaela Mihai, Ionut Nechita, and George Gicu.

The bottom line: we`ve learned a lot, we took advantage of the each other knowledge background and different perspective, we enjoyed working together and we secured meaningful business relationship with open-minded and supportive partners.

Did you have the chance to be a part of a CoP in your company or elsewhere? Did you find it useful? We would very much appreciate your feedback!