Three months to go, and we will be at the end of 2022. Time really flies. This is a good time to evaluate where we are and report to you our users, customers, partners, and supporters on our progress so far. Top of our minds are the following questions: how do we continue to develop and serve our users content and solutions that improve their daily lives and how do we make our products and services sustainable financially?
At the end of the day, as an organization our goal is for every student sitting for the national exam to benefit from our services making the preparation process a lot easier and better, building a must-use platform to achieve maximum success while having access to both past exams and use past keys on nationalexamination.com and a self gauging tools in practice exams on kezastore.com/online-exam. The same thing for every traveler, we want everyone traveling to think about booking a ticket from the kezastore.com e-ticketing platform.
Over the years we have noted areas where we need to improve and focus on, one of them is to truly embed ourselves in marketing our products and services, working with both end-user consumers and partners who are already in touch with them. Namely on our education side where our products are geared towards exam preparation, working with schools, districts, etc. while on the e-ticketing side working with travel agencies, cooperatives, and regulators.
We are happy to report that the process of engaging travel agencies has been ongoing for the last few quarters. Nevertheless, we have faced numerous challenges in actualizing working collaboration. At this point, we are exploring different avenues of approaching travel agencies as well as different models, among others looking into pre-purchasing travel agency tickets.
For education, we have successfully released to the public more than 20 new practice exams that cover primarily national examinations on www.kezastore.com/online-exam, but at the same time managed to collect and upload a good majority of past exams and past keys on www.nationalexamination.com. For Partnership development, Sales and Marketing, we have added resources to solely focus on marketing our product and engaging our users and partners.
Below are some summary activities for both Q2/3 2022 and planned activities for Q4 2022
Activities for Q42/3 2021 (April-September)
- We Completed Development and released 29 online practice exams which will give students access to more online practice materials, and strengthen our $1/6month subscription offering to students
- We managed to get at least 4 exams in each country that we are planning to target: Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa while focusing primarily on Rwanda to iron out our model
- We added a member to the team to drive partnership development and sales and marketing for our education side of the business, an important milestone in being able to market to the educational community and put to test our education business development marketing plans and strategies
- We renegotiated contracts with our suppliers for practice exam materials and engaged media content suppliers
- We identified and extended a contract to practice exam materials suppliers for Francophone East Africa namely Burundi and the DRC.
- The Standard Gateway Advisory Board was kickstarted to oversight strategic goals of objectives while tracking primarily user growth, revenue, funding applications, customer/partner engagement, and materials development
- We held the 1st Advisory Board Meeting on 09/18/2022. Meetings will be held quarterly tentatively scheduled on the last Sunday of the First Month of the quarter. The next meeting is scheduled on January 29th, 2023
- We applied for two grants as one of the avenues to render the organization sustainable and fund some of the activities that are currently put on hold.
- We continued to operationalize Materials Development Review Board Meetings to cover non-education materials development quality evaluation
Planned Activities for Q4 2022 (October – December)
- The primary goal for Q4 2022 is still to truly drive commercialization by
- Drive Partnership Development and Sales and Marketing of our education products and services (for Rwanda), Establish Formal Partnership with education players
- Drive Business Development and Sales and Marketing of our e-ticketing products and services (for Rwanda), Secure at least two working agreement contracts
- Bring on board secondary resources for content development for Anglophone Countries
- Bring on board a Business Development Individual (for Burundi), covering business development, Sales, and Marketing for both education and eTicketing
- Bring on board secondary resource for content development resources for Burundi and DRC, covering francophone East Africa (Burundi has been selected as a scalability testbed given cultural and historical fitness with the Rwandan team: Speaks nearly the same mother tongue, and nearly have the same culture)
- Finalize and Operationalize Sales and Marketing Plans and Strategies
- Chase and Finalize a working agreement with at least two travel agency operators in Rwanda and Burundi (From last Quarter)
- Investigate and finalize a plan for funding mobilization from both grants and investors (as needed), Apply to at least two grants
- Drive actionable Revenue (Targets to be established later)
- Launch and Drive Market campaign on buying tickets online: “no more reason to go to the bus park with no ticket, with kezastore.com e-ticketing”
- Organize at least two events to communicate to our users, partners, and customers of our services, solutions, and products (From last Quarter)
- Finalize Social Media Content Generator Tool and Animate Standard Gateway Social Media to communicate to tech-savvy internet users the benefits of our products and services (From Last Quarter) – This is a tool that will give us a competitive advantage and help engage with travel agency operators (From Last Quarter)
- Operationalize Advisory Board meeting Kickstarted Last Quarter
- Finalize Materials Development Dashboarding (From Last Quarter)
- Finalize building processes and templates for Financial reports
- Standardized the already kickstarted Materials Development Review Board Meetings
- Internally operationalize Sales and Marketing Operation and start tracking sales revenue
- Establish a Partnership Development plan with schools and other educational stakeholders (NGO, Districts, agencies, etc.) (From the Last Quarter)
At the end of the day, we want everyone to take advantage of what we have to offer. When we say through kezastore.com e-ticketing product, in this day and age no one should go to the bus park with no ticket anymore, or when we say that we want every student who is preparing for the national examination to be able to do so within a manner that allows him/her to achieve maximum results we mean it. And we work and develop our products and services in a way that we think will make it happen. It is a privilege to be in a unique position like ours with the opportunity to be able to use technology and add value and we think, although it is a work in progress, we are on a good track.
Thank you for reading and If you have any feedback, partnership inquiry, etc do not hesitate to reach out to us.
Cheers..
SG Team
N.B: This article was originally published at http://standardgateway.com/blog Here you can read our past quarterly updates and other articles.
Standard Gateway is an online and offline products and services provider focused on education and technology, visit http://standardgateway.com for more information | You can also visit our different products: www.nationalexamination.com | www.edrivingschool.org | www.kezaplex.com | http://kezastore.com |