The annual Intercultural Dialogue Day (IDD) was celebrated in September last year. Connected to IDD there was also the annual IDD Photo and Video Contest. The winner of the Video contest was Budapest Chapter of AFS Hungary. EFILife asked the winners to tell us about how they managed to win and what effect this had on the volunteer group involved in the contest.
Text and photos by: Kinga Udvardi, Szabolcs Zsiros, Zsófi Székely
We are so glad that we have the chance to give a report on our win with 1700 likes on the EFIL Intercultural Dialogue Day Photo and Video Contest. This is a huge honour for our chapter and also for our small but enthusiastic Marketing Team. We are very proud of coming first in a European Contest.
But how did we achieve this first place? Let us tell you how this story started. When we got an e-mail from our beloved team leader, Zsófi, we immediately got excited. The first prize was one free registration to the Volunteer Summer Summit in Iceland. The destination was the most amazing information of the message, it was good to imagine that we could travel to Iceland to participate in VSS and represent our country, Hungary.
We arranged a meeting very soon to discuss the details and find out what we are going to do. We wanted to make something national, something specific to our country, but on the other hand something well-known which fits to the International Dialogue Day. One of the volunteers came up with the best idea what we could have imagined. Our choice for the music was a Hungarian folk song, ’Tavaszi szél vizet áraszt’ performed by Freddie Mercury from Queen. We shared our plan with the exchange students and they learnt the song as well. We filmed in the city centre to show the most beautiful places of Budapest.
When the video was ready and edited, we realised that our work just started here, we had to collect likes to win. We didn’t stop, we made a great effort to collect the most likes but it wasn’t easy at all. First, we shared the video on our chapter’s Facebook page and we also sent it to every family members, relatives, friends and colleagues who are on Facebook. There were people who ignored it but most of them gave us a great feedback and shared the video and also asked their own friends on Facebook to like it. It was nice to see that after some days our volunteer group who made the video became a stronger group than ever and that more and more people joined us to help. For example, there were other Hungarian chapters who made a video for the competition and first we didn’t share each other’s video but when they saw that we were close to win, they all shared ours and started to ask their chapters to do the same. So we can say that the whole AFS Hungary was one big group after a while.
Our main competition partner was AFS Serbia and it wasn’t easy to overtake them. We want to congratulate them here too because they also collected a lot of likes which means a lot of work and a really great volunteer group of AFS Serbia. On the day of the deadline, AFS Serbia lead with more than 200 likes so we made a last effort and found our last relatives and friends who hadn’t seen the video yet. We even posted it to ’Pesten Hallottam’ which is the most popular Facebook community of the whole Budapest. First, the admins of the group wanted to delete our post because they didn’t like that we wanted to collect likes there for a competition but then we told them about the Intercultural Dialogue Day and AFS so they changed their minds. Unfortunately we had a barrier at the same time. Facebook didn’t let other people to like our video. We stayed up until late night to solve the problem but finally we could.
At midnight we realised that we won. It wasn’t easy but we did it and it was a really good feeling. We were extremely happy at the end and we celebrated. We were so excited that all 10 of us can go to Iceland but then we realised that there was just one place to win. So let the ’fight’ begin for it 
For more information: tinna.sveinsdottir@afs.org