The Amharic Translation of the British Council Website was made Live on New Year’s Day in Ethiopia. So that you won’t be confused, Ethiopia has its own calendar which starts on September 11 (and 12 during the leap year) and ends in ‘Pagumen’ which is a 5 day (and 6 days during leap year) month that comes after August. This is why Ethiopia is called the country of ‘13 Months of Sunshine’.
In the 5 months prior to the launch, the translation of the British Council Ethiopia website was undertaken and when that was finished there came the question of how to launch the website!
In answering this, it was found opportune to link the launch to the Ethiopian New Year’s day and the 75 year anniversary celebration on Facebook. Moreover, a small gift of mobile top up cards was added as an incentive for the first 10 users of the Amharic website.
All in all, the launch-related posts reached more than 25 thousand people. More than 12k of this number was garnered during the promotional phase. More than 9k saw the post just after the launch was announced on New Year’s Day. Within 3 hours of launch wee needed to announce that the competition was off as people were filling in the entry verification form so quickly that if we didn’t close it, it was bound to cause some issues in web traffic!
The Amharic website has already proven to be highly instrumental in communicating about our products and services, attracting more clients, and facilitating the relationship between the organisation and our local partners.