It is important to build a brand early on so that students can easily recognise you and your activities. This means using a consistent set of colours, fonts and a logo.

If you do not have a graphic designer on your team, the easiest place to start building your brand is **Canva.** If you are not familiar with this website, take a moment to browse through its features. Canva is your savior if you want to easily create professionally looking social media posts, posters, business cards and even videos. It is not necessary to buy the premium subscription right away, you can easily get started with a basic account which provides you with a variety of design options for free. If you are unsure how to work with Canva, check some of their many helpful instructional videos, you will be ready in no time!

Branding is a creative process so we cannot give you an exact blue print. But we do offer some tips that can be helpful:

• Tailor your image to your audience. What kind of images, colours and styles would appeal to the students you want to attract to your initiative?
• Pay extra attention to your profile picture/video and cover photo. They should be in the same style and truly capture the essence of your initiative.
• Create a logo early on so that you can use it when launching your initiative. Canva is also a useful tool for logo creation. Keep in mind that you might need to have a logo in different formats and sizes, for different backgrounds and purposes.
• Establish a color scheme that you consistently use on all of your promotional materials. The colors you use should also capture your message and be attractive to your target group. For inspiration, you can use graf1x or the color paletter generator in Canva.
• For social media, make sure to update the pages regularly, posting interesting and relatable content. The best way to embed yourself among the existing initiatives in Maastricht is to follow them, observe what they do and learn. You will be able to attract the most new members by collaborating with other pages, tagging each other and cooperating on events.
• When starting off as a new initiative, make frequent use of relevant hashtags such as #maastricht and #maastrichtuniversity.
• It is tempting to want to post all of your events to the Facebook page ‘Sharing is Caring’ to reach new people, however this will likely not be appreciated by the people in the group for whom these events are not relevant. Rather, try to extend your reach by looking around to see what existing initiatives you could cooperate with for mutual benefit. When organizing events that are open to a large amount of students, such as charitable fundraisers or festivals, you can also make use of Posting announcements to the UM Newsletter.