Miia da Silva for Innovation Fund Recipient Video

Speaker: Miia da Silva, TWR Women of Hope Regional Coordinator, TWR

Miia da Silva: To be an innovation award winner just fills me with so much gratitude, I mean. I didn't go into this, um. Taking a win for granted, just knowing how many amazing organizations and churches and leaders there are um taking part in this who have brilliant ideas and um, so for, for myself and my team, um, this feels like such a huge blessing and. Beyond uh the blessing that it is to get such a financial boost to be able to get started, um, quickly, uh, to try out a new project. What's really amazing to me is the encouragement that this kind of award brings that people looked at your project and thought, you know what, there's, there's something here and so that feeling of encouragement and blessing is on the top of my mind right now for sure.

Miia da Silva: Our project was inspired by a research that we did in late 2024. A researcher looked at a big data set of 54,000 Europeans in over 30 countries with the question of where and who are those Europeans who would be most likely open to the gospel. And specifically, we wanted to know about secular Europeans. What we learned from this research was that the most open. Secular people for the gospel are girls or young women, um, non-university educated, living in towns, um, or cities with less than 100,000 inhabitants, um. And in Northern Europe, the UK, and who. are open or or who think religion is important but aren't necessarily uh believers or uh religious themselves. And so this realization uh really inspired us to take quick action and so um. We quickly drafted a project together to create a video podcast for teenage girls, um. And Interestingly, around the same time as we were learning this, I got an application for our Women of Hope team here in Europe in Camina by someone who is a Uh, data scientist. Knowing what data scientists can do and having AI now available to us, um, I got the idea of what if we utilize large language models to do audience research and we decided to, with the help of this data scientist. To utilize um qua quantitative text analysis to learn about the needs and wants of our intended audience to be able to create very compelling and relatable and interesting content for our viewers with of course the purpose of. Making them these secular girls in Europe to find their way to Christ and to know about Christ. And Yeah, that, that is our project and we really have a strong mindset of, of course, audience first, audience focus. We want to create real value for our listeners and um we want to be Not just starting this project or be inspired by research, but to utilize analytics and the latest AI tools and um other Ways of research and analysis to make informed decisions, but to also can also to create content that truly speaks to the listeners. So we want to Get a couple of women to host the program who are relatable and warm and deeply rooted in Christ, uh, to, to really connect with our audience and bring value to them and bring hope to them.

Miia da Silva: From a technological standpoint, I think the most innovative aspect of our project is the fact that we will be utilizing quantitative text analysis for audience research. Um, and I think that, uh, because this analysis, it takes more than just going into chat GPT and writing in a prompt, um, it requires a lot of specific knowledge, education, skills, you need to know where to go, um, to get the data, uh, that you to analyze and you need to Yeah, you need to know um how to get to that, how, how to get that access. It's not easy and it's not immediate and so um from that perspective, um, for this process of audience research, I think uh we are very uniquely positioned to be able to do this and it's thanks to these amazing uh people that are on the team. And from a ministry perspective, um, I think teenage girls aren't necessarily a group, uh, or a demographic that has a lot of, um, Content or outreach to it in in sort of the media realm where we are in. Um, Or it's not I feel like they could be more uh for specifically secular uh teen girls. I think it's a very challenging group because they're not out there necessarily looking for uh for God or for hope. They don't maybe realize that they need it and with the vast um social media environment, there's so much content out there that to stand out, um, it's not gonna be easy. And so I think those two things are, are most innovative aspects of, in this project.

Miia da Silva: I know that Europe technically on paper is considered Christian, and in a way that's true, but having gone through life here um through the university system, I can certainly tell you from my anecdotal experience that it is challenging to be a Christian, and I think the core problem is that yes, it's easy to find God in Europe, but not many people want to. For example, in the UK right now, 53%. um 53% of people in the UK say that they are non-religious. And it makes me so sad, um. And my vision and my hope is that there could be a new wave of Christianity springing out in Europe and that there would be these young excited believers who would take the lead and um. Bring make Christ known uh for Europeans and. That being a Christian, that it would just be the coolest thing um to be. So that's my hope for this project.