Following through with the SWOT analysis for my project, some weaknesses regarding my project have been pointed out below.
Need to educate international students about tax law
A major challenge when allowing international students to freelance is the complexity around paying taxes for personal income earned.
Most people who become self-employed need to register themselves as sole-traders, which is a relatively straightforward process found on GOV.UK’s website. However, as it is with many tax rules, it could be easy to miss a detail regarding taxes as a sole-trader and face fiscal issues by paying taxes wrong or even not paying them at all.
International students unfamiliar with paying taxes could have a difficult time following the process of setting themselves up as a sole-trader, and educating them and making them aware of UK’s tax laws could be a challenge.
Campaigns take an uncertain amount of time
Campaigns are not a one size fits all kind of thing. Depending on the issue, the audience size, the gatekeepers, location, and many other factors, campaigns all vary from each other. For instance, from the book I read back in June, Be the Change, Gina Martin, the campaign starter, took the problem of upskirting not being a criminal offense to run the campaign to criminalize it in England. Her campaign related to thousands of women, and with the right support, she was able to achieve her campaign’s goal in about 2 years.
And then there are campaigns like those that seek to ban oil drilling around the world, that could go on for decades as there is so much complexity and parties involved around the issue.
Depending on the traction my campaign gets in the following months, I will get an idea of the direction my campaign is taking. As of now, there’s a lot of uncertainty of how long legalizing freelancing self-employment for international students will take.
Response time from potential supporters takes long
One of the major issues I’ve faced in my project is that I depend a lot on experts getting back to me. I often need them to contribute, guide me, promote my campaign, or simply get to know about what I’m doing, and it’s often the case that I get no response back.
It sometimes felt frustrating to not get a response, and I often felt as I was doing something wrong. But I know, as with many projects, the right people will answer with time (hopefully).
One-person team
Many campaigns are driven by a team, and I’m currently the only one working on Inter.work.
References
GOV.UK (n.d). Set up as a sole trader. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/set-up-sole-trader. Martin, G. (2019).
Be the change. 1st ed. Sphere.