The Most Popular OMI Twibbon Is Not From the Organizer

This year, 230,123 students registered for the Olimpiade Madrasah Indonesia, the national madrasah olympiad run by Indonesia's Ministry of Religious Affairs. That is up 12.7 percent from 204,222 participating students in 2025. An event that size pulls Twibbonize frames along with it. Search "Twibbon OMI 2026" and you get roundups listing twenty.

One of those frames, created on August 29, has 22,833 faces in its gallery as of September 14. It is the one the national roundups picked up, sourced from an account called Kamimadrasah. Kamimadrasah, turns out, is not affiliated at all with the ministry or the organizer of OMI 2026. It is a media portal, but instead of run by a newsroom, it is run by a teacher.

M. Lutvi Asy'ari teaches at MTs Sunan Ampel Kasembon, a madrasah in a far corner of Malang Regency, East Java. He started Kamimadrasah in 2016 on kamimadrasah.blogspot.com, a free address. In 2022, as the traffic grew, he moved the news side to kamimadrasah.id. In 2023 he added kamimadrasah.com for digitalization services, report-card servers, websites, applications, now serving more than 1,200 schools and madrasahs. Again, not run by a team. It is managed independently.

Asked how a personal blog became the place madrasah teachers go for information, he wrote back in a sure tone, "Consistency." He called it the "main factor" of everything that followed.

However, he followed that further with an explanation of why the portal garners an audience. "Ministry official news channels mainly focused on conveying information of ceremonial nature," he wrote. M. Lutvi saw that what operators, teachers, parents and students need is "something that is more practical" and closer to "affairs that they are facing in their daily life."

That is the gap Kamimadrasah fills: around 47,200 followers on Instagram, roughly 10,000 on its WhatsApp Channel, and about 4,900 on Telegram.

Why a media portal makes Twibbons

Kamimadrasah has been publishing campaigns on Twibbonize since February 2021. Each year for Hari Santri Nasional, or the national day of Islamic school students, then national teacher day, the madrasahs scientific competition, and many more. Twenty-five campaigns, close to 100,000 supporters across all of them. 

"For us, Twibbon is one of the tools to build our branding," M. Lutvi wrote. Which explains why they always added the name and logo of Kamimadrasah on every design they made. And perhaps it would be best to mention that while Kamimadrasah is run by M. Lutvi alone currently, he always addressed every action taken on behalf of the media by "we" and "us", so we, at Twibbonize, followed suit.

The distribution of the campaigns is a short list. Instagram is where the frame goes up first, which auto-posts to their Facebook. Then the link goes out through the WhatsApp Channel, Telegram, and the website. No official memo, no partner network, no ministry list.

Then there is the crucial part. "When users use the Twibbons from Kamimadrasah, and they posted it on social media tagging Kamimadrasah's account, we will reshare the post on our Instagram Story."

He worked out why an act that seems trivial is important. "I understand that social media essentially grows through a connection from one person to the next." By resharing the people's posts, Kamimadrasah ensures "the organic chain of spread", which matters to the portal's own growth.

This chain of sharing and resharing triggers the flywheel. Though it is a jargon he doesn't need, it is a process that a Twibbon mostly thrives on. A student posts the frame, gets reshared to an audience of 47,000, and that reshare is the reason the next student posts.

An official face gets the trust

Returning to the reason why we spoke to Kamimadrasah, it is the number of participants they managed to gather for their Twibbons. Other frames for OMI 2026, do not get as much as popularity with the one that Kamimadrasah released.

M. Lutvi shared his own perspective on how it came to be. "Kamimadrasah is often mistaken as a part of the government since the visual identity we have built looks different and original," he wrote. Even so, they always make clear that they are not affiliated with any government body.

He also spoke further regarding their design creation, "In the age of AI, we still create our own designs manually with CorelDRAW X7." The result, he argues, is a design that has its own character which is relatively difficult for other platforms to imitate. We do, however, find another frame that evidently imitates Kamimadrasah's design.

It eventually comes back to M. Lutvi's statement of consistency. We can see it ourselves: Kamimadrasah has its own brand identity. They created Twibbonize campaigns every year to follow up a ceremonial day. They distributed the campaigns within their own official channels, always with the links where people can contact or trace the frames back to. They also built their followings by resharing posts by other people. Al of these efforts signal professionalism, which might imbue trust in people, thus making them choose their campaigns over others.

Updating their approach as the era changes

But consistency is not the only key. Kamimadrasah also updates their methods.

Through 2025, the frames and the posts were the top of a funnel. Kamimadrasah would direct Instagram followers to the website, with QR codes and linking content in their Instagram bio, to build traffic.

Then in 2026 a different strategy is needed. "Information", he explained, "can now be found with various AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others." And this affects the website pages, suddenly the articles aren't worth the click. "Website content becomes less interesting to some users because they can get the information directly through AI," he continued.

So the media adjusted. "In 2026, we focus on communicating things to the point," M. Lutvi wrote. We see this in practice because Kamimadrasah is now less likely to attach QR codes or write links in bio in their posts, instead, they prioritize brevity and direct answers. No extra steps required. No sending people away to their website. The posts about OMI 2026, for example, would already inform people of the timeline, schedule, and fields of the olympiad in one photo.

The schedule of OMI 2026 derived from the ministry's technical guideline by Kamimadrasah via Instagram

Noticeably the engagements grew. In 2025, OMI posts by Kamimadrasah attract almost 1,000 likes with 100 comments. In 2026, the posts about OMI received an even better and higher amount of responses. One post in which Kamimadrasah shared the timeline and schedule of OMI garnered over 3,000 likes, two times increase since the prior year. People seem to respond better to posts where all the necessary information is there, so they don't need to add extra steps to know more.

A more interesting read lies beneath how many wear their OMI Twibbon. In 2025, when OMI had just launched, the Twibbon received just a tad shy of 14,000 supporters. Now in the second year of the olympiad, the supporters count of Kamimadrasah Twibbon steadily climbing toward 23,000. The portal adjusted as the participants of OMI grew, and this is why people's trust remains on them. It is even increasing.

Cross-check everything and keep improving

Asked about what he wanted to say to the madrasah community, he did not talk about frames or his own media portal. "I want to invite the people to always check and cross-check any information they found before they believe or share it," he stated. "These days, anyone can create or share any content easily, no matter if the information is valid or not."

With that statement, M. Lutvi might have just described his own challenges and responsibility. But the media seems to have figured it out. 

Kamimadrasah is consistent with their true-and-tried way of design creation, and this is supported by a distribution network which they have already established on Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook. On each post, sources of information are always mentioned, maintaining their reliability. Plus, they hold their relevance by keeping an eye on how the people use the Internet, adjusting and improving their methods accordingly. 

Their consistent efforts seem to make the madrasah community wants to stay and keep getting information from them. Thus, ostensibly makes Kamimadrasah's audience keep growing. 

In addition to that, the Twibbon made by Kamimadrasah promoted not only the olympiad which the ministry organized, it is doing multiple other functions too: they make the brand of Kamimadrasah visible and stand out, plus, it gives opportunity for the students to signal their identity as part of the madrasah community and the olympiad.

Twenty thousand madrasah students went to look for a way to say they are part of a national olympiad. The frame they found was not by a governmental agency or a big organizer. It was designed using CorelDRAW, in a village in Malang Regency, by a teacher who simply cared for the needs of the community he is a part of.