BA3b: SU President Campaign...

During this unit I've taken part in a few projects, one of which being part of Emily Gardiner's SU President Campaign. My role included helping with spreading the word of her campaign, helping to brainstorm ideas to attract potential voters and to take part on our campaign events and take photographs of the process. We only had 2 and a bit days to try and generate interest and we made sure to pack those 3 days with a lot of events.

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We started to brainstorm ideas to see what would be effective in showcasing Em's skills, personality and ideas for the student body. We wanted to encompass her core values of togetherness, empowerment and hard work into this campaign and to really sell the idea of inclusivity within the university. Em wanted to go with a bee theme, and the slogan to potentially be 'Be Part of The Hive!' to showcase the need for inclusivity. We decided on a honey yellow colour, as well as using a hexagon shaped speech bubble with the text 'Vote Em for SU President!' We wanted the 'Em' to seem hand written to emphasise the more personal aspect of our campaign. With the graphic designer we also created 3 digital posters with the words; Empathy, Embark and Empower as they represented the 3 core values of Em's campaign clearly which are to empower students to do well and succeed in their course and future, to be able to listen to and support students and to be able to encourage students to embark on adventures and their future as well as embarking on inclusivity,

We then brainstormed possibly events that we could run during the campaign time. We knew that Em loved to cook and to have cups of tea, so we decided to have a tea stall event called 'Spill the Tea' where students could come down and have a free cup of tea and a biscuit and be able to talk to Emily and get to know her as well as talk to her about what they think needs to change within the university. We arranged to do this twice in two different locations to try and get to speak with a range of students from different courses, not just Fine Art.

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Additionally, we came up with the idea to have goody bags to hand out which would include objects that relate to Em's core values and that would be universally enjoyed by all students. We hand made the bags themselves out of patterned saran wrap and had a folded banner across the top of the bags which we also had designed. We designated a morning where we would sit and hand these out and try and talk to more students and get them to vote as well as take part in the last 'Spill the Tea' event. These were really successful and we ended up giving away all of the bags we made which came to around 60.

The 'Spill the Tea' events were really successful and we got a lot of people to talk to Em and to talk about their own concerns and get people to befriend her and feel comfortable with her. We also had a budget of £50 so we managed to organise 2 events, and get 60 good bags out together within a small budget we should feel pretty proud about. I do think our campaign was probably the strongest campaign, however Em didn't get the role unfortunately. All that said, we should be proud of her and ourselves for organising so much for such a short campaign period.

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For the documentation, I was in charge of that and I managed to get some really great shots that we could use for our social media campaign. We set up a facebook page which I was in charge of and tried to create posts that encouraged people to vote as well as take part in the events we had arranged for the week. We also posted on our own social media such as instagram and shared the facebook posts on our own profiles. We were extremely active in campaigning both digitally and in person and I think the campaign was a success regardless of loss.

I did enjoy being part of a team and documenting for a purpose, and this falls into my interest in social media campaigning as I was generating content and posting said content onto social media. I do want to go into this industry post graduation, and this was a great first step in that direction. I've definitely learned a lot through doing this, for example what works in advertising and what doesn't, and I'm excited to take what I've learnt through this process into future projects.