This week is full of awareness events – it’s Represent Yourself Week as well as Earth Week, and Women’s Day is on Friday. Yet, how much of the student body is even aware of these events? Unfortunately, it is not only this week’s particular events that lack attention, but most of Fairfield’s events that don’t get promoted well. This makes for the unfortunate stereotype of student apathy across campus. Students need outlets for activism and participation but don’t know where to go or how to get involved.
The problem isn’t that our campus lacks events, but rather that our campus lacks adequate advertising to tell the students about these events being held by a variety of groups and organizations on campus. The limitations of advertising as imposed by the Office of Student Activities and the general Fairfield administration has a detrimental effect on the events held on campus.
Clubs or groups wishing to gain approval of their event advertising materials are limited to only 6 paper flyers or 1-2 big posters for promotion throughout the entire BCC. Dispersed throughout all 4 floors of the building, these 6-8 promotional materials don’t create nearly enough promotion for the events, therefore resulting in a problematic lack of student awareness. FUSA and the University-organized events generally do a great job advertising their programs; yet the overabundant promotion that these events receive seems to insinuate an importance of them over other events that do not produce or receive the same level of advertising.
This week made our student body’s limitations on advertising even more evident. Numerous events have already been held in relation to Earth Week and Represent Yourself Week, but many students weren’t aware of them because they didn’t see ads promoting events efficiently. This leaves us wondering, why wouldn’t Fairfield want us to know about all the events on campus?
Without the ability to answer that directly, there are still some possible solutions that might help this problem. Students should be allowed to increase the amount of flyers they use as advertising around the campus and within the BCC specifically. Also, each club should receive better funding from the University, creating a fairer budget to allow for a larger amount of funds for advertising usage. This could create more equal awareness about each club and its events. Also, bring back the Advertising Club. Use it as a way to promote campus-wide events from all the clubs, giving the Ad Club members more experience and giving each club better event promotion. If larger clubs worked together to coordinate with smaller clubs or co-sponsored events with them, they could lend their funding, experience with advertising for events, and recognition status among the student body to help promote the smaller group’s programming. There is potential for major improvement, so it’s time to step up and promote these events before groups become too frustrated by low attendance to even organize them.
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