Spreading the Word: Club leaders strive to find the best ways to advertise
With dozens of clubs spanning a wide range of interests, there is one thing that almost all groups have in common: the need to advertise.
“We try everything, we try everything, to get people’s attention,” Project Help executive board member senior Mirose Song expressed.
This constant challenge of gaining support is not singular to the community service club. All over school, different groups search for the best ways to catch the eyes of the student body.
“Everybody in high school wants to go for the ‘apathetic teenager’ kind of thing, and not seem passionate about anything, with the risk of being made fun of for your passions,” Operation 350 member senior Emma Roberts said.
In addition to attitudes that stand in the way, every group has to fight against the huge amounts of time constraints that pull high schoolers every which way.
“People’s lives are increasingly busy,” founder of the Ballroom Dancing Club sophomore Jackie Blasini said. “So trying to get people to take away an hour of time when they could be doing homework or other activities is really difficult.”
Each club has to compete not only with everyone’s prior commitments, but also with every other club as well.
“There’s all the other that’s going on, that’s like ‘Badminton club! Basketball! Rugby! and all sorts of other announcements that are going on as well,” Roberts said. “It can be overwhelming; you have to filter stuff out.”
The school environment is another obstacle that tests the limits of club leaders’ creativity.
“We use very similar methods every single event we do,” Song said. “We should have different types of advertisement, but school is kind of a limited area to have that much advertisement.”
Finally, to add a whole new level to the struggle, each club faces its own particular roadblocks when it comes to reaching their specific intended audience, schedule limits of the leaders or sponsors, and the time needed to accomplish the club’s goals.
“Whenever you have a diversity club, it’s hard to specifically target your minority group, to make sure everybody knows,” co-founder of the Black Student Union junior Elyse Ellis said. “Reaching everybody that would be represented in the group gets kind of difficult when you just have a couple of friends who started the group.”
In the face of each of these unique challenges, every group has to adapt different methods of best spreading their message.
Some clubs turn to technology to organize their advertising efforts.
“We started a group chat for the people who have been showing up regularly, reminding them to bring friends,” Blasini said.
Sometimes the best thing to do is get personal.
“A lot of it was word-of-mouth,” Ellis said. “Some people need to actually hear about it in order to feel personally welcome to go.”
In other cases, especially in groups that advertise longstanding projects or many separate events, more assertive or unusual methods are needed.
“Recently, we tried running a game at the pep rally,” Roberts said. “We made an announcement that we recorded, and added fancy announcement music to it. We put posters on the tables.”
Much of the time, the best solution is just to try it all.
“We use fliers, banners; we email to teachers, to parents sometimes; we put it on the morning announcements, or we talk about it during lunch,” Song listed. “We talk to people. We talk to friends, we talk to family, like ‘Hey, there’s an event that’s going on at our school. You wanna help out?’”
Whether it’s Ferguson Youth Tutoring’s bright pink posters or the Colt Cafe’s catchy jingles, every type of advertising requires club leaders to get creative if they want it to successfully grab their peers’ attention.
