The best week of the university calendar is just around the corner, and now is the time to start planning your society’s activities for freshers’ week. Freshers’ week is a great opportunity to show students what the Student Stop Aids Campaign does, what issues we campaign on and crucially recruit more people to our cause!

We will be sending out freshers’ packs to all the societies in the first week of September and these will include campaign briefs, action cards and a massive scroll which we intend to send to pharmaceutical companies for students to sign with of course the usual fliers, balloons and condoms.

Use Freshers’ week to promote the Student Stop AIDS Speaker Tour which starts travelling the country in October (more information in next month’s newsletter).

So just a few tips on making this years’ freshers’ a successful one:

• Plan in advance – although this is difficult with many people still away on their holidays, it is good to have some ideas and plans ready for when you get back to university. Try to work out who will be running the freshers fair stall and any other activities you may want to carry out on campus – such as fundraising or campaigning on an issue to raise awareness.
• Stand out – remember that there are hundreds of other societies all trying to attract the new students and that we have to stand out. This can mean having a lively and colourful stall with a sheet, posters and freebies to hand to students, or even projecting the patent pool animation onto the union building (see the society challenge for more information).
• Remember to give people something to go away with i.e. a handout which has information on how they can get involved, when the next meeting is and some contact information, also remember to have a sign up sheet on the stall so that you can get their contact details and email them to remind them to come along to the meetings and speaker tour.
• Finally let Diarmaid and me know what your plans are as we are hoping to come and visit some of the societies during freshers’ week and would love to know about the exciting things you are up to so we can attend!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Campaign News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.