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Lonely Full Hallway
Jan. 17th, 2008 02:40 pmIt's incredibly hard to sell people on joining a club when your target audience rarely goes near the place where you're hawking how awesome you are.
The Computing Science Student Society here at SFU is a lovely group. I may be a bit biased, being one of the executive, but we really do have fun times all around, and our common room has to be the best place to chill and hang out on campus. We've sadly been seeing a bit of a drop in active membership lately, so SFU Clubs Days is a good chance to get out there and advertise our mission to CS students who may not have heard of us.
Clubs Days, this semester, exists in the form of many tables - and students - littering one of the hallways of the Academic Quadrangle. Anyone walking through can come over and look at our booth, or talk to us, or sign up for our mailing list. Alas, the people who we are trying to attract - computing science students, namely - are not often in this section of the school. Most classes for CS students, particularly new ones, occur way over on the other side of the AQ. There's no reason for them to be out at this end. This means very few people stop by to chat with us; at best, they stop and giggle for a moment as they stare at the pictures of real-life Pac-Man in our slideshow, and move on.
The location of our booth isn't the best for enticing people over to speak to us, either. On my right side, we have students who seem to be involved with something to do with geography. On the left, there's a booth with students of the Bahá'í Faith (or at least, that's what I think they are, judging from the titles of the literature they have with them). Now, while these might be great clubs full of friendly people, they aren't exactly the kind of things CS students usually find themselves attracted towards. If we were beside, say, a video game club or a Linux developers club or anything else slightly technological, we could reach out to people visiting those tables with promises of intelligent conversation and events they might be interested in. As it stands, I think the geography and religious students might be a little turned off by our passel of lovely, nerdy, scientific-minded folk.
Still, I must continue to sit here until my three hours of service is up. It hasn't been a total waste of time, however: just as I was writing this, we got our first sign-up to the mailing list, after five hours of the booth being here. Hooray!
The Computing Science Student Society here at SFU is a lovely group. I may be a bit biased, being one of the executive, but we really do have fun times all around, and our common room has to be the best place to chill and hang out on campus. We've sadly been seeing a bit of a drop in active membership lately, so SFU Clubs Days is a good chance to get out there and advertise our mission to CS students who may not have heard of us.
Clubs Days, this semester, exists in the form of many tables - and students - littering one of the hallways of the Academic Quadrangle. Anyone walking through can come over and look at our booth, or talk to us, or sign up for our mailing list. Alas, the people who we are trying to attract - computing science students, namely - are not often in this section of the school. Most classes for CS students, particularly new ones, occur way over on the other side of the AQ. There's no reason for them to be out at this end. This means very few people stop by to chat with us; at best, they stop and giggle for a moment as they stare at the pictures of real-life Pac-Man in our slideshow, and move on.
The location of our booth isn't the best for enticing people over to speak to us, either. On my right side, we have students who seem to be involved with something to do with geography. On the left, there's a booth with students of the Bahá'í Faith (or at least, that's what I think they are, judging from the titles of the literature they have with them). Now, while these might be great clubs full of friendly people, they aren't exactly the kind of things CS students usually find themselves attracted towards. If we were beside, say, a video game club or a Linux developers club or anything else slightly technological, we could reach out to people visiting those tables with promises of intelligent conversation and events they might be interested in. As it stands, I think the geography and religious students might be a little turned off by our passel of lovely, nerdy, scientific-minded folk.
Still, I must continue to sit here until my three hours of service is up. It hasn't been a total waste of time, however: just as I was writing this, we got our first sign-up to the mailing list, after five hours of the booth being here. Hooray!
