Resource:How to generate awareness and excitement by raising the profile of innovators on campus

How to Generate Excitement for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Branding- Arielle

Generating excitement about innovation and entrepreneurship (I and E) can be a rather difficult task at most schools. There are two key approaches that have been shown to attract the most attention: rather exclusive events and/or creating a culture shift.

Exclusive Events:The first idea when trying to inspire more i and e around a campus is typically to start a club focusing on this subject. However, this simply does not work. You will plan and plan and have great curriculum but because this is a once a week meeting, students will put off actually going and end up not participating. To combat this, approach the situation with exclusive events. Have a key group of people work together to plan events that celebrate i and e and then either make them open to your campus or only invite a selective group of people. This stirs up more attention because then students with an interest in this topic are essentially forced to attend lest they miss a fantastic learning opportunity. An example of this sort of event is mentioned in Success Stories detailing an awards ceremony that was created at William Jewell College to recognize those with an i and e mindset.

Creating A Culture Shift: The other approach is to work towards creating a cultural shift around your campus by essentially bombarding students and faculty with i and e. Many people don’t realize the awesome things that are going on on their campuses unless it is spelled out for them. One of the main things to keep in mind when started to raise this sort of awareness around your campus is developing a branding guide. If all of your material (posters, flyers, emails, etc…) seen by those on your campus are made by the same standards (one color palette, one type of font, certain spacing every time, etc…) then it is much easier for people to legitimize these medias around campus. A great example of this is the #thismatters campaign started at William Jewell College. This campaign focused on showcasing students and faculty who were/are doing just really awesome things on their campus (i.e. developing an app, improving fitness for children, etc…). From these stories a group of students developed banners, printed on vinyl, that were put up all around their campus so they just became an integrated part of the college life at William Jewell. Below you will find a picture of an example of this. Note the basic tagline at the top that says what the student is accomplishing, then smaller it goes into why this student is doing this, says who this person is, and then #thismatters. All of the posters at William Jewell were standardized to this layout, what changed, however, were the background colors and the stories.

Success Stories

 There are many ways to showcase the success of innovators on campus. The first step is to find innovators who are doing cool things on campus.  One way to do this is to ask faculty and students to nominate people who they know are doing innovative things both in and outside of the classroom. One such method is by creating short (30 second) clips to put on YouTube that highlight the work of said innovators. Create a hashtag to use for Instagram and Twitter posts promoting the innovation and works of innovators on campus. Another method would be to create posters to put around campus, being sure to place them in diverse areas. This means that if a poster highlights the work of a political science student, it gets put in the math and science buildings/regions of campus, and if a chemistry student is being highlighted, the poster gets placed in the law building and the English building. Another way to highlight innovators on campus is with recognition awards for groups and for individuals.