In Freshers 2012 the Communications team at Anglia Ruskin Students’ Union decided to be brave and stop playing safe. For as long as anyone could remember we had created a ‘freshers handbook’ and that often means it’s time for change. So this year we didn’t make one. The handbook, a 20ish page booklet of static information, is either out of date by the time it’s delivered or too vague to provide any real value to a new student. No matter how you get your handbook to students, on CD one year, a flash drive the next, on Issuu.com or just to their hand, we’d done it all and it just wasn’t quite us anymore. What we needed to do was get students on to our website. On our website the information is fresh, targeted, useful and engaging. On the website students can explore the Students’ Union at their own pace. They could dig as deeply as they wanted to into the things which chimed with their interests. Most importantly the website can’t get left in a pile of other handbooks, flyers, guides and maps in the corner of their room.

Making the decision to drop the handbook felt positive. The decision had freed up around £2500 in the budget, we had to do something that would get students online and raise awareness of the Students’ Union. Later that week we took a leap of faith and ordered 4000 pairs of colourful sunglasses. We had effectively replaced our handbook with boxes and boxes of sunglasses. But there was more to it than that!

We had noticed through Google Analytics that only around 13% of all traffic to the website came from Social, something we knew our members engaged with. It made sense for our strategy to focus on increasing our reach on Social and drive traffic to our website.

We gave away the sungalsses to new students as they arrived in halls, visited the SU or came to an event. Attached to each pair were instructions explaining how to take part in an interactive campaign. We asked students to take a photo of themselves wearing the sunglasses and send it to us through a social network. All the photos were entered into a prize draw to win Sunglasses Hut vouchers. We had a secondary prize of a yearlong Spotify premium account for the photo with the most ‘likes’ on Facebook. We sent friend requests or followed every student who submitted a photo and contacted them to say “thanks” in the hope they’d follow us back (at least to find out if they’d won!).

We were nervous in the days leading up to the start of welcome week; would people actually want to send us photos of themselves? We tweeted a few shots of the glasses to let students already following us know what was about to happen, we instantly had people asking how they could get a pair which was a great sign. From the first day the sunglasses were being distributed the photos started coming in, first through twitter, then Facebook, then students started emailing them. Students were talking about them, re-tweeting others photos and getting really creative with their entries.

We used Storify.com embedded into our Freshers micro site to record all the entries and allow students to tell us their story of Freshers through photos. Storify worked very well as a way to collate content on a variety of social networks and present it as an easy to read linear timeline of activity. It also allowed us to ‘curate’ the best photos and then promote the entire story in a single message.

Sunglasses came to represent our freshers brand; we gave induction talks to students wearing them, we shared and celebrated hundreds of students who wore them around campus, to their lectures and in their homes with their families. Our freshers logo included a pair of sunglasses and when you spotted someone wearing a pair your first thought was of the Students’ Union.

We used the photos to make a video telling the story of freshers and uploaded it to our YouTube account. There were so many we could show everything from cooking in halls to the freshers fair, moving in weekend to commuting to uni, nights out to the first lectures.

There was a point when it seemed like the majority of students on campus were walking around in a colourful pair of sunglasses. It became a talking point and a great way for new students to introduce themselves to each other and make friends. Wearing the sunglasses around campus was a way for new students to fit in and feel part of the Anglia Ruskin community whilst standing out.

We did nothing technologically complex or that couldn’t be done for free by any organisation of any size. Our ideas were simple to understand which is crucial when communicating with a wide and varied audience.

The yearlong Spotify premium account went to six new students who wore the sunglasses whilst in a human pyramid. They managed to get their photo ‘liked’ by around 500 people, extending the reach of the campaign amongst their friends. These students had never met before but they now share a great story from their first week at University.

By building our Social reach we’ve developed a long-term consistent increase in online engagement. Referrals from Social now account for around 30% of all traffic and our overall unique visitors has increased by around 30% from last year. This growth has helped in every area of the Union; like increasing voter turnout from 2496 to 3738 or quadrupling the number of students attending our Union Council meetings. Combining online and offline campaigning using a variety of tools has really worked for us and we won’t be going back to a handbook anytime soon!

Our video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZdgavucNnk&list=UUZesMWALBAkLErEjfLnOvLQ&index=84

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