The Shocker Financial Wellness Team is hosting a scholarship raffle which, when concluded, will pay for a student’s spring tuition, excluding student fees. There is a high chance that you didn’t know this, because it’s not being advertised.
Wichita State has a lot of resources for students, like discounted Adobe prices and free software for students with learning difficulties. Yet students rarely know these exist, and if they do, they don’t know how to access them.
Most campus resources are advertised in two ways: Shocker Blasts, emailed out every Wednesday, and posters around campus.
Shocker Blasts are a convenient way to learn about weekly campus events, but it’s scattered in what it advertises and doesn’t cover student-specific interests. Not every student is going to scroll through the often more than 25 messages for something of interest.
There are also numerous posters around campus, which are often eye-catching and can spread info to a diverse range of students. But you can’t guarantee students will pause and look through the variety of posters often clustered together, or that they will see these posters in time for planned events.
Posters are also often hung in interest-specific buildings. For example, the only posters for Communication Week, an event that has offered a range of advice from creating a podcast to Hispanic journalism in Wichita, is only advertised in Elliott Hall, not leaving room for other students to learn and join.
Recently, I had to guide a student considering minoring in French to La Papote, WSU’s online French language club. It’s only been advertised in Jardine Hall — somewhere the student has never had classes.
This doesn’t leave much of a chance for students who don’t visit these buildings to learn about these events and clubs.
This failure to advertise leads to these services and activities becoming under-utilized. In the worst cases, that could lead them to become underfunded or removed, taking valuable resources away before they can ever be fully realized and expanded upon.
The most effective way to get information to students is an email service students could sign up for that would allow them to choose areas of interest (i.e. disability services, SEAL events) to be emailed about.
I’d also suggest marketing these services and groups, such as on social media. College students spend between one to two hours on social media a day, creating an account with the sole purpose of campus groups advertising their events, would allow students a passive, but effective, way to learn this information.
These would both allow students to receive information important to them, and allow these student services rarely get proper advertising to reach their audience and help students.
Until then, try and keep up with Shocker Blasts and talk to staff across campus; there are resources available that may be the deciding factor between failing or flourishing.
