March 21, 2013, by offcampus

Launching Be A Sweet Neighbour

Our Be a Sweet Neighbour project launch was on 20^th of March in the Portland Building, alongside Nottingham in Bloom’s launch for their Student Garden Competition. Egle, one of the students involved in the Advantage Award PR Project Management module, reflects on how things went in today’s blog.

 

The Be A Sweet Neighbour campaign launch was a great success.  Students were not only attracted by free lollipops, strawberry teabags or cupcakes but were happy to hear more about the project and were willing to take the postcards with strawberry teabags attached to them in order to send them to their neighbours.

Our PR Project Management Advantage Award group have been preparing for this event for weeks. Our strawberry postcard concept was designed to encourage students to post postcards through their neighbours’ door to suggest meeting up for a cup of strawberry tea, and tied in well with Nottingham in Bloom’s strawberry theme for this year’s Student Garden Competition. We hope this project will help to build a stronger community between students living off campus and local residents.

We started our event by standing behind our table full of leaflets, postcards, lollipops, cupcakes and teabags. However, it was a bit difficult to attract students, who were hesitantly passing by – though there were many longing glances at the beautiful cupcakes! Therefore, we decided to take our campaign directly to the students. I took some postcards, leaflets and lollipops and went near the entrance of Portland building. It became much easier to talk with the students and introduce our project as well as invite them to our table, where they could get more information and some free strawberry teabags and other goodies. Students were also able to pot their own strawberry plant at the Nottingham in Bloom stand next to ours.

 

We received great feedback from the students. They were surprised with the idea and expressed their interest in meeting their neighbours. Some students confirmed that they do want to meet their neighbours, but are just too hesitant to start the conversation first. So it seems like the postcards are a really good solution!

One hesitant fresher, who is going to live in Lenton next year, told me he was hoping to get to know more people there, but was he was not sure how to approach new neighbours. He sincerely hoped that by posting the postcard he will find more friends.

I was really happy to take part in this project launch. It proved that students of the University of Nottingham do want to build stronger, safer and friendlier community. I hope that students will post the postcards, find more friends and feel like part of the community in Nottingham.

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