Sustainability: Inspiring the Freshmen

As the FBE Challenge comes to a close, our team is really focusing on sustainability. One way that we plan on having a long-term impact is by developing a video centered on the question “What does community service mean to you?” We plan on asking faculty, staff, and students about the role they believe community service plays at Olin and what inspires them to volunteer. We will then show this video to the incoming freshmen during orientation or an OIE class and having a short discussion about community service at Olin (Nick Tatar agreed to let us show the video as long as we produce it well). The idea behind our project is to get the freshmen thinking about community service before they commit all of their time to other clubs and projects. A big observation we made throughout this process is the difficulty and inertia that comes with trying to make a change. It is difficult enough to get people to try something new but it is ever harder to get them to change their preexisting routines and commitments. This comes back to one of the six fundamental principles of persuasion, consistency. Right now students have already made clear commitments to clubs and projects so it has been hard to get people involved in community service especially this late in the school year.

However, we plan on using three of the principles of persuasion to get the incoming freshmen more involved in service. Through our video and a short discussion we plan on using the principles of social proof, authority, and consistency to get the freshmen involved in service and to keep them involved. First, the main principle of the video will be social proof. The freshmen will be new to Olin and looking for people to set examples. By playing the video and including a variety of members from the Olin Community, the freshmen will see how passionate some community members are about service and hopefully follow their lead.

Similarly I, along with two other students who are also consistently engaged in community service (Elizabeth Poindexter and Liz Threlkeld), will compose three of the ten members of the orientation staff. As members of the orientation staff we will be the first upperclassmen that the freshmen meet (the staff and freshmen are on campus for five days before upperclassmen arrive) and therefore I believe they will look to us as authorities on life at Olin and hopefully through the video and discussion they will see how passionate the three of us are about service and this will inspire them to get involved. However, we must ensure that we do not make the common mistake of assuming that others recognize our expertise. We must first establish our expertise before we attempt to inspire the freshmen.

As far as the principle of consistency goes, at the end of the video and discussion with upperclassmen we plan on presenting the freshmen with the option of filling out a Community SERVice star and pledge how many service activities they will participate in throughout the semester, similar to what we did for all Olin students this past week. By having freshmen pledge the number of service projects they will participate in, it will align them with their clear commitments by making these commitments active, public, and voluntary (with an emphasis on the voluntary). We don’t want to force any freshmen to pledge if they don’t want to. Also, by giving the entire freshmen class the option of filling out the service stars at the same time it will maximize the principle of social proof. If a hoard of people is filling out the stars, it is less likely that someone will walk out of the room without filling out a star.

Overall, we plan on getting the incoming freshmen thinking about community service and (through the service stars) get some of them to commit to service before all of their time is committed elsewhere. But getting the freshmen involved is just a small part of a much larger plan we have to revitalize community service at Olin. We also plan on presenting the SERV board with a packet of suggested changes that we believe will increase service participation. These changes will be more focused on getting the community as a whole involved and less focused on a specific group of students (i.e. the freshmen).

Study Break!!

Woot! Woot! Study Break! On Tuesday night from 9-11 we held a study break in the first floor of West Hall. As Kat mentioned in her blog post, we used pizza, popsicles, and fudgsicles along with the one of the six principles of persuasion, scarcity, to entice people to come (and we had over eighty students show up). We moved all the furniture around the room to open up the space, placed a whiteboard in the middle of the room, and two large piece of butcher paper on the walls with writing prompts that said: (1) What do you do on Friday’s during service time? (2) What service did you do in high school? (3) What service projects would interest you? (4) Other?

We positioned the food in the corner of the room along with a sign-up sheet. All the students who showed up at the study break were encouraged to sign the attendance sheet so we could keep track of the number of students who attended. This sign-up sheet, along with the food, allowed us to use two more principles of persuasion, reciprocity and consistency. We gave students food and therefore they felt that they needed to repay us by participating in the study break and writing suggestions/comments regarding community service at Olin. By signing their name on the sheet students, whether they knew it or not, made a commitment. After signing the paper most students felt that they could not just take the food and leave. They felt the need to stick around for a while and write ideas on the butcher paper or talk to one of the team members because after all, if the signed a paper saying that they participated in the study break they better have actually participated and not just ate the food.

Last but not least, our study break also used the principle of social proof. By holding the event in a public place we had the added advantage that students would walk in the front door of West Hall, saw a swarm of people in the lounge, were curious, and joined in! Also, when the event first began people were not that willing to write on the butcher paper but once a few students started writing, everyone joined in! Also, when the crowed grew thin Kat and I left the first floor to go talk to people sitting in the lounges and asked students about their view on community service at Olin. Once one student started giving us feedback several other began to chime in. Again, it was the principle of social proof at work.

Overall the study break was a big success and we received a lot of useful information from it, all while using four of the six principles of persuasion. We didn’t use the principles of liking or authority (or at least not intentionally). However, three of our four team members are on the SERV board so we were somewhat an authority on community service at Olin. Also, while talking to students I, and I think most of the team, often unintentionally used the principle of liking by talking to other students, uncovering similar service projects we many have done, and genuinely praising students for cool or inspiring service they may have done. With that said, in one way or another, we used all six principles of persuasion and whether this was unintentional or not it resulted in a very successful and informative study break.