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.

Costco!

In preparation for our study break on Tuesday (2/22/11), Brendan and I made a trip to Costco (and an unplanned trip to Wal-Mart) on Sunday. Earlier in the weekend we'd discussed various ideas about how to get information about why people don't come to Friday service and what we could do to encourage people to come and we'd decided to hold a study break to get people to share their ideas. Once we decided on a study break we had to figure out how to get people to come to our study break.
The answer to the question of "How do you get college students to come to something?" should be painfully obvious - you offer them free food. Once we decided we wanted to have food, we had to decide what kind of food to have. People like pizza, but it's a pretty common lure and one of the principles of persuasion that we discussed in class was scarcity. Even though people like having pizza after the dining hall has closed (especially for free) it is very common. We decided that people would be more likely to come if we had something rare in addition to pizza.
Our first idea was to get Fun Dip (a candy that people don't get very often) and then we thought of otter pops (also known as freeze pops) because they're quite cheap and they're scarce at colleges (especially in February).
With this plan in mind, Brendan, Patrick, and I headed to Costco on Sunday to check the prices of freeze pops and possibly buy them. This was a good plan until we got to Costco and realized that freeze pops are not only scarce at colleges in February - they are also scarce at stores. Costco didn't have any freeze pops and we couldn't find anything else that we were interested in so we decided to head to Wal-Mart to see if they had freeze pops.
Wal-Mart also didn't have freeze pops (apparently we're the only ones who think it's freeze pop season) but while we were at Wal-Mart we wandered down the freezer aisle and saw popsicles and fudgsicles. Popsicles and fudgsicles aren't quite as inexpensive as freeze pops, but they are still scarce around Olin and they have the same it's-almost-springtime appeal that freeze pops have so we decided to buy one box of popsicles and two boxes of fudgsicles to supplement the pizza we were planning on buying for the study break.
Buying popsicles and fudgsicles turned out to be a good idea and it worked well to get people to come to our study break. The appeal of the frozen treats along with pizza convinced nearly 80 people to come to our study break and we got lots of good suggestions for our project.