Problem & Communications Goal

PROBLEM AND COMMUNICATION GOALS

Julia Cox is a research professional in the UGA Geology Department. She coordinates the IFP program and teaches on the eightweek trip every year. There are also staff members who contribute to and attend the trip as well, but most of them vary from year to year. There are also current and former students who have attended IFP and assist in holding information sessions and contributing to promotional efforts. The two student workers who assist Julia most often this year are James Moy and Caroline Flournoy. We interact most with Julia, our client contact, for Creative Consultants and Talking Dog information and decisions.

So far, the Interdisciplinary Field Program has used a mixture of digital and traditional media to reach its audience. IFP has utilized tabling, word of mouth, posters distributed around campus, advertisements on buses, and information sessions to increase awareness and encourage students to apply. They are also present on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

However, when we took on the Interdisciplinary Field Program as a client, they were experiencing an all-time low in number of applicants to the program, with only eight applying the previous year. Our research showed that awareness on campus was so low that students weren’t familiar with “Interdisciplinary Field Program” or “IFP.” Our work was cut out for us, and we developed a set of goals and strategies for the year we would be working with IFP, as well as a system for evaluating whether or not we met those goals.

Our creative focus was to target the student body as a whole with social media and Tate Art Wall posters, and targeting underclassmen with flyers and posters in their dorms and other buildings on campus with a high level of traffic from freshmen. We decided to eliminate print ads from buses, considering their low impact (see Appendix: Survey Results for key findings on attention paid to ads on UGA buses).