Pitt Dance Marathon Campaign Although Pitt Dance Marathon (PDM) serves as the largest fundraising event held by Pitt Students, the event still lacks awareness on campus. To combat this problem, and in-turn increase student attendance and participation, the focus of this project will be to generate further awareness about the event among students. The campaign will begin at the beginning of the school year and continue up to the event in February. This promotional campaign will consist of three major components. First we will introduce a T-shirt sale to take place during the first weeks of school. Next, we will create a Facebook page including details about the event. On the page, we will also post encouraging and relevant pictures, quotes, and articles to engage students and create interest in the event. Finally, we will make a twitter account, which will creatively promote the event, remind people to register, and announce our fundraisers leading up to PDM. The twitter account will also be used to interact with other groups on campus by tweeting at other organizations’ twitter accounts. T-Shirt Sale The first step towards creating awareness about the event will be through a t-shirt sale. The shirts will be memorable, but also simple in order to keep the cost low. They will be grey tank tops as tanks are trendier currently than regular short-sleeved shirts. Also, tanks are slightly more versatile in the fact that students can wear them to the gym, or at the beginning of the year when the weather remains warm. The text on the shirts will read “Too Legit To Sit.” This along with “Dancing For Another Day” will be our trademark phrase for the year. The first phrase serves as a catchy attraction to the actual
dance marathon itself. The second promotes the fundraising aspect of the event. On the back of the tanks, we will print the PDM logo. We will order the tanks in bulk before the beginning of the school year. During welcome-week and throughout the first months of school, we will schedule tabling hours in Towers lobby. The ordering cost of the shirts should be around $10.00, so we will sell the shirts for $15.00 in order to generate a profit, which will directly benefit the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. When selling the shirts, we will make purchasers aware of where their money is going. Additionally, when students either walk up to the table or purchase a shirt, we will ask them for their email address, so we can send them information about the event itself and directions to apply for PDM committee positions. Although the T-shirt sale will assist in our fundraising effort, the main goal will be to generate awareness about PDM. By sporting the tanks around campus, students will create buzz and recognition of our logo and catch phrase, and the event itself.
Facebook Our Facebook page will function as both an informational and promotional item. We will use this medium because almost all college students use Facebook for either social or informational purposes. On the “Info” section of the page, we will detail the event’s time and location, and link followers to our event registration page. Throughout the year, leading up to the event, we will post statuses, encouraging our followers to register for PDM. We will also post photos, quotes, and videos relevant to dancing or to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Each post will be created with the hope of appealing to our audience’s emotions, as we want to engage our followers and accumulate “likes” and “comments” on each post. In addition, we will post photos, which either read “I’ve pledged to dance for 24 hours in this year’s PDM in support of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation” or “I’ve pledged to moral for eight hours in this year’s PDM in support of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.” When posting the photos, we will encourage those who have registered for PDM to make one of the photos their profile picture in order to increase awareness of the event. We will also use the Facebook page to promote our T-shirt sale by posting pictures of the tanks and the dates, times, and locations in which we will be selling the tanks.
Twitter Our Twitter account will be used also for promotional and informational purposes. Like our Facebook page, we will use twitter to inform our followers about the date, time, and location of PDM. We will post links to our registration page, engaging photos about dancing and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and details of our T-shirt sale. However, because students tend to check twitter more consistently throughout the day than they do Facebook, we will use twitter more frequently to promote our fundraising events leading up to PDM. Our twitter account will be a constant reminder to our followers to stop by our fundraisers at the various restaurants around Oakland throughout the year.
We will also use twitter to engage other organizations on campus. Because we are striving to expand participation outside of the Greek community, twitter will aid in reaching non-Greek groups at Pitt. We will tweet at groups individually asking them to recruit a team of their group members to participate in PDM. In the tweets, we will use inviting language to avoid sounding exclusive.
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Conclusion Through this three-component promotional campaign, we hope to increase general awareness about PDM, create more buzz surrounding the event, attract a wider range of students, and increase overall participation.