I’ve been slowly writing up a skills bank for the Lancaster Award and while finding something for organisation I came across the old working documents for a viral marketing campaign I ran in my first intro week as president of the Computing Society.
I was trying to attract more people to the academic side so I made a simple challenge that went up on posters around campus. The poster that was put up can be found here.
This led to a landing page which sadly is no longer available at the original URL as I no longer control the domain, however I have put it back up here (for those who wish to give the challenge a go, change the domain for http://cslu.co.uk to http://109.74.204.44).
I think overall we had 5 people email in and solve it, which wasn’t very many – but I remember there was a lot of talk wondering what the posters were about, and as they had our logo on them a fair amount of people turned up to the first meeting.
I think if I was to do it again, I wouldn’t say which society it was (there is still a lot of social stigma attached to computing societies) but would just put the date, time, and venue of the first meeting. A few different levels of challenge with prizes would be better too. The challenge was very easy and would fall very quickly when put up against the internet, but a university has a different make-up of population and not everyone who could easily solve mental challenges may want to do so at intro week.
It was quite exciting seeing the posters scattered everywhere though.