Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Let's spread green dots like chicken pox

For my campaign, I honed in on POLs, specifically, the party crowd. The party-crowd is characterized by alcohol, frisbee, making duck faces, and playing loud music. Unfortunately, giant, sloppy parties are also characterized as being dangerous. Well, they shouldn't be! My goal was to inject as much green dot paraphernalia into any party situation in order to remind the crowds to step in if/when something goes awry. I read up on the bystander effect and wanted to make gritty and cutting posters based off of events such as the death of Kitty Genovesa, who was murdered as onlookers walked past.

After consideration (which involved spying on party people at the library), I decided that depressing posters wouldn't appeal my target crowd as well. Not that they are heartless, but that a smaller upbeat approach would be easier to spread. Theme-wise, I thought the slogan of "I've got your back" encompassed the green dot movement of stepping in to prevent violence. Also, I thought it was a good phrase to appeal to the fact that we all want to help friends--and want people we don't even know looking out for said friends (and us, look out for us too). Enter my poster. I took many meticulously focused photos of my friend with a green dot button. Luckily, she had the sense to strike a fantastic pose, which worked better than my imagined grin.

Poster to the left, oh how you function so much better.

I'll start with my favorite of the swag lot: ping pong balls. These are ridiculously cheap (plastic wrapped around air) and a party staple. Honestly, they would be used for beer pong, but the university could market them for games. They directly place green dot right into the situations where it's needed. These green plastic orbs could serve to remind people to watch out for everyone at the party.
Also, the tiny detail of the tread on the racket up there was a pain.
As for the rest of the swag, I came up with hats, which are beloved as tacky:

Also on the swag list were fuzzy gym wristbands to target menfolk and/or bring green dot to the gym:


I also picked chapstick for it's gender neutralness and because people totally share it and pass it around:

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