Commons Campaign
Humans of Lincoln
Commons Campaign Proposal
For our Commons Campaign, the six of us will be imitating
the successful promotion “Humans of New York,” bringing a new chapter to
Lincoln.
Purpose and Scope
Exigence: Rarely are cities in
the Midwest perceived to be very diverse, which is especially true for a town
in which almost nine out of every ten people are white. However, like with many
college campuses around the country, UNL is a crossroads for a wide array of
people from different cities, states, and countries, all of whom have unique
stories to tell. Unfortunately, not enough people in Lincoln are aware of all
the diversity the city has to offer and have not had the chance to see the many
facets of our campus, causing many of us to have a narrow, limited view of the
people around us.
Fitting Response: Our response to the
exigence at hand will be an effort to increase awareness of the present
diversity on campus, create feelings of pride for a campus with so much
variety, and instill ideas of unity in our audience through the creation of
“Humans of Lincoln.” We’ll do this by interviewing students, faculty, and
pedestrians, searching to find what makes every individual unique. In the end,
hopefully we’ll be able to show our audience the humanity that exists around
us, giving faces and stories to nameless strangers. This, ideally, will help
people focus on what makes us different, interesting, and good.
Rhetorical Audience: Since we won’t be
straying too far from campus, meaning that most of the people we’ll meet will
be students or faculty of the university, the main rhetorical audience will be
people affiliated with the school. However, because this campus is in the
middle of the city, our audience can extend to any citizen of Lincoln that has
access to social media.
Constraints: We’re only freshman,
which could potentially cause an issue of ethos – we don’t have the authority
or credibility of older, more experienced professionals, which may be a
constraint while interviewing people older than us. Time will also be a
limitation because we’re a group of six, all of us enrolled as full-time
students; this may present issues of time management and matching schedules to
work on the project. Also, technology won’t always be available to us – not all
of us have professional cameras or recorders to bring with us, so even if we
come across a perfect subject for an interview, we may not be able to take
advantage of the opportunity. Lastly, because we’ll be asking some personal
questions, there may be people that’ll be hesitant or reluctant to share their
information.
Affordances: On the bright side,
we are on a large campus that has plenty of diversity beneath the surface.
Everyone has a story to tell, or something to say, so we shouldn’t be short on
potential subjects. Another affordance is that we have access to a variety of
social media, and many of us are well-versed in technology and able to navigate
these sites. Also, although they may not be available consistently, we still do
have broad access to equipment and resources we need to carry out this project,
such as cameras, voice recorders, and photo/video editing software.
Rhetorical Canons
Inventivenes: This is a creative
approach to the exigence at hand because instead of merely claiming our campus
is diverse, we’ll be proving just how unique our society is while tying in an
element of humanity to the situation. By involving various forms of social
media, we’ll be reaching out to a wide array of potential audiences – old and
young, educated and uneducated, etc. – and use both images and words in an
artistic form of marketing.
Arrangement:
We’ll go out in groups of two to three people and interview around four or five
people at a time. Whoever is taking the photographs will upload the pictures
and the descriptions onto our communal Google Docs account and designate which
day each photo will be published (one photo per day). Every member in the group
has been assigned to manage some form of social media, and so the person
responsible for each website will visit the Google Docs account each day and
post the designated photo with its corresponding caption. We’ve agreed to take
a minimum of ten photos (with quotes and/or stories) per week so that we can
choose the best ones for each day and have a bank of potential photos in case
we fall short of our quota later during the project.
Style:
We’re hoping to approach this with a sort of artistic minimalism.
Stylistically, we don’t want to overwhelm our audience with flashy photos and
long stories; rather, we want to post what an average reader can view and think
about at any moment in their day, whether they be on their way to class,
standing in the lunch line, or checking their Facebook before they go to bed.
We also want the project to seem contemporary and clean, sort of mimicking the
style of “Humans of New York.”
Memorability: Obviously, this isn’t
a project that’ll take over the lives and conversations of everyone that
participates in or views it. However, this should capture the attention of many
students, faculty, and general citizens of Lincoln, making them at least
question their preconceived stereotypes of the people around them. We’ll make
this project memorable by designing something that is digestible for virtually
everyone, hopefully spotlighting intense, unique stories that’ll work their
ways into the minds of our audience. We don’t need to be flashy to be
memorable. We just need remarkable stories and photos and a way of effectively
transmitting them to our viewers.
Delivery:
We’ll be posting photos and their corresponding texts to a variety of social
media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. At the end of the
project, we will make a behind-the-scenes video to post to YouTube that’ll
hopefully expand the scope of our audience.
Timeline
Our
first week will begin on Monday, October
13th. Every Sunday we will have a minimum of ten extra photos in
our bank of possible posts. Each day, we will collectively post one photo on
our three targeted forms of social media. Our last day of taking photos will be
Tuesday, November 25th,
as that is the last day before Thanksgiving break. Ideally, we’ll have enough
reserved photos and quotes to continue to post through finals week. Breaks will
not cut into our quota of 10 pictures a week, so by our final week, we should
have over 60 to 70 photos.
Interviewing information:
As
of right now, we’ve resolved that ten photos need to be taken a week for the
group as a whole. Groups of two to three should go out at each other’s
convenience. If we begin to have trouble meeting quotas, we may adjust
assignments so that people belong to specific groups and/or each member is in
charge of a certain number of photos to assure that our goals will be met.
Project Summary
For our commons campaign, we imitated the successful promotion of “Humans of New York,” bringing a new chapter to Nebraska and calling it “Humans of Lincoln.” Similar to “Humans of New York,” we took pictures of different people around our campus and our city and asked them a few questions to capture their essence. Some of the questions we asked dealt with what their biggest goal was, what they consider to be their happiest moment, what would be their best piece of advice for others, and how they began working. We purposefully would ask broad questions so that the people we interviewed were able to interpret our questions in their own way. If we believed there was more to say, we’d ask more specific questions so that they could expand on their answer. We started “Humans of Lincoln” to connect the many people around the campus of UNL and in Lincoln, as well as to demonstrate the uniqueness of everyone living here. We were able to interview over 40 Lincolnites in the past two months and share their stories on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages.
Evidence
Below are some screenshots of posts of our Facebook page.
Below are screenshots of our Facebook page’s statistics.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/humansoflincoln
Instagram: http://instagram.com/humansoflincolnne
Our overall progress on this project was successful in many aspects. Our Facebook page was liked by a total of 351 people; our most popular post reached 2670 people, meaning that despite our lack of promotion – we’d have to pay Facebook or our other pages to promote our pages – we still managed to reach a significant amount of people. Our Facebook page had over 40 postings, which was a good amount considering the two months that we have been working on the pictures. While interviewing the Lincolnites, we managed to connect with a large variety of people. Most of the people we approached were eager and gave us fascinating quotes that helped our page promote a sense of community. Our group tried to ask thought-provoking questions with the intention of successfully emulating Humans of New York, which we do believe happened.
However, despite our success, there were many things that we could have done better. For instance, it may have been in our best interest to make a more concrete schedule for obtaining quotes pictures, because we rarely had a safe supply. If we would’ve done that, we wouldn’t have been so pressed for time, since we would’ve had back-up photos. For example, when we had weekends off (or large breaks, such as Thanksgiving) over which we didn’t post or take pictures, we began to lag behind in our posts. Another thing that we could have done differently would have been to go out and interview people at a greater variety of places. The places at which we were able to find the most people willing to speak with us was the Student Union. While we did visit other places, we took too many at the Student Union; it would have been nice to have pictures from more around campus, or around Lincoln in general, such as outside Memorial Stadium on game day. Promotion was another issue. Our group reached out to people we knew and asked them to like our page; however, we could have done a more adamant job of promoting Humans of Lincoln by setting out flyers or reaching out to the local newspaper. Also, while most of the participants were eager, some of the interviews were a bit awkward, and at times, we were not sure which questions to ask to get the most interesting quotes.
Nevertheless,
we found the project to be a success, and we are pleased with the overall
results of Humans of Lincoln.
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