Commons Campaign

HSS Cleaning Campaign
Addison Zeltner, Megan McLain, Katie Meredith

Project Proposal

     For our project, my group and I decided to interview all the cleaning ladies in Harper, Schramm, and Smith buildings. We feel that students can do more everyday to make the cleaning facilities job easier. This project should target students as our audience because we will be posting memes throughout HSS. Hopefully after students read our flyers/memes we will see new results on each floor.
     After a while of having the memes hung up we are going to interview the cleaning staff again and ask if they’ve noticed any change on the floors they are cleaning. I’ve grown to really appreciate the cleaning facilities because without them our dorms and bathrooms would be disgusting. I feel like a lot of students don’t realize how much of a difference they make when they clean everyday and we want to try to show the students what they can do to show appreciation.
      We planned on interviewing them and asking questions like these:

 1.    What is the hardest to clean on every floor?

2.    What can students do to make your job easier?
3.    Have you ever cleaned any other building in HSS?
4.    What takes the longest to clean? (bathroom, study room, hallways, lobby area)
5.    Are there any other things you would want students to do or not do before you clean our floors?As we go along we will also be able to ask more questions and go off topic to find out other information to make the cleaning faculties jobs easier. This will not only be able to help out the cleaning ladies but will also hopefully make students aware of their actions and get them to care more about the messes that they are creating. Also, this project will also help students to grow in the long run by maturing and learning to clean up their own messes.
     This project is creative because I think that the cleaning faculty is often forgotten about. I think that we can get students to respect the faculty even more and once we’ve accomplished that, the cleaning faculty will be grateful and really appreciate what we do.
     There are rules in our bathrooms posted by the RA’s but I think students will listen more because this information is coming from a regular student, just like them. Also, we think memes will really grab the attention of the students better than a plain piece of paper will. We want to make this a fun experience that is also going to ACTUALLY work. We are using basic principles we’ve learned about in class to do this project. An example would be: we are trying to target students (mostly freshman) so the age group is about 18 or 19 I would say; and we are still young adults! White paper with plain black letters is boring! Instead of being TOLD what to do, I think it will be better to approach the situation in a more laid back, sarcastic way. I listen better when I’m interested in something than when I’m being told what to do.
         We’re hoping this is memorable because once we get students to start reacting to our memes and actually making a change, it will be carried on as years go by. There are probably plenty of things that the cleaning ladies/men do without anyone knowing about. So we just want to get a lot of information from them so that we can make students aware and we can update the little signs that have been put up by RA’s! Then as the years go on once people see the change and how good it is, others will follow and keep updating the signs and making sure the cleaning faculty doesn’t go unnoticed.
         For our timeline, we are going to start with interviewing the cleaning faculty a little bit at a time. I’ve gone down to the cleaning facility office and talked with the lady that is in charge and she gave me information on some of the staff along with times they normally start cleaning and she’s also come up with a couple questions of her own to ask her staff about and I’m expecting an email from her any time now. I, (Addison) will be interviewing/talking with the people that clean Harper, Megan will be doing the same with the ones that clean Smith and same with Katie for the people that clean Schramm. We are going to keep updating each other while we do this. Once we have finished that we will meet up and create the memes and print them off to post to the specific dorms. Megan will make the memes for Smith, Katie will make the memes for Schramm, and I will make the memes for Harper. After 2 weeks of having them up we are going to contact our assigned staff, and ask them if they have seen any changes in the cleanliness of our dorms. We are then going to keep track of all our information and make a powerpoint showing different information about what we’ve done and will continue to do. We also made a Twitter page titled “CleaningHSS”. We are going ot tweet contests everyday for whomever can take the best selfie of them cleaning something up outside of their rooms. Hopefully, this works out in our favor and we will really see some change in the dorms.
Evidence

Reflection

Our completed commons campaign was a huge success in the HSS dorms. The memes that we hung on each floor were a huge hit to our peers and got a lot of positive comments. The way we connected to our peers through memes really made everything a little more fun. On another note, the real hit of our campaign was helping out the cleaning staff. After interviewing the cleaning staff at the beginning of our project and getting their opinions on little things that could change to make their jobs easier and then to hanging up our memes, there was a successful change made in the dorms. Even everyone just changing the littlest things such as cleaning your hair out of the drain after you shower or putting furniture back after using it really helps out a lot in the long run.  The cleaning staff of HSS do so much for us and are already so proud of the changes being made and can’t wait to keep watching more changes happen.

           A few things that we wish we would have done differently would have been to have more face to face communication with our peers and the residents of HSS and to been able to communicate with them more besides through just our memes and twitter page. Another thing we wish we could have done was to expanded our campaign to more dorms than just HSS. With the improvements that have already been made at HSS we hope that we can continue to bring the same improvements to the other dorms on campus. Overall our project brought improvements to the HSS dorms and the cleaning faculty is very impressed at the improvements that were already made.