The 1.9 Mile Ride: Helping Students Get to Class On Time

        The purpose of this campaign is to find efficient ways of finding and utilizing transportation between UNL East Campus and UNL City Campus for students so that they can better utilize their time. Finding consistent, time-efficient ways of travel between the two campuses can be difficult for some students, especially those with tight schedules taking classes on both. The students that this campaign would most benefit would be those dabbling in engineering, agriculture, dentistry, law, and other individual classes, like computer science. This proposal would be a fitting response in that it brings awareness to students about the bus system, and potentially expands the Perimeter and Evening Service to other hours of high traffic. Even with classes solely on UNL City Campus, it can be difficult to manage finding ways of getting from class to class. We know enough students (as well as their professors) that this campaign would benefit, as it allows for more time in class, and less time frantically trying to find rides.

        Our group’s campaign is focused on style and arrangement. This means that we are focusing our campaign by using the high usage of social media to accumulate data for bus student traffic. The twitter polls last for only 24 hours, meaning that the quickness and ease of social media would help us to make a representation of what the average student traffic week would look like in a timely manner. This is a creative approach because we are using the technology of the millennials to solve student issues. If successful, this campaign would be memorable due to the effect it has on students in the 2016 Fall semester.

To complete our campaign we used a site called Survey Monkey to create our own survey to share across Twitter and Facebook. The survey consisted of six questions, five of them multiple choice and the sixth for any other comments our audience thought to share. The questions focused on the individual's association with UNL, their use of the university’s bus transportation, and whether or not they believed the university would benefit from more transportation around high traffic times. After creating the survey we shared and posted the survey on various UNL affiliated groups on Facebook such as the Engineering page and the Class of 2017 page. As well as posting on our Twitter feed using the #1.9MileRide for each post. We rallied friends and other colleagues from our individual extracurricular activities to help share and spread our survey through our Facebook and Twitter media ports. After leaving the survey running for about a week we had a little over fifty people who had taken our survey. Using the information provided on the survey website we were able to collect analyzed data with statistics incorporated for each question of the survey.

This campaign was designed to help the general UNL community of bus-goers find ways to optimize transportation methods between UNL City Campus and East Campus. At the beginning of the campaign, we had a lot of ideas on who to contact and where to go to get answers regarding what could and couldn’t be a reasonable project. However, towards the end of the campaign, no one had replied to our requests for information, and we had to gather the information about public opinion ourselves. We were able to gather this information quite easily through social media platforms, but without the help of staff, it was hard to conceptualize something that we could do on our own with the data. Despite these setbacks, we will continue to work on expanding the transportation system on campus. If we were to get the chance to repeat this campaign, we would go to offices and other physical resources instead of relying on email and other electronic-based ways of communication. Because social media seemed to speed up the process of surveying large amounts of people, we would expand the audience of people seeing the surveys by promoting it on all platforms, personal accounts, and Facebook groups. There are even paid ways to promote your tweet or survey on Facebook and Twitter that allow for the potential of hundreds of hits. Yik-Yak could even prove to be helpful if done right.

One thing that did go well was the survey itself. In the survey, there was an area to add a personal comment or idea on how to better the situation, and we got some very insightful responses. This was not necessarily a part of the original plan, but it allowed for us to gather ideas from a lot of different people, and allowed for a broadened way of brainstorming.