Thursday, August 27, 2009
Top Tips for a Fab Freshers
Freshers’ Fair is quite possibly the most important day of the STAR year. But you can relax, because here are some tips we prepared earlier…
STAR Top Tips
- Book your stall. You might need to do this far in advance so make sure you’re not too late, and that you’re in a prominent place with similar societies (not in a cupboard with Engineering Soc). Find out how big your table is, whether you have a noticeboard or a place to plug in your laptop, etc.
- Order your materials. Contact STAR national team in advance to get your resources to help promote STAR and refugees (banners, t-shirts, stickers, leaflets, posters).
- Plan your first meeting. Meet together as a committee or group and set a date, book a room, invite any speakers and decide what you’re going to do. Make it interesting, fun, a good opportunity for people to meet each other, and be clear on what they can do next.
- Advertise your first meeting or event clearly. Have a poster or flyer with clear details of how to find out more and what they can go to over the next few weeks (with a set date, time, location, etc).
- Make your stall stand out. New students will often have a huge number of societies they can join, so you need to ensure that your stall will get noticed. Put up signs and arrows, give out freebies like stickers or cakes, use the STAR banner, have photos from last year, play music, maybe have footprints leading to your stall…
- Organise who is on the stall. Make a rota and have enough helpers so one or two of you can wander around giving out leaflets and directing people to your stall.
- Prepare a sign-up sheet. Make it as easy as possible for people to sign up to your mailing list! That means making sure you’ve got plenty of sheets with enough space to write, pens that actually work, and that you don’t lose them underneath all the leaflets and cookies.
- Have a small activity on your stall. Get people involved straight away with a petition, a quiz, a short video…
- Be friendly and approachable! Try to be welcoming – if you start to get grumpy after 3 hours then take a break!
Download
You can download a copy of these tips here:
For more advice on how to make the most of Freshers’ Fair, contact James (Network Coordinator) at the STAR national team
Posted by STAR team on 27/08/2009 at 02:48 PM
