Africa Trip: Announcing the Individual Actions

March 9th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

To determine which individual OCC students are most worthy of the first-ever OCC trip to Africa, we’re going to be adding up how many points you’ve scored as an individual for all the actions below since last September.

The 20 students with the most individual action points will be announced on Tuesday, March 24th, and those 20 will be eligible to submit creative projects in competition for 5 spots on a trip to Africa this summer (countries and exact dates to be announced on March 24th). The deadline for reporting actions to be considered for the top 20 students is midnight (PST) on Sunday, March 22nd.

Here are the actions from our points list that definitely qualify as “individual”:

1. Invite – use your campus webpage to invite your friends and family to sign up for OCC. 10 points per invitation (don’t spam strangers as this hurts our campaign).

2. Sign up – you get 100 points for personally signing up for OCC. You probably already did this, and you can’t do it more than once.

3. Refer – When one of the people you invited signs up with ONE, you’ll get the cred automatically. 100 points per sign up.

4. Blog about ONE – Use your personal blog or Facebook notes as an outlet to let your loyal followers know about ONE, our issues, and/or events in your area. We give you 75 points per entry of 50 words or more about ONE.

5. Write letters to Congress – Write your member of Congress a letter about the importance of acknowledging and addressing extreme poverty and global disease, and submit it for 500 points. We’ll be posting tips on what to say to your member soon.

6. Sign a petition – You have to sign a ONE petition while it is active to get the 500 points. Right now we only have one active petition, so make sure you’ve added your name to our Zimbabwe campaign. But also watch the main ONE website in case we put up a new petition before the deadline.

7. Phone calls to Congress – Call the office of your member of congress and report back to us for 1000 points! Talking points will be posted here on the OCC blog soon.

8. Campus LTE – Write to your school’s newspaper addressing issues of poverty and global disease, why they’re important to you as a student, and what your fellow students can do to help. Has to be published for 1000 points. More info on how to write LTEs

9. Local LTE – Take the same concept to the next level. Tell your community why issues of global poverty and disease are important and how they can help by becoming a member of ONE. 1800 points.

10. High-profile LTE – Get an LTE about ONE and our issues in a major publication like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, etc. for a whopping 10,000 points.

Here are the actions we will consider on a case-by-case basis, since they could be individual or group:

1. Make your own action – Get creative! This can mean looping a number of actions together or submitting something we missed entirely! You suggest how many points you think it should be worth but we make the final call.

2. Get on the ONE blog – Has to be just you and not your whole team. 750 points. Those Power 100 Wrap posts count but we’re no longer accepting additional submissions. Might give you another “call for blog submissions” opportunity soon.

3. ONE creative project – Incorporate ONE into a piece of art, a song, or a creative dance, etc. for 750 points!

4. High-profile blog – When a blog entry authored by you gets posted on a blog receiving more than 1,000 hits a day, you get 1,000 points.

5. ONE Congressional visits – If you meet with and lobby your member of Congress, you get 12,000 points! 1,000 points for meeting with your member’s staff.

We’re going to be scrutinizing these actions carefully to make sure there’s no monkey business or cheating, so make sure you’re doing your best work and not cutting corners or playing games with these actions — do them well and you’re sure to get full credit.

Check back here on the OCC blog for special point opportunities and tips on how to do these actions effectively. And be sure to check in next week to see a list of the top 40 individual action-takers so far.

For the official OCC contest rules, click here.

Game On!

-Emily Stivers