December Challenge: Seton Hall, With Icing, On Top
For our World AIDS Day event challenge, we have to give Seton Hall University the 12,500 points due our first runner up for their impressive numbers.
At a school of only 5,000 (with only 3,000 living on campus), Seton Hall managed to hand out 500 ONE fact sheets on preventable disease and 200 red AIDS awareness ribbons, plus net a whopping 300 signatures on our International Affairs Budget petition.
How’d they do it? Cupcakes (why did so many schools give out cupcakes for World AIDS Day? Are cupcakes the new cookies? This is a subject under lengthy discussion at OCC staff meetings). In Seton Hall’s main cafeteria on December 1, you could only get a red-iced, sprinkle-covered cupcake if you stopped and listened to the ONE folks talk about World AIDS Day.
An impressive display, tasty treats and a prime location are all it takes to make a great event with a powerful impact, and Seton Hall certainly showed us all how it’s done.
Get a table inside your cafeteria, get 300 petition signatures. Oh, and have cupcakes. Cupcakes definitely help.
January 9th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Cupcakes are like cookies…with a soul. I think they’re the new pizza in that college students seem to care about receiving them. Pizza stopped working midway through last year. MSU also saw some success with the free music downloads, but I think cupcakes are the hot-button giveaway right now. Cookies seem cheap. Anything more than a cupcake seems extravagant.
This, though, looks like more than cupcakes. This seems like photo evidence of a DIY icing bar. That might’ve worked with cookies. When the awe-inspiring power of the cupcake is added… well…the average Seton Hall student just didn’t really have a chance.
I’ve wished Mo State could get some indoor tabling and permission to distribute non-contracted University vendors. Ahh well. This looks pretty cool.
January 11th, 2010 at 10:04 am
I know! The write-up the Seton Hall team submitted didn’t talk about an icing bar, but you can see from the pictures that they did it that way. “Frost your own” makes it even cooler.
January 12th, 2010 at 11:01 am
Thanks for the post!! Cupcake tabling was definately a hit. You can’t tell in the pictures, but we also had sprinkles that students used to decorate with. Emily/Maisie- did I send you guys a picture of the Africa cupcake? Ha ONE members had a lot of fun with that one.
Also, just for clarification- SHU has around 10,000 students total, but undergrad enrollment (aka those who would be around during the day using the caf) is 5,300.
January 13th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Thanks for the clarification, Alyssa. And we’d love to see a picture of an Africa cupcake! Sounds awesome.