Sunday morning I went to a meeting for a public policy group on campus called The Roosevelt Institute. Essentially, The Roosevelt Institute is a non-partisan group comprised of students who do independent research for their center (e.g., center on urban planning, center on international affairs, center on health) and create policy based off their findings.
It is quite unique in this way, as the group is beholden to neither left or right leanings (though admittedly bills itself as more progressive). Members have the chance to get published nationally and even get the opportunity to pitch their policy in their state capitol.
If you've not heard of them, I doubt you're alone. Despite being part of a large network across the nation—nearly 85 chapters—with a national committee in Washington D.C. that can count, among others, a former White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense in its ranks, they remain rather unknown on campus.
Why?
This problem reminded me of a Ted Talk I watched last spring with Jacek Utko. Utko was probing the reason for declining newspaper readership. Beyond the obvious rise of the internet, what he found was the way in which the internet communicates. The internet facilitated the medium of exchange much better than the clunky print designs of old.
At it's heart, readership was a design problem. His subsequent redesigns of newspapers have yielded great returns, merely by making them more accessible and, to some degree, more playful. We are even seeing older, more established newspapers, like The New York Times, alter format due to cost and thereby rethink their design.
I've been involved with Roosevelt for two years now. My first, it was purely in a writing capacity. The second year I had trouble making many of the meetings, but I began offering my services as a designer instead. It was my first real experience doing work for a student group like this, but slowly we began to discover something.
Basically, the way student groups advertise has not changed in fifty years.
They flyer every hallway, hand out leaflets in the Diag, they make Facebook groups (essentially your internet leaflet), and if they have a bit of money they make buttons or t-shirts. None of this is effective though. It doesn't harp to a specific demographic that would be interested in coming to events.
The scatter-gun approach wastes a great deal of time on people who wouldn't come anyhow, rather than finding out where people who are interested in international politics, or health care, actually are. It produces the same outcome. Loyal members drag some of their friends to the event and that's the turnout. What's worse, when a person does make something effective, a blog, a catching t-shirt design, it never gets passed along to the next generation of leaders. There's a quick turnover in student groups.
What is happening can best be described as a design problem.
Near the end of last year, we tried something different. Rather than spraying an array leaflets for an event The Roosevelt Institute was putting on, we decided it would be best to try and target. I created a colored poster in a run of 50 that we placed more strategically in the Ford School and other international affairs-minded areas of campus.
The turnout was quite surprising. For a voluntary lecture on campus, not at all sponsored by the University of Michigan, we managed to pack a lecture hall. There were people actually standing because we didn't have enough seats.
People already do such wonderful research on issues I care about, but are read by so few. This is really the crux of the project I envisioned doing on Detroit. It's not that the statistics and information aren't there, it's that people don't know where to look.
The problem at hand has a clearly defined goals (to increase membership, attendance, and find out where our demographics are) and means to reach them (through design) over the course of the year. Doing a year-long project with The Roosevelt Institute would not only offer several opportunities in design, but would also allow me to create something a lasting for the organization by researching effective marketing strategy for them.
I'm not certain that design was directly responsible for the outcome of the event above. I'm really interested in finding out how much it was though.
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