Student groups embrace Web
By Jennifer Gottesfeld
Oct. 9, 2007 10:43 p.m.
On Bruin Walk in the middle of the day, one cannot miss the dozens of student groups advertising for their clubs. This week the Kyodo Taiko drummers performed, the dance clubs tangoed and thousands of fliers were distributed to the passersby.
With over 800 clubs at UCLA, ranging from the African Activists Association to the Zoroastrian Student Association, many student groups use a variety of avenues besides Bruin Walk to advertise to the UCLA community. Some participated in the Enormous Activities Fair in September, but others have turned to their technological resources to spread the word about their organizations.
The combined use of Web sites, e-mail, listservs, Facebook and MySpace have been the most popular and effective ways that student groups are getting their name out, said Kenn Heller, associate director of the UCLA Center for Student Programming.
Facebook in particular has become one of the more popular choices for both creating groups as well as advertising, he said.
Dance Marathon has had a successful Internet campaign, with over 1,000 unique visits to their Web site in the past two weeks, said Taylor Wirth, Dance Marathon public relations director.
One way that Dance Marathon directs people to their Web site is by handing out fliers on Bruin Walk.
“We handed out over 1,000 fliers on Bruin Walk last week, and that wasn’t even enough,” Wirth said. “We’re really big on fliering; we think it’s a good way to put ourselves out there.”
While some groups, such as Dance Marathon, put themselves out there in their highlighter-colored shirts, other groups, such as Social Justice Alliance, are not as forward.
Social Justice Alliance, a much smaller and more specific interest group on campus, takes different measures to get the word out about their club, the group’s administrative assistant Diana Ionescu said.
“Being a social justice club, we feel people should really be interested in those issues. We wish we had more members, but we don’t want to use gimmicks to get members,” Ionescu said.
For both the student groups looking for recruits and the students looking for groups to join, finding the right match can prove difficult.
Bobby Styles, a third-year English student, said that, as a transfer student who is new to the campus, he found the Enormous Activities Fair to be overwhelming.
“I haven’t joined any groups because the groups I am interested in joining I haven’t been able to find,” Styles said. “The tables at the activities fair were not really organized, so many people will just wander around and give up like I did.”
Styles, who was looking for a film club, found that it was not as easy to find as he thought it would be.
Ionescu said that one of the reasons that students like Styles may have difficulty finding what they are looking for is because the student activities Web site is not organized by interest.
Therefore, smaller groups like Social Justice Alliance get lost in the very long list of student groups.
“I would recommend a more straightforward system to organize clubs so that they are easier to find,” Styles agreed.
While there is a Web site listing the student groups, it is in alphabetic order, and the search engine only pulls up clubs that have the search word in the title of the club, said Jonathan Curtiss, technological development manager for student and campus life.
“The (student group) Web site was never designed to be the primary location where students would get information about clubs on campus,” Heller said. “The Web site is simply a baseline.”
Heller said that, instead, student groups should look to utilizing the free Web space provided for the groups through the Center for Student Programming.
However, finding the way to find the specific group Web sites is still through the general Web site search engine, Heller said.
“I’m surprised that more groups aren’t utilizing these services,” Heller said.
