Advocacy Proposal

 To recap, the issue that has got me the most frustrated today, is the lack of air conditioning in the dorms. Other than the issue of comfort, no air conditioning makes things like studying and sleeping a lot harder. To go more in depth, the hot and humid atmosphere makes it difficult to eat the classic, cheap college meals like ramen and mac and cheese. On top of that, the humidity caused by the hot air makes hanging things on the walls virtually impossible without them falling off and it attracts bugs. After living in a no air conditioning dorm for my freshman year, I’m ready to snap. Few people on campus truly understand the struggle of this issue. My target audience will be the residents of no air conditioning dorms as well as the staff that work there, because there's no way they enjoy coming into work during the hotter months. I want my audience to realize that there are solutions to the problem and to get annoyed enough to tell the administration that this issue needs to be resolved or at least get them to propose a different solution to the issue. I am flexible after all. To get my message out there I have a few ideas. To begin I was thinking tshirts. College kids love free stuff, that's a proven fact. I don’t know who it was proved by but it's definitely a proven fact. If someone stands on the quad with shirts that have a clever and interesting phrase on it, people will have no choice but to be intrigued. I did dabble with the idea of maybe creating a flyer instead of a shirt because flyers are easier to mass produce. However, just going by my own personal experiences, it's very easy to ignore someone passing out flyers. Where as no one is going to turn down a free t-shirt. The shirt gets the ball rolling and people are talking. Next I want to produce a comic strip that explains exactly what the issue is. The reason I want to do a comic strip is because they’re fun to read and have a higher chance of people paying attention to what the information is saying. I was thinking of maybe putting a link to the comic on the shirt as well as the information on how to tune into my third idea. A radio segment. In Allen hall there is this thing called Pizza Radio which is a program/club you can sign up for where you learn how to work on a radio and keep people interested. The creators are really cool and would definitely be open to a brief segment on the issue and solution I’m presenting.  The radio broadcast across Allen so all the residents would definitely hear about it. By broadcasting across Allen, it would definitely spark the interest of many residents and inspire them to help be a part of fixing the issue. By broadcasting a platform like Pizza Radio, it's keeping everything light whilst still spreading my message to a large platform. The three solutions I have created each play a different role. The tshirt gets the ball rolling and gets people talking initially. As well as it spreads the word to people outside of Allen. The comic strip provides a summary of the information in a fun way that continues people's interests. Finally, the radio segment provides a full explanation of the issue as well as the solution. On top of that, it makes sure to cover the entire Allen population which is a huge chunk of the target audience.