The Button Party highlighted had the 'Price is Right' theme.
All employees in the Spirit Committee and student union made the Button Party a success each semester.
The students enjoyed decorating for the event.
At each Button Party, suspenders were the typical attire to display all buttons collected.
Prizes were raffled, and the number of unique spirit buttons turned into raffle tickets.
Other activities and games were created to entertain attendees.
Screenshot of how the Spirit Button approved events and the Button Party were displayed on the website.
One of the earlier renditions of advertising the Button Party.
A sample social media post promoting the buttons that were delivered for the upcoming event.
The mascot was involved in the weekly spirit button giveaway by visiting departments and offices.
The location of weekly spirit buttons and mascot became an anticipated event.
It became difficult to keep up with the demand, so we worked on ways to mass produce the accessibility for inclusion. One of the ideas was to request submissions of their weekly spirit for a Facebook album photo vote. All submissions received buttons, and the photo with the most votes received a prize.
Screenshot of the program guidelines and rules.
An example photo submission for the weekly Facebook spirit picture contest.
A screenshot of how the submitted spirit photos were published on weekly Facebook albums.
To help crowdsource design ideas, a design contest was created.
We promoted the design contest consistently when passing out buttons.
Client: Texas A&M University-Commerce
Role(S): Visionary, Program Development, Marketing, Promotions, Design, Ordering, Event Marketing, Logistics
Opportunity
In 2009, my supervisor asked if I had new and creative ways to increase attendance at campus events and participation in spirit overall. T-shirts were always a default idea, but we often reserved t-shirt giveaways for big events, and not every department could afford t-shirts or other attractive novelty for their events.
solution
The 90's flair and suspenders were in at the time, and I observed adults going crazy over mini buttons at conferences and meetups. The button designs ranged from minimalistic to artistic and figurative to iconic.
I introduced the button idea for the upcoming Welcome Week, and the buttons ended up being a great way to promote the updated programming for the back-to-school events, as well as the social media platforms for the digital laggards.
tactics
Creating a central theme and a look for a series of events was one thing; Implementing a game or point system over several events for hundreds of students was another puzzle to solve.
- Finalized events for Welcome Week and determined which ones were featured as Button Events.
- Applied a full design for the Button Events and designed the button around the design/motif/icons
- A&M-Commerce's spirit day is called Blue and Gold Wednesdays, so every Wednesday, the Spirit Committee would go on spirit raids and pass out spirit buttons for those wearing blue and gold.
- Before there was access to social media schedulers, I created a content strategy and trained student employees to post and publish posts and tweets to promote events, give clues for button locations, and announce updates.
- Reframed the end-of-semester celebration to the Button Party and created a new experience and celebration
RESULTS
Too many to count.
1. Pro: Blue and Gold Wednesday participation visibly grew
Con: The demand to be everywhere on campus on Wednesday grew too much to accommodate
2. Pro: The buttons were a hit.
Con: While attendance increased, participation in some events still lagged.
3. Pro: Campus spirit also significantly increased amongst staff, faculty, and support servicemen/women
Con: Not all of their direct supervisors were on board, so wearing anything but business or uniform attire was reprimanded.
4. Pro: Being 'Spirit Button Approved' was a seal of approval, and applications to be the next button event were in high demand
Con: There were too many requests to be 'Spirit Button Approved,' so there had to be a system in place to review requests and decide based on a handful of measurements like the need for campus awareness, funding, potential attendance, inclusivity, and accessibility.
ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS
Spirit Buttons were a great success and the run lastest from 2009-2013. The retirement of the program stemmed from a couple of reasons, but all in all, it was good to see this program and promotion end on a good note.
I now use this promotional program as a tangible example when explaining the concept of NFTs, Non-Fungible Tokens. Similarly, Spirit Buttons were successful because the concept created a community for a specific audience. On the other hand, there was not a long-term plan, or roadmap in NFT terms, to continue to build on the community, and the utility of the Spirit Buttons was intentionally limited.
Off-topic, yes; however, I felt I came full circle when connecting the dots of how we've implemented the concept and goals of NFTs in previous years. It's pretty fascinating to see this parallelism in other forms.