Every year, usually at the end of summer, tons of new students arrive in every university town in Europe. All of them full of great expectations, plans, ambitions, enthusiasm, creativity and whatnot, thousands of them flooding the city with new energy. Despite their sometime overabundance, I find their infiltration to be a happy sight every time and again.
Plenty of them are potential active AEGEE members, but of course you’ll need to attract their attention somehow. Unfortunately, so is everybody else. Save for a few of the very large ones like Enschede, locals struggle to place themselves somehow in the new kids’ focus. What is AEGEE? What do we do? Why should you join us? We are the European Students Forum, we strive for pan-European understanding bottom-up. Which is very nice in itself, however, the message gets lost in the introduction festival mess common in the Netherlands…
Let’s discuss the freedom of movement in Europe here
Seeing that my antenna has 30 active members, we’ll need to resort to other means to be noticed at all. But how?
Look at my AEGEEness!
Let’s use the flag as a net
Not for actually wearing on the head
A bit more in-depth
These are just some examples of AEGEE creativity Maastricht style, and they work to some extent. Many locals have their own PR strategy, including entire clothing lines and merchandising, internet apps (see Enschede and Budapest), some can even use their own bar. What do you do to gain attention, and how do you get the message across?
written by Bas Wouters, AEGEE Maastricht