Communication Strategy

• Utilize the expertise of your school’s communications department to write and distribute a formal press release to both campus and off campus media outlets.
• Come up with trivia and other challenges on to post on social media and see if you can get students to extend the challenge by reaching out to friends at rival campuses.
• Create a dedicated RecycleMania webpage with up to date competition results and provide recycling facts specific to your campus. Or highlight various staff on campus that work on recycling, to bring a human face to the process.
• When planning attention getting activities make sure your campus paper and local media get notified well in advance.
• Take plenty of photos of your events. They serve as an engaging visual story of the competition and promote the idea that recycling is all the rage on campus.
• Reach out to high profile bloggers on your campus to encourage write ups about the competition and spur some friendly taunting with rivals.
• Collaborate with the department that manages the school’s homepage to see if you can get your participation placed in a prominent location during key points of the competition.
• Cozy up to your campus newspaper to see if they would be willing to run a regular weekly column during the Tournament that provides updates on the school’s ranking against your school’s rivals.
• Create scorecards that you can update each week, post around campus bulletin boards and on your website, and on the university cable network.
• Work with Residential Life staff to promote RecycleMania in the residence halls. Distribute flyers to residential advisors to hang on bulletin boards in the residence buildings.
• Work with your communication dept or whoever manages the official school website to see if you can get RecycleMania featured on the homepage during the kickoff or other key promotional time.
• Make napkin holder inserts for dining halls. Change them out each week with update messages and rankings.
• Create slides or short videos about your participation to run on video monitors.
• Create pie chart signs with butcher paper to tape onto dumpsters that show what percentage of trash is recyclable items and a message to recycle more. Get permission to post them.
• Create chalk ads on sidewalks around campus. Get permission to do this first!
• Conduct promotional tabling, hosting recycling-related activities, interactive displays, and prize raffles in the main hall lobbies.

It’s not enough to issue a challenge, you also need to update people on the school’s progress toward achieving it. It’s important to share regular updates to maintain people’s interest and rally them to try harder as you get closer or fall short. And of course, congratulate your audience when they successfully meet the challenge or goal!