Ohio Dominican University has dealt with a lot of transition. Servicing between 2,500 and 3,000 students, the school has been shifting over the past 5 to 10 years from a campus mostly attended by commuters to a residential campus. This has presented all sorts of challenges for the school administration, and of course providing activities for the rising number of student residents is not the least of these worries.
“We had two residence halls and then about two years ago we doubled the size of our residence population to about 800, and we are in the process of building a new residence hall that will open next year,” says Jen Conti, Director of Student Activities at Ohio Dominican. “In the fall of 2009, we will also be opening up a new student center, so we really are a growing campus.”
This has presented unique challenges for the activities board. “There has been more of an emphasis on student organizations and increasing involvement in general.” Before Jen arrived on campus and things in the activities department got going, it wasn’t uncommon for students to go as far as other campuses to find something to do.
This led to an increase in not only activities, but also the total number of student organizations on campus as well. “There are bigger activities, more things to do and things are heating up in residence life. The RA’s are programming more and our sports are really taking off. There is just more buzz and participation around the entire community.”
The specific entertainment the board brings in has been bound to a learning curve with the explosive growth in activities and student population. “It has been pretty much hit-or-miss,” says Dustin Crew, President of the Panther Activities Council and a brand new Campus Activities Magazine Student Ambassador (see our special feature on him in this article- and find out how you could be in the next issue!). “We have tried to bring in comics and a lot of people like them, but we are a small Catholic institution, so some of the more conservative members of our population can get pretty easily offended. So that makes it harder to please everyone. This is my third year here and we have been really branching out into trying new things, but it is difficult to figure out what will please the most people.”
Some things are done differently on this campus, namely the scheduling and frequency of outside artists entertaining at their events. The campus holds several large events throughout the year, including a Welcome Week, Welcome Back Week, and an “ODU Day” to celebrate the end of the school term. These are the events where the board typically brings in outside entertainment such as game shows and other novelties, hypnotists, comedians and the like. Throughout the course of the normal everyday year though, the board cools its monetary jets. “We don’t really bring acts in on a regular basis throughout the year. We do have weekly programming events to keep everyone happy, but it is usually smaller scale things like movie nights, game nights or networking activities.”
It just happens that with their incredible growth, ODU is shying away from these smaller low-key events and intends to focus more on programming on a larger scale next year. “We hope to do maybe one large event per month instead of just the smaller weekly events.”
There are many active student organizations at ODU, with some of them even “complementing” with the activities board. There are actually two separate entities that handle programming here, the official Student Activities department and PAC, or Panther Activities Council, which is its own student-run organization. “PAC helps out with larger events that the student activities office does, but we are two independent entities despite collaborating when needed,” Jen says.
When it comes to booking great entertainment for your students, every programmer’s hands seem to be tied by invisible budgetary bonds. “Our funding comes directly from the university. We do have student activities fees built into our tuition, but it goes to benefit other organizations than ours,” she elaborates. Dustin says that the board is able to make everything low to no cost for the students. “We generally try to make everything free for the students,” he says. “But last year we had a larger event where we were given the opportunity to host the filming of Judson Laipply and “The Evolution of Dance 2.” Unfortunately he won’t be able to use the video, but the event was an incredible success for us just the same. We actually had to charge $5 or allow the attendees to donate canned goods for charity. It turned out to be the largest event we have ever had. People were very receptive to paying for that event and so we know that for future reference people seem more invested in the show because of the good cause their contribution benefits.”
ODU hasn’t typically utilized alternate forms of supplementing their budget, but recently they have explored some options. “I went to a NACA conference last weekend and attended some sessions on sponsorships, which we haven’t used in the past. I did learn a lot of useful information that will be able to help us with some of the larger events we want to hold.”
Cyber habits at ODU only confirm the reality of how entertainment marketing in many places has the most benefit online. “Everyone here is always talking about Facebook or MySpace or YouTube and what video was just on and who the hot comedians are.” That theory certainly adds up when considering the turnout for Judson Laipply, who has one of the most watched videos of all time on youtube.com, entitled “The Evolution of Dance.”
Jen says big online play in addition to a steadily built reputation made all the difference in the turnout for Judson. “That was the third time we had him on campus in the past year and a half,” she says. “So we have been building up that popularity by playing on the huge success of his YouTube video. We find that anytime we can find artists with media credits whether it is from a TV show or online, we definitely have a larger crowd, so we play that up as much as possible. Unfortunately we haven’t had the budget to support some of those bigger names before, but now that we see people are willing to pay some ticket prices to see these shows, our options have opened up a lot more.” So many small schools have to get creative these days if they want any shot of even middle-tier entertainment. You can’t bust the budget on one event.
“It would be very tempting to blow our budget on something really big, but it would make the rest of the year pretty drab. PAC is expected to fill in the blanks from all the other students organizations on campus, so if we don’t stretch and plan accordingly, we fail to accomplish our purpose here.”
ODU is passionate and dedicated about the events they hold and the students they host them for. With a quickly growing student body, difficult trends to predict, conservative audiences and a fine line to walk with today’s ever-shrinking activities budget, ODU’s PAC is making the best out of the challenges they face and enriching the lives of their students in the process.