Gallagher 1

Eyas (Messiahs Student Alumni Council) Professor Halloway Persuasion: Theory and Practice Brian Gallagher

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COMM 301: Persuasion Theory and Practice Executive Summary Proposal for Eyas
As part of the requirements for COMM 301, Persuasion Theory and Practice, Brian Gallagher offers the following recommendations: Develop a Logo that Helps Promote the Mission and Vision of Eyas Make Eyas an Acronym New Interactive Forms of Advertising (Video, Stencil, Big Picture, etc) Keep 1-2 Anchor Events, but then Diversify the Events to Bring in Diverse Audiences

Review this proposal and please contact me for additional information or questions.

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Charles Larson defines persuasion as the process of co-creation by sources and receivers of a state of identification through the use of verbal and/or visual symbols (Larson, 22). Walter Ong later says that it is used in a way that creates different ways of thinking and feeling. Persuasion is a tactic that can be used to benefit society negatively or effectively. It can call people to get behind a movement that is morally good or a movement that is morally bad. Persuasion can be manipulative and, negative connotations aside; this can be a good thing. Persuasion calls for people to enact their ability to have free will. It makes people decide for themselves what to believe. If one is convincing enough, one can influence a whole mass of people to get behind his or her idea, for example, the chapel Messiah College had with Eric Samuel Timm speaking. He convinced over 140 students to sponsor children with his powerful and heart felt talk during chapel. He grabbed the audiences attention from the very start and tailored to their sense of humor and related to them on a personal level. Chapel has never been that quiet and attentive in as many years as most can recall. His message hit home for many, including me. He persuaded me to sponsor two children for our floor. I rallied twenty-four guys on my floor to help support these children for the reminder of the year. He didnt guilt us into doing it. He presented the facts and his heart came through and everyone reciprocated his passion into supporting over 140 children. This is, however, only one form of persuasion. There are many ways one can persuade people to get behind a movement, idea or group. For my project, I analyzed Messiahs Student Alumni Council, or better known as Eyas because I am a part of this organization. I will address what

Gallagher 4 Eyas is and has been in the past, and how Eyas can fortify their identity in the student body using persuasive tactics. To begin, one must understand exactly what Eyas is and does. Eyas was founded in 2006, and was more a solution to a problem then anything. I have served on Eyas since spring semester last year as a first year. This group was originally under SGA, and grew into what it is now. A common misconception with Eyas is that its an acronym, however, this is false. According to Merriam-Webster, the term defined as an unfledged bird (Eyas). Messiah uses it as a baby falcon in its development stage, representing the bridge between students and alumni. This is needed because, whether most know it or not, every student who attends Messiah after they reach thirty credits is considered an alumni of the school. Eyas doesnt serve a segmented audience, which Larson defines as, customizing the message strategies to the specific target (Larson, 72). Eyas has to reach a wide range of audience since its dealing with a college campus. Instead of narrowcasting, which a segmented audience would call for, we have to broadcast, using social media, posters and word of mouth to help get our message out, which can be challenging. We are one of the few organizations with our own email address. Most groups on campus, when in a mass email, have a spokesperson you can contact if you have any questions rather than emailing back the group itself. Eyas, however, has their own email address, which helps us stand out above the other groups, verifying our legitimacy. The mission of Eyas as we define it every group meeting is to create and enhance relations within each class, throughout the college and between students and alumni so that the Messiah community can overflow with humble pride. The vision of Eyas is to reestablish class identity and emphasize school pride. In doing so, we must grasp the importance of class leaders, class participation and class unity. We work ambitiously in establishing duties on the council,

Gallagher 5 creating new class traditions and accentuating school spirit. We will facilitate and strengthen relations between alumni and current students. We accomplish all this by hosting various events on campus like Sophmore Mugging, Two Smore Years, tailgates for soccer or other sporting events, Homecoming Whiteout, Bombardment Tournament, Basketball Whiteout, Eggstravaganza and various Senior Week events. The Eyas headquarters are in the Alumni Office house, or the house behind Boyer. We have our every other weekly meeting in the Macbeth Conference Room in the office side of the house. For the most part, Eyas has been doing pretty well, but Eyas still has an identity problem on campus. Many people still dont understand exactly what Eyas is or does. This project aims to propose persuasive tactics that will help Eyas get its message, vision, mission and identity all throughout Messiah. In one of my smaller classes, I decided to conduct a poll. The majority of the class is Juniors and Sophomores with some Seniors. Out of the fourteen people polled, only four people had a clear idea of what Eyas was. They said that we represented a baby falcon and that we were a student alumni council. Four other people had a very vague idea of what Eyas is, but they mostly defined Eyas as the events we carry out or they only saw us as the alumni council and not the student part of the council, ironically. Six people - the majority of the class - had no understanding of what Eyas was at all. They labeled us as a student government organization. One person said, I have no idea. Evangelical Youth Against? One of my personal favourite ones was an organization that does stuff. Clearly, right off the bat, Eyas has an identity problem. We live on a Christian campus, and for the most part, Messiahs buzzword community is upheld, but that is the problem to begin with. Messiahs culture inhibits things from growing. People on a campus arent going to be keen on new things that they have to be used to. Students

Gallagher 6 in college want to be comfortable and have it as easy as they can, since they have enough to worry about already. So, a college students passive manner is already a punch in the gut to organizations like Eyas. The reality is most people in college are just here for the work, friends and events. People will recognize the events that we host, and that is the problem. One of our key persuasive tactics right now is to host many events like Bombardment Tournament or the Tailgate, and that is all well and good, but when it comes down to it, we will always be defined by the events we hold and not the actual organization we are due to the nature of college students. In the beginning of Eyas in 2006, all they wanted to do was create enough buzz through events so people would be talking about the group, but now that that initial stage of buzz is over, we have to now fortify the identity and what this group actually is. Students now a day want to be entertained, not informed, so analyzing our persuasive tactics proves alarming to the identity. We appeal to the needs of belongingness of the college students, which is to entertain them with various events that they will have fun at. By doing this, as Larson says, we aim to change peoples positive, neutral, or negative evaluationsof activities, people or institutions (Larson, 92). The way we carry out the events will directly relate to the way that the student body will view us. Pathos, or as Larson defines it, emotional appeal is a key part to how we persuade. We unite the whole student body around our teams for the tailgates we host, we bring the competitive side out of the students in our dodge ball tournament, we unite each class together with separate class events and then unite and we bridge the gap between the whole student body and the whole body of alumni that have passed through and experienced many similar things. All of this directly relates to the motivation of Eyas. We do these things in order to achieve our mission, which I think is a very good way to do that. Larson says that, people are driven by the

Gallagher 7 emotions its not about fact or logic. Increasingly, the only button you press is an emotional one. You find out what their needs are and you discover how to reflect those needs (Larson, 174). When it comes down to it, everyone wants to feel like they belong. By uniting the class around a single event or mission, Eyas appeals to the emotional needs to many of the students because it broadens their horizons, friend groups and lets them have a fun time doing that. What college student wouldnt want that? For these various events that we host, we rely heavily on advertisements, posters, Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth, which I think is very strong way to use nonverbal and verbal tactics. We, again, are appealing to what the student body uses most to get the message out. Attendance to these events are never a problem, unless, due to the nature of a college campus, there is an equally big event going on at the same time, which happens every once and a while. A couple weeks in advance we would post a reminder or event on Facebook. We would post posters all around campus or write on the sidewalks using sidewalk chalk. And if that is not enough, on the day of an event we host, we update our Twitter and Facebook pages. A majority of the members tell their friends to come out and have a good time, and also update their own personal Facebook or Twitter pages. This area is one of our strongest areas of persuasion. The media is a great tool to use to help achieve our message. Proxemics, or as Larson defines it, the use of physical space (261) is a vital reason why this works. Because our campus is a campus that all but 3% of the school population lives on campus, our media messages and events are made possible to meet the success that they meet. From all of this, there are many things we do correctly, but the issue of our identity still remains. Why dont students understand what Eyas is and what we are fully about? Why are we almost fully defined by the events we host and not by the organization we are? Why is that all the members of Eyas are on

Gallagher 8 the same page, but as soon as we step outside into the student body, regardless of the advertisements, events and clothing we wear to represent Eyas, are not? What can we do to improve this? My proposal for Eyas is simple. Upon meeting with Kristen Zummo, we came up with a plan to help Eyas fortify their identity. While we both think that our beliefs and values in the group are not the problem, and, for the most part, our policy is pretty strong, the change would have to come in the policy and how we attack advertising. The first thing we should do is change the logo of Eyas. The logo of Eyas currently does create a lot of buzz, but it doesnt work up to its full potential. The physical logo of Eyas, which is just the name, helps create dissonance and loss in group prestige in the student body. We should develop a logo that promotes the mission and vision of Eyas. Since a majority of the student body felt that Eyas was an acronym, then maybe we should develop an acronym to help the student body relate to us. It should stand for something that promotes the vision and mission of Eyas and puts the idea of what Eyas tries to carry out in the student body. People become immune to one message. Eyas uses a lot of posters and social media to get the word out on the events we have, but we should broaden our horizons on the way we reach our audience. We should use video advertisement as a way to do this. For example, with the Bombardment Tournament, we could use video advertising to show how much fun it would be to come out with the rest of your graduating class unite and take down the other classes in dodge ball. That would help get the message out on our events, since we could put a video like this on Facebook and Twitter. A video sometimes carries further than just words on a screen. Its better if the audience can physically see what is going to happen at some event rather then just hear about it. Another form of advertising that would help would be a Big Picture. We could take a

Gallagher 9 photo we have from the Whiteout March or some event where a lot of people attended and do a Wheres Waldo? type of picture and have the mission and vision of Eyas in the lower corner. The picture wall in the Eisenhower Commons draws a lot of attention, and if we blew up a picture to 30x40 of the Whiteout March, this would naturally draw attention and people would enjoy looking at it just so they could find themselves. With this picture being printed so big, if we put the mission and vision of Eyas on this picture, more people would see this and more people would understand what Eyas is. Interactive advertisements like that would help Eyas get their identity out in the open. Another thing Kristen and I discussed was the idea of an Eyas Stencil. At a lot of State Universities, there are secret societies or fraternities who paint their greek symbols all over campus. This gets people talking about that group, and in turn, they get more attention. Eyas should use the stencil of the font of Eyas that we have to get people to talk about us. If students are walking to class and they occasionally see Eyas on the sidewalk in chalk, people will start wondering what this name is and what it does. Then from this, when we start promoting an event that we want to do, when people see the name Eyas on there, they would be more likely to come out to this event so they can finally learn what this group does. From this, if we diversify events, we bring in diverse audiences. If we keep one to two anchor events in our playbook, and then each year do more and more different events, we then start reaching out to more and more of the campus and not just one segment of it. With Bombardment, we would attract the people who enjoy sports and dorm/class unity. With the Eggstravaganza, we reach out to a majority of the students and also alumni, so each time, we bring different people in. Keeping the events fresh would get rid of Eyas being defined as the events that we do, but there has to be those one or two anchor events so people wont totally forget who we are.

Gallagher 10 With any plan, there are strengths and weaknesses. The strengths of this plan are in the different advertising and diversifying the events. Many people can be immune to the messages that Messiahs groups try to send out. Everybody sends out mass emails and sets up posters, but not everyone does things with video and pictures. If Eyas can put different advertising tactics to the test, like the stencil idea, it will improve the number of people that come out to our events. Also, the events themselves are another strength of this plan. To make one to two anchor events and then do different events around them would allow us to get a fresh audience in at every new event we do, but keep our identity with the student body with events familiar to them. Both of these things will be vital to what Eyas tries to accomplish. If we put these into action, more and more people will come out to the events we host and learn about who we are. A weakness to the plan may be making Eyas an acronym. If people for so long have thought that Eyas was an acronym when it hasnt been and then all of sudden we make Eyas stand for something that could create confusion in the student body. It would help newer students understand what Eyas is all about, but students and alumni who know what Eyas is all about could be confused by this change. If the acronym were to work, it would have to be an acronym that does a very good job at getting the message of Eyas across in four words. That would be a daunting task for anybody, especially a council that deals with both alumni and students. Upon talking with Kristen about this proposal, we were on the same page on a lot of things. My aim was to inform her on the things that I was working on, and from that, we both talked about different ways Eyas could act on getting its message out to the student body. Eyas may start acting on these things that were proposed. We want to use video advertising for our events. We want to use the stencil of our name around campus to create mystery and get people talking about us. The true feedback from this proposal will come from future analysis of what

Gallagher 11 those things will do for the group, but my hope is that it will only help Eyas in getting the student body to understand more about their mission and vision. I learned a lot about persuasion through this project. I learned that persuasion is more then just convincing someone to get behind an idea or a movement. Persuasion is more about the receiver then the message. One can give the same message to one audience and have it received very well and then the next day, give that same message and have it received terribly. Eyas cant advertise to one group of people on campus, it has to broadcast to the whole campus to try to spark interest. Using one form of advertising or one type of event wont draw in enough people for a group like Eyas to succeed. We have to advertise and reach out to many different people on Messiahs campus. That is why persuasion isnt so much about what you say, but who you say it too. Persuasion is a very powerful tool that can help spread information and ideas to a mass of people, or it can be a message that is convincing enough to get a person to join a certain council thats main job is to persuade people to come out to events and have fun with your peers and people who have gone before you, which was the case for me. Eyas was persuasive enough to get me to join. As a whole, Eyas persuasion is very good, but changing things up a bit wouldnt hurt their chances to reaching out to more people on campus, whether that be having them join the actual council or getting them to come out to events.

Gallagher 12 Works Cited "Eyas." Merriam-Webster. Web. 23 Nov. 2011. <http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/eyas?show=0&t=1320868316>. Larson, Charles. Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility. 12th ed. Wadsworth, 2009. Print.