For my groups project we created a campaign targeting the problem of littering within the community of SLA. SLA has a huge problem with litter around the school and we really want to see this change. For this campaign we spilt up rolls so we could have many things all supporting the same idea and hit people in ever-possible angle.

My part of this project was to create a pledge that students of SLA could take. This pledge consisted of how students of SLA should be acting and treating their school, for example throwing away their trash and encouraging others to also throw away trash. The pledge was to get people to promise they will try to keep the school clean. After people pledged they signed a large piece of paper that is now hanging in front of class so other students can see that their fellow students are working towards a better and clean school and to also remind the people that did sign it that they should remain true to the pledge they promised to follow.

I also created a twitter account. This account was created to help reach out to the SLA community even more. Many students have twitter and use twitter to stay connected. It is also used as a place to go when they need an escape during class, so why not fill their feed with facts about littering. I followed many students at SLA and also asked students to follow back. On this account students have hash tagged us a few times as well as a teacher. I plan to keep this twitter going and sending tweets out so people know how things in the school are looking.

The most challenging part of this project was trying to discover what exactly would help make this campaign a success. We didn't want to pick just anything, we wanted it to speak to people and make people care and that is why I directly spoke to students here at SLA and also through a common social media site that is highly used during school hours. 

            I feel like for the first few days of being assigned this benchmark my group members and I were stuck because we didn’t know what exactly to write about our topic, for everything on the internet felt repetitive and boring. We wanted to find a way to be creative, as well as inform people. We finally decided that it would be a good idea if we each picked a different way of broadcasting our topic, and put them all together in a website. The topic I chose was videos. I feel like my group members and I all got a little off topic leading us to do our topics, plus a little more work as well because we didn’t want to just do our assigned topics.

            For my video I made a video of me pretending to be at work at McDonald’s. I kept saying in the video how this is where you’re going to be if you drop out of high school still working at your minimum wage paying job that you had as a kid, into you adult years. I felt this would send the message to my peers and others that if you don’t graduate, you won’t be able to actually grow up and leave childish things behind, like your not well paying job at a fast food restaurant. As well as the video, I thought it would be cool if I added an add to promote why dropping out is negatively looked at so I did lots of editing and created an add that I’m pretty proud of, it’s actually on the cover of our website. Also, my group made a pledge not to drop out, which I thought was pretty inspiring.

            All in all I think that my group members and I all did an equal amount of work and it was a pretty good experience. I enjoyed the people I worked with and I wouldn’t change anything about my project!

Our Public Service Announcement is about the amount of litter in SLA. There is a large amount of students in our school not disposing of their trash properly and leaving it on the ground. This image of litter in our school is visible all around, in the bathroom where food is sitting in the drain, the halls where kids just toss their waste and forget about it, and finally the café where the most trash is left on the floor to be ignored.

Litter seems so unimportant and we do not fully realize what we are doing when we drop something on the ground to forget about later. Litter is bad but upon doing more research we discovered even more ill effects then just it looking dirty. Litter is a fire hazard and attracts bugs, animals, and bacteria. This is important for the students at our school to know because they are not only creating an unclean environment but an unhealthy and unsafe one.

Our group took ideas from other PSA sites. Chelsea got the idea for a pledge from a sight about healthy food (http://www.fightbac.org/). Catherine and I got the idea for our posters from the images we saw online and how well they got the idea out. (http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2009/11/the-80-best-guerrilla-marketing-ideas-ive-ever-seen/) Tyler wanted to have a place where all our efforts could come together and thus our website (https://sites.google.com/a/scienceleadership.org/littering/?pli=1) was born. Chelsea wanted to make the Twitter account to get more people following our movement.

Catherine and I worked on the posters. We wanted them to be colorful and have pictures so that they were interesting. Unfortunately we could not make a hundred posters all by hand and in different colors but the more posters the better. Putting them up was full of strategy; the posters had to go in highly populated places but also in places where littering was the main problem. We put the posters on blank walls so that it popped more because it was the only thing there. The ballroom on the second floor was bombed with poster as was the lunchroom. While walking the stairwell you come face to face with the posters because they are at eye level (a selling strategy that is used by companies). The posters are also placed for relevance, if the poster is about fire then it will be near a fire extinguisher or the ones about boys producing more litter are in the boys bathroom.

This project is really important because it is a big problem in our school that does not seem important but is makes such a difference and is such a nuisance.