ELSA Day 2017
Success achieved
We engaged our members to show the world what we stand for.
- Website
- https://www.elsa.org/elsa-day
- Project dates
March 2017 - February 2018
Project team
- Kerli Kalk, Vice President for Academic Activities
- Deniz Hatemi, Vice President for Seminars & Conferences
- Krzysztof Rumpel, Vice President for Marketing
Tools & Systems
We used the Facebook’s Camera Effects Platform and promoted the campaign on our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages and groups.
Introduction
The aim of the ELSA Day is to jointly demonstrate our human rights engagement by providing our members legal education opportunity.
As part of the first edition of the ELSA Day, ELSA organised the ELSA for Children Panel Discussion in the European Parliament. For the second edition, the International Board organised the Panel Discussion in the European Parliament on Human Rights on the Internet. For the 5th edition ELSA held a Webinar on Migration Law together with the Council of Europe.
Moreover, during the five past editions, students organised moot court competitions, panel discussions, legal debates, institutional visits and other activities all over the Network.
For us, students and young lawyers from the European Law Students’ Association, ELSA Day is a worldwide celebration, which focuses every year on different aspects of Human Rights.
For the 6th edition of ELSA Day, we wanted to contribute in a special way to raising awareness about the ELSA Day events. Thus, an ELSA Day Campaign was launched under the title “I stand for access to justice beyond borders”. The Campaign has been launched on the 25th of October 2017.
Discovery
We decided to engage as many of our members as possible, hoping this will give us an opportunity to build the biggest reach. As the ELSA Day is the project focusing on Human Rights education, we wanted to target students, mainly law students. We decided to create an unique Facebook profile picture campaign supported with posts on out Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Facebook was our choice because of the easy-to-use tool to set a profile picture frame and because it provides the biggest target group in all 43 of our countries.
Objectives
We wanted to raise an awareness about the project and organised events, mainly the ELSA Webinar organised with the Council of Europe. We wanted to unify the whole ELSA Network around one goal - promotion of human rights, and one project - ELSA Day.
We set a goal of 1000 people setting our profile picture frame on their Facebook profiles.
Activities
ELSA Day event teaser
The ELSA Day is a complex and unique project. On one day the whole ELSA Network (44 countries, 300+ Universities) organises projects and events focused on Human Rights Education.
To make it happen, ELSA International undertook following steps:
- Choose a topic of the 6th edition, Access to justice beyond boarders, together with our Human Rights Partner – Council of Europe.
- Create supporting materials regarding the topic for the Network
- Create marketing uniformity materials
- Choose National Coordinators - one association member per country
- Gather specific projects information through the form
- Organise the social media promotion campaign on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
- Organise the social media awareness campaign - Facebook profile pictures frames
- Organise the ELSA Webinar livestreamed from Council of Europe’s headquarters in Strasbourg
- Evaluate the events through the form
- Choose and award the best event/project in the Network
To make it unified, we created social media templates and materials, which we shared with the whole network:
- Post template
- Cover photos
- Event photos
- Speaker photo frame
- Profile picture frame
The project started in March 2017 with choosing the topic, and ended in February 2018 with the evaluation of the events. The announcement of the best project will happen in April during the International Council Meeting of ELSA in Lviv.
The International Board of the Association focuses on the ELSA Day since the first day of the term (1st August 2017) alongside with other projects we run.
The idea behind the ELSA Day and the ELSA Day Campaign is to develop unity in the ELSA Network and to make all of our 50k+ members focus on one topic on one day. It’s a unique challenge and achievement since the 1st edition.
Innovation
We believe that Facebook’s Camera Effects Platform and Facebook Live Videos are not used widely enough by the students’ associations. It is a great way to engage all of the members of an international Network like ours.
Marketing
Our promotion is mostly done via Social Media. We use a Facebook Page (62k likes), multiple Facebook Groups, a LinkedIn page (6k+ followers), two LinkedIn Groups and our Twitter account.
We believe that the usage of the Facebook Frame Studio and Profile Pictures Frames is an underestimated but very effective tool for promotion of projects focused on the some cause.
Challenges
The biggest challenges are:
- To coordinate the whole Network of law students in organising events
- To make everybody aware of the uniformity marketing materials and to make them use them correctly
To overcome them:
- We had National Coordinators to facilitate the knowledge transfer and to motivate our members
- We used the Network of Marketing officers to spread the materials package and provided guidelines on their usage.
Achievements
We set an objective of having 1000 members setting the profile picture. The final result was over 2,100 people.
We also wanted to engage the Network in organising events and succeeded with this, having around 150 events in 37 countries organised.
Targets & Statistics
We have managed to make over 2.1k members set our profile picture frame during the Campaign on Facebook.
Moreover, our posts on facebook, connected to the campaign, reached more then 50k people.
The main event, the live streamed ELSA Webinar, broadcasted using Facebook Live Service, reached over 105k people, getting over 21k views in total.
Financials
As a non-profit and voluntary-based association, we didn’t use any financial resources for the campaign.
What would we do differently?
ELSA Day logo
We will recommend the next team to consider rebranding ELSA Day, so the name and logo send clearer information what the project is about. We believe that the promotion approach and tools we had were the best choices we could make with the very limited resources we have.
Wider impact
We are happy that our Network unified its forces to show how engaged and strong it is. For a period of time, we could observe our frame on the Facebook profiles of most of the active officers in ELSA. It provided the feeling of unity and additional boost of motivation for both international officers as well as the national and local members of ELSA.
The purpose of ELSA is “To contribute to legal education, to foster mutual understanding and to promote social responsibility of law students and young lawyers.” We believe that promoting the human rights education is the best way we can fulfill it. Thus, we are very happy to see our Association working towards the common goals.
