General Action Plan

At this point in time we have several key ideas that we feel we could take forward as potential resolutions to this brief;

- i Student Forum - a dedicated area for students, offering a place for discussion as well as local information. The Independent already has a student area, although it is quite cluttered and in many ways too synonymous with other areas of the website to warrant much interest amongst students.

- Smartphone App - Those with a smartphone would have the option of receiving snippets of information when they first check their phone in the morning, in the same way they might check their facebook or email. This would tie in heavily with the 'news matrix' on the second page of every 'i', which contains very short summaries of the articles contained in the paper. Should there be something that catches the viewers attention, then they might choose to go and buy the paper on the way into university, or on a break.

- Newspaper vending machines - Just a simple one really, but it makes sense. Most students visit the NEWSagents to buys cigarettes and cans of drink, not newspapers. Potentially by placing a few vending machines in the some well thought out spots around college/university, students might be encouraged to drop that spare 20p in and see if there's anything worth reading about. More often than not there is one or two articles which will warrant the purchase; after all it is only 20p.

- Poster Campaign - This would act as the foundation of the entire campaign as such, the thing that ties the other three elements together in terms of promoting the newspaper to students. It seems like an obvious choice as well, although it is perhaps the aspect that will require the most thought and care, if it is to be effective.



There we have it, the current four pillars of this campaign. Of course we are going to have to constantly re-analyse the situation, continue researching and keeping a spare eye open for any other ideas that crop up.

However, in the time we have available, this seems like quite a reasonable workload for us to create an effective and workable campaign.

Currently Yafet has been playing around with some visual ideas for the posters, his blog is here:

http://y-bisrat1013-dp.blogspot.co.uk/

Tonight I am going to begin working on some concepts and initial ideas for the proposed Student Forum.

By Wednesday (our final crit date), we should have the majority of these elements ready for feedback and improvement, which will leave us ready for the YCN deadline which I believe is the 27th of March.