HUMANS VS.

ZOMBIES

The event that wont die | Submitted by the UOW Rotaract Club

Contents
Overview: ................................................................................................................................... 2 Aims and Objectives .................................................................................................................. 3 Effect on Community Perceptions of Rotaract: ......................................................................... 3 Distinctiveness of the task or project: ........................................................................................ 4 Modes of raising awareness and recognition received .............................................................. 9 Effort of the Club in Raising Awareness of Rotaract .............................................................. 12 Results Achieved ..................................................................................................................... 12

Humans vs. Zombies is the biggest event I have ever seen the UOW Rotaract Club attempt. It was an event geared at promotion and publicity, it was always going to offer quirky, striking visual images, but the reach that its had has been mind-blowing Aidan Simmons, event organiser. Overview:
Lets start with the rules. At its core Humans vs. Zombies is essentially a giant game of tag with Nerf guns. All players begin the game as Humans who are attempting to survive the Zombie apocalypse. Humans are being hunted by the original Zombie/s in our game these were members of the UOW Rotaract club and one keen competitor. Humans are converted into Zombies via being tagged by a Zombie, Humans can stun Zombies with a direct hit from a foam dart fired from a Nerf gun or by throwing a rolled up ball of socks, Zombies are to stay put for 30 seconds after being stunned. Friend and foe are distinguished by the position of a bright orange bandanna, Humans wear this band on their arm and Zombies wrap it around their heads. The game of Humans vs. Zombies is not our idea; originally it began in 2005 at Groucher College, America, the game has since spread virally around the world. The UOW Rotaract club thanks Joe Sklover of Gnarwal Studios (who administer the game at an International Level) Humans vs. Zombies is usually free to play and we were grateful to be given permission to fundraise. Humans vs Zombies was originally designed to be played out over the course of a week and thus was tailored to American style colleges where the bulk of students live on campus. This style of play wasnt ideal for those looking to compete at the University of Wollongong, therefore, our game was amended to be played over the course of a single day. With this in mind we attempted to set about finding a means of keeping competitors engaged and moving around the campus to minimize camping (that is staying put in one location). To achieve this aim we devised player classes. At the beginning of the game competitors were assigned with information kit which contained the rules, a map and their objectives card with their player class. Each class had to reach certain checkpoints around the University, we set up 20 of these in total. Beyond promotion, the event involved considerable planning and logistical work, for our first attempt at the event it was fabulous that so many competitors spoke glowingly of the event afterwards.

Aims and Objectives

Raise the profile of UOW Rotaract within the University and the broader community Create a vibrant, visually entertaining and engaging event that draws media attention Forge closer ties with University staff, particularly the Centre for Student Engagement who administer clubs on Campus Raise $1000 dollars for Rotarys End Polio Now campaign Have up to 150 players take part

Effect on Community Perceptions of Rotaract:

In marketing Brand/Name recall is thought to be one of the hardest tasks for a campaign to achieve, it is pleasing that on our survey (which had no mention of our name) some respondents mentioned UOW Rotaract specifically. Post event we put out a feedback survey via SurveyMonkey, some of the responses from the general feedback box were the following: This game was perhaps the most fun I've had in months, I will never cease to sing praise of the Rotaract Club had a stroke of genius when they came to this idea, and the fact that my money went to supporting End Polio Now Campaign gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling for each zombie scum I sent back to hell.
7/9/2013 7:05 PM

Great idea and execution. I cant wait until the next one!
7/9/2013 1:44 PM

It was AWESOME. Thanks so much for hosting it!

7/5/2013 3:52 PM

You folk did a great job, and I am extremely impressed by your organisation of the event, as a first time effort :-)
7/5/2013 1:02 PM

Do it again! please!
7/10/2013 12:29 PM

It was amazing and should be done again if at all possible!!!!!

7/9/2013 5:30 PM

On the event survey we also included a general question regarding how satisfied competitors were with the event: We believe it a fantastic result that 77% of competitors surveyed (36

people) said they were extremely satisfied, furthermore no competitor responded that they were unsatisfied. We have also had a fantastic response on Facebook to our content, we have seen several massive spikes in the clubs post reach both in the lead up to HvZ and in the aftermath specific figures will be detailed further later on. We believe Humans vs. Zombies has had an overwhelmingly positive impact to community perceptions of Rotaract. During our regular recruitment drive on Clubs Day we asked people if they had heard of our event and our club a significant proportion of the people we spoke with had, which is a stark difference from previous years.

Distinctiveness of the task or project:

We believe Humans vs. Zombies to be an incredibly distinctive event. Humans vs. Zombies is still in its infancy in Australia, our event was the first time it had run successfully in Wollongong and the first time it had run in New South Wales for some years. As outlined earlier Humans vs. Zombies offers striking visuals and has made for a quirky good news story. The best way for us to illustrate this point is to share some images taken on the day and explain the people in them and their significance. Competitors begin assembling at the start of proceedings we had a few keen beans arrive the second registration opened at 8:30am.

Our treasurer Alex Jessup created this fabulous logo and also created a stencil which we applied on the bags with acrylic paint. One of the competitors looks menacing, note bandanna on head, he is your enemy!

A group of competitors get ready before the start of round one. The competitor on the far left has come armed with socks which many players used when zombies got in close about to make the final strike.

We were honoured to have Local State MP for Keira, Ryan Park (pictured left) present to open the event, Aidan Simmons, event organiser and current UOW Rotaract President (pictured right) took the bulk of the emcee duties for the day

This war cry from competitors could be heard hundreds of meters away at the CSE main offices. For any concerned, as you can see Nerf weapons are not realistic looking, at all.

Tiarna Cunial, the non-Rotaractor original Zombie, came all made up and has informed us that next year she is considering the use of prosthetics to make her transformation to one of the undead more realistic.

The UOW Rotaract Club is also indebted to Charis Dobbs for her assistance as Chief Makeup artist for the day. A large portion of competitors got right into the spirit of things and were made up to look fantastic.

One of these was UOW Rotaractor and original Zombie Craig Dunne, who has appeared in many of the press photos/coverage we have had!

A combination of strong, colourful and vibrant visual images mixed with the quirky and offbeat nature of the event has made it an extremely distinctive undertaking. In a busy marketplace like UOW (which has 90 other clubs operating) recall is a hard thing to achieve as is the ability to cut through noise. The fact that we have managed to achieve this speaks volumes to the task performed.

Modes of raising awareness and recognition received

The primary medium used to raise awareness of this project and our club has been social media, on which as outlined earlier, we have had phenomenal successes. Throughout the lead up to the event the club also maintained an event blog which was filled with resources for competitors and used to push out press releases. The primary avenue used to communicate with competitors has been through an event page set up by the UOW Rotaract Facebook page which can be found here. This event page allowed us to have direct interactions with those seeking more information about the event and to energise those looking to come. An example of this was the following post: Two weeks to go fellow humans. If this post gets over 30 likes, we will release a teaser section of the map with a handful of checkpoints on it! #hvzatuow, this post got 32 likes and as promised we did a small map reveal, which garnered 11 likes. Under the new Facebook insights in the lead up to Humans vs. Zombies the club reach had peaks of between 250-320, this increased the day before which saw a rise to 574, to put it into context these are fairly strong numbers in their own right as our reach usually hovers in the hundreds. This pales in comparison for the figures recorded in the aftermath as praise came in from the competitors and our image galleries were littered with likes and tags. The highpoints of the campaign were spikes of 1,238 and 1,421 on the 5th of July and the 7th. Shown below are the insights for the month prior:

Coupled with our Social Media exploits we also made extensive use of word of mouth sales and in the week before the event went on a promotions blitz. Members of the promotions team set up out the front of the UOW Library, during hours of high foot traffic (usually 11-2pm) and handed out literally hundreds of event flyers. Flyers were also

distributed during any regular event we ran and posters were placed around UOW, including ones placed prominently at the UOW Unibar front counter. A copy of this poster is included on the next page. Recognition received for Humans vs. Zombies came in the form of strong media coverage. The night of the event we featured in our local television news bulletin, huddled round the TVs in the Unibar a cheer went up from the event team and a few competitors who were watching. The following morning we woke up to find our event on the front cover of the local paper (shown below) with an accompanying article featuring prominently in the paper. Since then Humans vs. Zombies and UOW Rotaract has featured in two other articles one can be found here and the other can be found here. We have been blown away by the amount of coverage and the praise heaped upon the club. One of the most outstanding pieces of coverage we received was Aidans blog post for the official End Polio Now blog. This article was linked on Facebook and has at time of writing 345 likes and 114 shares, including shares from the official Rotaract Page. Following this coverage UOW Rotaract picked up 12 likes overnight the single biggest jump that we have recorded. In the space of approximately three months the club has had a massive increase in total likes, growing from 206 to 261. We also received recognition through comments from the Lord Mayor of Wollongong, Gordon Bradbury, Ryan Park MP for Keira and Peter Doran the head of the clubs program at UOW, these comments can be found here.

These posters were printed in A5, A4, A3 and one in A2 and placed around campus or handed out to passers-by.

During the month of June the UOW Rotaract updated our Facebook page frequently, filling it with information about Humans vs. Zombies as well as information about Rotarys Campaign to End Polio. We were also fortunate to leverage off the strength of resources at UOW including the Student Life page who shared our event and the featured event tab on the UOW Current Students page where our event lived for about a month. The Club also experimented with a new medium it had not tried before and made an infographic about the results of the campaign that was well received.

Effort of the Club in Raising Awareness of Rotaract

Humans vs. Zombies was a lot of work, but it has been a labour of love, I have wanted to run this event since early 2011, this year I finally did and it was awesome, Aidan Simmons. As we have outlined Humans vs. Zombies was an event that took a tremendous amount of logistical work. The campaign was maintained for literally months and pushed hard by members of the UOW Rotaract Club. It was an event that was promoted at literally everything we did for the start of the year. But the end results of fantastic press coverage, strong social media growth and engagement have made it more than worthwhile.

Results Achieved
The net earnings for Humans vs. Zombies totalled somewhere in the vicinity of $2000, of this the UOW Rotaract Club donated $1500 dollars (after costs) to the Rotary Foundation to go towards the End Polio Now campaign. We were overjoyed to have met our fundraising goals for the event, proving that an event which was fun and vibrant could also be financially successful. Humans vs. Zombies also achieved its other key aims of broad media coverage as has been detailed in this submission, it has left the UOW Rotaract club in a strong position with many contacts to draw on for our next major event. Since Humans vs. Zombies the UOW Rotaract club has worked closer than ever with the Centre for Student engagement and are seen to be one of the strongest clubs on campus. The only aim Humans vs. Zombies did not achieve was final player numbers with 90+ taking part, which was short of the 150 we wanted, however now with proof of concept and an energised player base we are certain that HvZ 2 will exceed all expectations and be even bigger and bolder than the first one.