The Reason Behind Our Website

This website was created for a final project in the Environmental Communications course offered at Eckerd College during the Fall of 2024.

For our final project, our group decided to tackle the issue of climate anxiety. The primary audience for our advocacy campaign was college students and faculty on Eckerd College’s campus. The course theme that we connected our project to is hope appeals, a mode of drawing on humans' desire for connection and the motivation to be moved by our aspirations (Pezzullo, Cox 216). We used this to offer students signs of hope in the environmental sphere because there is a lot of negativity in the world now and people often feel immobilized by it. Our objective was to try to give Eckerd students and faculty different hopeful books to read, movies and shows to watch, businesses to support, and organizations to join to help alleviate feelings of anxiety about the state of the environment and the climate. 

To do this, we made signs that encouraged people to come talk about climate change and their anxieties, and we made a website with links to all of the supportive things listed above. Our goal for this project was to get 100-150 people to engage with our website/come up to our table. After our first tabling event on campus, we realized that we were going to need an incentive for people to come talk to us, so we bought some stickers to make our table more intriguing. The increase between our first tabling event and our second tabling event made us more hopeful that we could reach our target. After tabling a total of three times, we had nearly 100 engagements! We decided that we wanted to spread our website a little further, so we decided to print out QR codes with the link to our website and pasted them around campus to try and get more engagement. As of December 9, 2024, we have over 140 visits to our website, which is very encouraging!

In addition to getting stickers to encourage students to come to the table, we also reached out to local sustainable businesses which we had included on our website, and asked if they would be willing to offer student discounts. Although they did not offer specific discounts for students, there were some deals that businesses offer on a regular basis. Jade Soap Shop has a 20% off gift bundle, Lake View Farm store offers a cash discount, and Red Hot Tiki Spicy Gourmet Market has online discounts. If we had had more time, we would have liked to find more businesses to get Eckerd students excited about supporting local sustainable businesses. 

Ultimately, this was a very rewarding project for us, and we had quite a few interesting conversations with students who are feeling the effects of climate anxiety and were glad to have an outlet to talk about it.

See some pictures of our tabling set-up below!