Going in, our team initially felt like we were at a disadvantage. We were not business majors of any sort — no accounting majors, no finance majors, no business majors in general. As public relations students, we felt like we could create the campaign, but the material of the campaign would be a little more difficult.

But as we prepared for the campaign, we became more educated and well-versed on the content. We were able to talk about the long-term national debt with each other and think of meaningful talking points. We started to figure out how this related to us and how the debt can affect our future. However, this was not the difficult part of the campaign.

The long-term national debt is not sexy or fun. People are aware of the long-term national debt, but they don’t understand how it can affect their future with student loans, job placement or the fiscal security of our country. On a college campus where people leave with massive quantities of student loans and a future of debt because of it, students are not motivated to talk about the debt of our nation.

Once we began implementing our campaign, we learned a lot about ourselves and our community. We learned that it is hard to make the people who should care about the long-term national debt actually listen and become involved in conversations. It’s also difficult to get people to understand what you’re doing. Even when we were clear about our purpose and gave out free things, students were confused about what we were doing and even thought at times we were trying to raise money for education. When dealing with sub-zero temperatures and snow, students were not always willing to come to events.

But, we learned that persistence and transparency helped us reach students that did want to learn more. By finding our key audience of students that were concerned about the economic future of our nation, we were able to further educate students and make them concerned about our campaign. For those that may not be entirely interested, we leveraged trivia and gift cards to make them care more. We learned that incentives for involvement helped make students more involved, and that we needed to use creative methods to make people come to events in the cold.

Although involvement from campus was not at the level we hoped it would be, we learned what does work with our campus in order to be more successful in the future and made a positive impact on our student body by empowering them to be more informed about the long-term national debt.