How does one get students involved and volunteering? If you’re involved with the Office of Volunteerism, you do it with a brand new contest that gets students involved through social media.

Karen Drake, a junior marketing major, works as a marketing and promotions assistant in the office of volunteerism and came up with the idea for the contest. Drake sat down recently to discuss the reasoning behind the promotion.

“The basic gist of the social media contest is that you go volunteering with us on a trip, and then you take a picture, and then you submit it to us,” Drake said.

Drake went on to explain that the process is simple. Students have to take a picture while attending an official Rowan volunteer event. After that, they enter the picture in the drawing by emailing it to volunteer@rowan.edu. Each person that sends a photo automatically gets a prize for entering and then the photos are entered into a grand prize drawing for a prize pack. Voting for the winner of each weekly contest takes place on the Office of Volunteerism’s Facebook page.

“I came up with the idea because I wanted us to have more pictures because we certainly have a lot of volunteers,” Drake said. “So it’s not for a lack of people volunteering, it’s more that we always want to have more people volunteering, so we wanted to incentivize them. If that helps me get pictures to post on our Facebook page, that’s kind of like a double bonus.”

According to Drake, some of the trips students can attend are the annual beach sweep, where students help to pick up trash at the shore, or trips to the Ronald McDonald House to help families.

Drake says her final goal is for the contest to become popular on campus. She also hopes that it will catch on in the future.

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