RAW

The first RAW demonstration I visited was the display case in the Student Center. It was effective in catching people's attention, but I don't know about much else. I think a lot of people probably stopped, but continued after a quick lookover. I don't think giving people stats is very effective. Everyone has heard a million times that such and such amount of people die from drinking every year. However, in conjunction with all of the other activities, its effectiveness is increased because the only way that this message is going to be taken in is if it's everywhere. If RAW permeated campus well enough that people couldn't escape it and they had to think about it, then it would work, and in that case, every little thing is effective.

The other project I visited was the mock tailgate. I think it was more effective because it sort of demanded everyone's attention. No one walked by it and didn't think about the message or talk to their friends about it. The one problem with it was that the message was a little hard to pull out. Everyone could clearly see that these people were pretending to drink and they were really annoying, but I don't know how many people were able to realize the message of RAW. I think this could have been solved if there were a lot of signs up that said "RAW" and other things like "Yeah you really are this annoying when you drink too much."

I think the RAW campaign was probably successful to an extent. A lot of people had to think about their drinking and a few of them probably changed their drinking habits. Done bigger and more persistently, this type of campaign could do a lot of good.