(NOTE FROM JAKE MENTZEL: The following post was written by Jason Chen, with a few additions and changes made by me. It is also a continuation of his original post, here. Jason is a Clearnote Pastors College Student and just started his second year as an intern with Clearnote Campus Fellowship. He is in charge of outreach efforts on the campus of IU and was primarily responsible for the marketing and promotion of Sexual by Design.)
So our slow-build marketing plan didn't work out as we anticipated. We thought we'd be working hard to generate interest in the lectures, but as it turns out, from the first day we put chalk on the ground, the buzz around campus began to take on a life of its own.
Although some of our students were rattled by the opposition we were facing, we continued chalking. At this point we made our messages simpler and more direct. Once while we were out, a member of SAGE (Sexual Orientation and Gender Equality) told me and a CNCF student that they had just finished meeting to discuss how to respond to our advertising. We were told that they had decided to no longer erase our chalk. Very big of them! They had, however, set up a website to counter our efforts, www.bettermessage.org.
At the same time I went on campus to interview students to make a few promotional videos. We asked a series of simple questions related to the lectures—questions like, "What does it mean for you to be a man (or woman)?" Here's an example of what we ended up with...
(View all of the videos here: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3, Video 4).
We published these videos online and began posting them on Facebook.
Shortly after, a protest event entitled "Student Response to 'Sexual by Design'" was created on Facebook by a couple students and Doug Bauder, the director of the GLBT center on campus. 948 students were invited to the counter event, with 182 planning on attending.
Various plans were suggested in the description of the protest event:
While students freely made plans and added suggestions on the event wall:
Students used Facebook to organize protest planning meetings, spread slander, and create a media campaign of their own...
Jake has served as a pastor at Clearnote Church since 2010. He also teaches systematics at Clearnote Pastors College and Athanasius College. In his spare time, he leads Warhorn Media.
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