One of my responsibilities in my new role is to facilitate Friday night programming, so for the fall semester we’ve scheduled out a series of Friday events (I posted the list a few weeks back). Last Friday, we had our biggest crowd that we’ve EVER had for these Friday night events (they’ve been going on for a few years). So what was the epic event that blew the doors off the Brower Student Center?
BINGO.
I would never have expected it but we had 120 people for Bingo last Friday. This event runs from 9pm-midnight on a Friday night and 120 students came out to play Bingo. To give you some numbers, our student body is about 6000 students. Let’s assume that 50% leave every weekend (reasonable assumption from what I’ve seen). That means 3000 students were left on campus in some function – now that I think about it this actually might be high.
Anyway, even based on that 4% of the student body came out to play BINGO on a Friday night. I was floored.
These Friday night events have averaged about 50 up until last week, with bingo last time only hitting about 50 people.
Just to put this in perspective, Bingo is also the cheapest Friday night event we do, and it draws the biggest crowds.
Maybe we should start programming to our students the same way we do to old people!
That IS funny. When I was in school we went exclusively to free stuff since we just had no money. We didn’t have bingo, though — most of our fun was in seeing local bands, assuming you were old enough to get into the clubs where they played. If there was a cover charge, we didn’t see the band. Looking back on it, I can’t imagine those club owners were thrilled with the influx of crowds who didn’t spend money…!
Lisa,
That’s true! Especially since the bottom line at most of those joints is based on beer sales.
I LOVE Bingo.
See, what it is, is that we don’t want to go play Bingo with the old people. So if you give us a venue to do it and not feel stupid because 119 other people our age are there and, besides, it’s on campus and geared specifically toward us…we will come.
Tell TJ and Rick to get on that.
Meaghan, I’ll get right on that.
But seriously, that was a good explanation and I didn’t think of it that way.