I think that a great way to promote PPUK to students would be to have a website specifically aimed at student Pirates, covering our aims and policies and explaining their relevance to students. Let's say we have a website ppsoc.org.uk (or whatever, the domain isn't important right now). On this website would be information about the PPUK's policies, specifically focussing on students; why the PPUK is the right party for the digital age, with a subsection covering students; and information about student campaigns, such as freshers' week recruitment drives.
Of course, we could do that with the current website, just have a student section. But that's only a part of my idea, I also propose that PPUK student societies be hosted on a subdomain (say, uni.ppsoc.org.uk), with a map of societies on the main website to make it easy to find them. Additionally, the main website could have news from the individual societies (perhaps broken down by region to avoid information overload); also, information to help Pirates form societies at universities without one—such as a stock constitution and goals. Officers in societies would get an @uni.ppsoc.org.uk email address (what about the username scheme though—I propose leaving it up to individual societies to decide that). Finally, the individual society websites would all link back to the main website, and possibly share a common appearance.
I think that this would work because it would:
- Explain our policies and why students should care/are affected
- Provide a simple way to find or get help founding a society
- Aid communication between societies
- Aid widespread campaigns
I think that our policies are perfect for students (as should be evidenced by the number of young members), and that an attractive and useful website is the ideal medium to promote ourselves through.
Things that need thinking about:
People: I can code it all given a week or so. However, my design, image-editing, and content-writing skills are rather weak.
Name: I like "PPSoc", but I'm notoriously bad at names.
Email: Allowing societies to set up new email addresses (I'm thinking just forwarders) would require privileged access to a mailserver.
Societies: Would need to choose someone to handle their web stuff, such as their own website and email addresses. Though I don't imagine this would be a problem.
CMS: A CMS would need to be built to manage the main website and mini-sites. This shouldn't be a problem.
I have a few ideas of what the design (of the main page, at least) should be like, so I'll have a go at making a mockup later.
