[Education] Advice for promoting/running uni art club?
So I'm an animation student, studying on a small campus that also has: visual arts, design, and film students. I recently started a club where we meet 1x a week to practice our sklls (reddit wont let me say that word?? because it has kll in it???). Anyways I'm getting off track. We've been doing plein air and still life (no figure drawing because a different club already does that). We had 10—15 attendees at some sessions but the last 2 sessions was just me and the other 2 people running the club.... I'm worried if we don't have enough people attending, then my uni will shut down our club because they have rules on how many members clubs must have that are based on the bigger campuses in my state, not our tiny arts campus. And arts students (in my opinion) are notoriously unorganised, so as we get to the end of the semester right now, most people are catching up on late work and don't have the time to attend extra classes for fun.
So I'm brainstorming ideas for promoting the club to get more members so we arent shut down. And I don't just want to promote to students but also local artists in general because my uni allows outsiders to join our clubs. Does anyone have any ideas or has done something like this before?
Here's what we've tried so far:
- I started by promoting the club with memes which worked well with animation and games students. But I worry if I do any more "touch grass" jokes about plein air, it will get very tiring. ‐ Someone made a reel (using one of my "touch grass" memes I drew) which got 100 likes — the most successful thing anyone has done to promote our club so far.
- I've put posters on campus. Since animation/games students love memes, I put a silly poster in those rooms and a more practical poster on the club bulletin board.
- I post 2x a week to inst@gram (sorry another restricted word). One post is the info for the next weeks session like location and theme, the other post is photos from the session. I also encourage engagement by asking people to share their art and tag to go in the post, so theres like mutual benefit of exposure.
- I then share each club post to my story on my own art account (which has more followers) at least 1x
- I have made a few posts to some uni di$cord servers to promote the club.
I'm all out of ideas, my brain hurts. I worry that this club is too niche. To me, plein air and still life is very fun so I would attend a poorly advertised drawing session without thinking, but I worry that everyone else finds it too boring so my club is doomed 😔
Please share if you have any ideas. And sorry if I've broken any sub rules, I got a few popups about restricted words I don't understand (why cant i say sk!ll ☹️?)
Posted May 7, 2025, 12:15 PM UTC