University of Wisconsin-Madison students communicated and reminisced with Badgers around the world in the university’s second annual #UWRightNow campaign Wednesday.
University Communications, in partner with volunteers, created and maintained the website from midnight Wednesday to midnight Thursday to allow students, alumni, staff and the community to share their stories about UW-Madison, according to Assistant Director of Communications John Lucas.
The project’s facilitators accepted submissions from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vine and online submissions to tell the stories and experiences of contributors. The website had received submissions from over 1,000 people from 86 countries at approximately 10 p.m., according to the university’s Twitter account.
In its first year, the website intended to report on what students were doing at a particular moment all around campus, and the response University Communications received was much greater than they expected, Lucas said. But this year, creators wanted the site to contain more visual content rather than just written stories.
“This year, we decided we wanted to do something slightly different, and we wanted to make it more about people and people’s faces,” Lucas said. “We’re really trying to pull that out this year. And if you watch it for awhile, ideally you would see a lot of faces, more so than last year.”
Submissions on the site included everything from students hiking glaciers in New Zealand and two alumni getting engaged to house fellows serenading residents in elevators in Ogg Hall.
Lucas said the project allows students and activities that are not well-known to share their stories and add to the “richness of the campus.”
“A lot of times campus gets a rap as being a big, impersonal, [research-oriented], fairly homogenous and Midwestern,” Lucas said. “If you go back through [the website] you see global, you see diverse, you see personal and caring and not just the kind of the stereotypes … that are associated with us.”
Lucas said University Communications enjoyed conducting the project and, as long as people remain interested in #UWRightNow, the website could return for years to come.
“It’s been a really fun experience for all of us, and we’re just glad that people are interested,” Lucas said.
