Goal of this Guide

This guide has two primary objectives:

• To provide strategy recommendations for AI safety groups implementing physical outreach.
• To streamline physical outreach by using pre-existing templates

Effectiveness

<aside> ⚠️ Despite its simplicity physical outreach is often a lesser efficient outreach strategy. We recommend groups pursue Staff Directed Outreach, tabling, and attend the activities fair in addition to or instead of physical outreach. That being said, hanging up posters can be a lot of fun for your group. They also tend to be much more feasible for larger groups with larger leadership teams who can afford the time investment of designing, printing, and hanging posters all around campus.

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Flyers

Flyer Design

It’s much more difficult to catch viewers' attention with a public flyer than one displayed in an email. As such, the best public flyers are eye-catching and “clickbaity”. If possible, offer something an average student would want. “Free Dinner!”, “Free Book!”, “Cash Prizes!” are good examples.

Fellowship flyers should include:

• A link to your website or directly to fellowship interest form/application
  • Keep this link short - https://tinyurl.com/app
  • ❗️We think have a decent website is critical for this strategy to pay off!
• A call to action "Fill out our interest form and get a free book!"
• Application deadline
• Info on an intro event, if you're running one
  • Don't make this front and center. We recommend adding this as a footnote

Flyer Placement

Flyer location is critical to effectiveness. In general, we think most student orgs flyer strategies are lazy and mild. Put flyers in noticeable high traffic places. The following are our typical flyer locations, listed in order by effectiveness.

Place flyers 1-2 weeks before an event or deadline

1. Classrooms
   • Oftentimes this isn’t allowed, but many groups do it anyways.
   • Hang in front of the class. I like to put them as high as possible in the center of the class's line of sight. So the professors can’t easily take it down, and the whole class can see it.
   • Discussion rooms are great for this.
   • Classrooms are typically unlocked on weekends, so I like to take a big stack of flyers and cover as many rooms as possible in different buildings.
2. Dorms
   • Make sure this won’t get you in substantial trouble
   • Go floor by floor hanging a flyer on a bulletin in the floor’s public space.
   • This is especially effective very early in the year. (like the day that students are moving in)
3. Random Outdoor Spaces
   • There are a lot of walls that hundreds of students walk past a day.
   • When the weather's nice it's worth hanging flyers on the sides of certain buildings so they stand out to walkers.