When thinking about Toyon's future, the first word that came to mind was "expansion." Toyon has this breadth of quality writing laying in wait to be read, and sadly, I've come to realize that many issues will never leave the Toyon room. Growth in our readership is neccessary for our literary journal, and while we are supported by the university, many university students aren't even aware of Toyon exists. For the literary journal's future, advertising must become a more important feature. While we're trying consistently to advertise our call for submissions and produce the journal, we fail to advertise simply reading Toyon and it's newest issue. Additionally, while the semester progressed I noticed a lack of flyers, which means students weren't being made aware of the journal at all once the time limit of having your flyer posted, was up. Since we know there's a limit to how long our flyers will be allowed to stay on the boards in the halls, we can keep a sheet to track this and re-post flyers as needed.
There's a tendency to do a week or two of advertisment, then forgetting all about promoting Toyon as the deadline for submissions passes. In order to keep Toyon's presence strong amongst HSU, fliers, tabling, etc., need to continue throughout the semester, not just at one stage of production. As I mentioned before, many students have no idea we exist and we need to change that by reaching out to them more than we have in the past. An idea to increase awareness of Toyon in general, is by creating t-shirts for the staff. Staff members can wear their shirts periodically throughout the semester increasing Toyon's exposure, and encouraging others to ask "what's Toyon?" or be reminded of us throughout their day. When I created a shirt for Astronomy day I had many people coming up to me and asking where I got my shirt from and what was astronomy day. This allowed me to pitch the event to the student, answer any questions they have, and invited them to joing the event on Facebook to remind them of it later. When someone says they're attending an event through Facebook, it posts to their wall, increasing the amount of people exposed to the event. When thinking about the spring release, I feel we could apply the same ideas listed above. We could have the students involved in the spring course, consistently advertising the release different ways each week. For example, we table a few days for the first week, next we post the flyer another week, and as we draw closer to the date, we announce to our classes, then repeat. Again, I think t-shirts would be a great way to effortlessly advertise ourselves and engage in conversations with the public about who we are and what we do. Something I would reccomend for future staff members, are to think of other ways to engage our readership with Toyon. By this I mean asking the reader's to submit their personal suggestions, comments, stories, etc. about Toyon, to Toyon. We could encourage people to speak with us so we can tailor our content to what people want to read about. Or we could have them send photos of them reading our journal so we can post it to our social media platforms. Another idea could be taking personal testimony from reader's and sharing them at the end of the journal. We could advertise this to our readership, asking them to submit what Toyon means for them for a chance to be published at the end of the journal. For me it felt as if there's a disconnect between us and the audience, and I want future staff to work on creating a bridge between the journal and the audience. People want to feel as if they're apart of something, that they have a voice. Over the next five years that's something I see Toyon working on giving them, in addition to becoming more aggressive in advertising our journal outside of submissions.
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December 2016
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