Fort Lewis College | Keep Calm Campaign

The curriculum at Fort Lewis College is going through major changes in Fall of 2016. The college is changing academic policies in order to be consistent with other public colleges and universities across the state of Colorado. These sweeping large-scale changes to academic policy can result in an amount of confusion and stress among students who will be required to conform to the new standards. As a result the college has undertaken a proactive campaign to address student anxiety with the a healthy sense of humor by employing the popular internet meme “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

The college contracted with me shortly before Spring Break of the 2016 Winter Semester to produce a series of videos to inform students, with the goal of releasing the videos the Monday that students return to classes. As a result, I worked with the college to turn-around the video project in a week’s time.The goal here was to proactively address “a sky is falling” attitude among students, with smart and effective communication. The idea was to keep it simple, short and effective. We were fortunate to work with the very talented Lindley Gallegos, who is not only ASFLC President, but is also an anchor for the college video news program Fort Fuel. She was able to communicate the changes in a relatable manner, as a peer, as opposed to a member of the administration. A teleprompter rolled the scripts in front of the camera lens, allowing Lindley to look directly into camera, without any need to memorize a total of eight minutes of dialogue for each of the videos.