How to Organize Your Own Rock the Vote Concert

Has your college campus ever planned a Rock the Vote concert? If not, then what are you waiting for? Hosting a Rock the Vote concert on your college campus is one of the most fun things you can do as you raise political awareness. All it takes is effort, determination and collaboration between the existing political groups on your college campus and in your community.

On the Binghamton University campus, the first ever Rock the Vote concert event was held in spring of 2008. The event was a huge success and involved cooperation and event planning by College Democrats, College Republicans, College Libertarians and the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG).

So how did the event get off the ground? Well the idea was first proposed by a member of college democrats who wanted to elaborate on an existing small student concert idea hosted by College Libertarians. Since both college democrats and college libertarians would be involved with this event planning, we decided to make it a Rock the Vote Event which its name in it of itself is enough to attract students and townspeople to the event.

The first step that we took was to get the bands and singers in place for the event. Since we had a very small budget to work with initially, we knew that whoever we would get for the concert event would have to play for free. We figured though, that student bands and student singers/performers would be ideal choices to target since they would all love to play in front of a huge crowd of several hundred people which we aimed to get for the event. We came up with a list of different student bands and singers and then when we narrowed down our list based on who wanted to play out the event. Once we had our list, we narrowed it down further based on who we thought were the best bands/singers. We had a list of five singers/bands that we thought were good. Three weeks before the event, one of the singers dropped and we had a problem because we had a spot to fill. Luckily, a friend of ours had been contacted by a student guitarist singer and our friend forwarded us his contact information. As a freshman at the University, he was all too willing to play at the event, although he wasn't too happy about being the opening act.

When our list of five acts was finalized, we needed to ask permission from the Rock the Vote organization to get approval for using their organization name. This was done by emailing them using the listed contact name on their website. Within a day, they responded back, all the willing to be a proud sponsor of the event. The only requirement was that our event had to be non-partisan and free for everyone. That was fine with us since we had planned to do both from the very start. By having a free student concert event, we knew we would have a huge audience attendance.

Next, we publicized the event like never before. We came up with very creative advertising methods like putting fliers in every student mailbox on campus and creating teaser posters hung in dining halls which counted down the days until the event to build anticipation and excitement for the event. We also had people giving out fliers all over campus on the day of the event and put the announcement on the school department list serve.

The final details were to hire a set up and equipment crew which cost three hundred dollars to install lighting and sound in the room for the concert. We also needed about a dozen people to help us in the hours before the concert event in setting up signs, getting food, drinks, and last minute publicizing of the event. We also set up a makeshift dressing room for the performers. Lastly, we needed to get some more money to help pay for event costs and we did this by asking the student community governments for money. They gave us about $600 for the event. We were also successful in getting local businesses to sponsor the event by having their banner posted on the event wall and setting up tables with their business information listed.

Altogether the event was a huge success as we had about three hundred people at the event. Sixty new people registered to vote and everyone who attended had a great time.