I chose to focus my Trending Now blog post on how CURA can promote its social justice edge on the Fordham campus and beyond. It is crucial to separately market this aspect of the magazine because CURA has two different components: the literature itself and its social justice mission. These two components form the basis of two different marketing bases, namely the literary world and the world of social justice. As of now, CURA has targeted most of its marketing at the literary world, but has done no specific marketing towards the social justice world. We now must begin to market to this world since it may be one of our most powerful tools to promote CURA and gain readership/support. One of the reasons for this is that there is a huge community of people both at Fordham and in NYC dedicated to/interested in social justice and therefore potentially interested in what CURA is doing. Access to this community will greatly help expand our readership and audience. Secondly, by marketing to the social justice world/getting ourselves established as part of it, we are also able to capitalize on what sets CURA apart in the literary world (namely that we have a social action component, unlike any other publication). Thirdly, many of the high-rollers (i.e. philanthropists) that float around the social justice world are interested in good causes and high culture (and we are the perfect combination!) and are willing to throw money at them. This could present great fundraising opportunities for us.
The first step in marketing CURA to the social justice world is to see how we can get involved in ongoing social justice events/groups/clubs at Fordham University (LC and RH) by using the name of the Doe Fund to clue people in to our relevance to their world. The point here is to get our name and our mission out and to establish ourselves as a solid part of social justice activities on campus. In order to do so, we should hook up with clubs (have them sponsor us or us sponsor them) that are interested in social issues surrounding homelessness (ISIS, LGBTQ, Midnight Runs) and organize events with members from the Doe Foundation as speakers (posters advertising these events can also have CURA's name all over them). We can also get these groups to sell CURA editions to their members/help us hold additional fundraising events for the Doe Fund. CURA should also get the Social Work Department (etc.) to sponsor events and help us sell copies of CURA.
Outside of Fordham, we should look into other organizations associated with homelessness (Semiperm, Picture the Homeless, Covenant House) and see if they would be interested in CURA. We can also organize Fordham-sponsored panel discussions about homelessness with the Doe Fund and members of these other organizations. We should also start networking at social justice-type events (fundraiser galas etc.) in NYC as this is where the philanthropists hang out and where we can spread the word about what CURA is in order to get them interested. Smaller events in the city that pertain to homelessness should also be attended (perhaps we should come up with a social justice/homelessness/Doe Fund representative from our staff who could get involved with this).
Literary Magazine
The Antigonish Review is a Canadian literary magazine supported by St. Francis Xavier University. It is unique in that it has established an interesting Poet Grow-Op partnership with another university’s creative writing program. The purpose of the grow-op is to discover and mentor young literary talent from its partner university. I thought this might be an interesting option for CURA to pursue because it could help us establish relationships with other universities/graduate school programs across the country. It would also help promote CURA and garner more submissions to the magazine.
http://www.antigonishreview.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=71&Itemid=61
Cate Nicholas