Current students can have a say in the future branding of NIU.

A 45-person subcommittee headed by Kathy Buettner, vice president of University Relations, selected 12 tag lines, one of which will be used for recruiting future students.

Buettner said she approached all the deans of the colleges and asked if they wanted to participate in the survey or suggest someone from their department to participate. Buettner said the College of Business suggested two people to be on the committee.

NIU’s Public Opinion Lab was hired to do a study of randomly selected individuals from faculty, staff, prospective students, current students, parents of students and high school counsellors. Buettner said the committee wanted to take it one step further and expand it to the full campus.

“We felt as a committee that the campus itself should have a way to weigh in,” she said. “We wanted to make sure the campus had that opportunity and while its not scientifically based, it allows those that want to, to weigh in and give us an opinion on the twelve final tag lines or suggest a different tag line.”

Buettner said in the two days the survey has been online 442 people have taken it and 66 people have given additional tag lines.

“I’ve really been overwhelmed by the positive and attention the campus is giving this issue,” she said.

Mindy Schneiderman, associate director of the Public Opinion Lab said for the random survey they sent out around 3900 unique e-mails, which equates to around 650 per category.

Schneiderman said for Internet surveys they usually see about a 15-20 percent response rate.

“We’ve already sent out the initial survey and two follow-up surveys for non-responders,” she said.

Some confusion came when NIU released a recruitment brochure with “Dream. Discover. Do.” one of the options responders can choose as a tag line, on the cover.

Buettner said the brochure was used as part of a separate advertising campaign. Buettner said the branding and marketing research was started 10 months ago and NIU couldn’t wait for the results before the next recruiting cycle started.

“We could not stand by and lose another recruiting cycle,” she said. “What the advertising committee put together was an ad campaign that is called Dream. Discover. Do.”

Melanie Magara, assistant vice president for Public Relations, said the Public Opinion Lab has done surveys for the university in the past and they felt this was the best way to get a scientific response to what the community as a whole feels best describes NIU.

Magara said the random survey will be conducted through this Friday and she said so far they have well over 500 responses.

The final day for those wishing to take the campus-wide survey is Nov. 19.

Buettner said she expects to get all the data collected by Dec. 1 and have a final recommendation by Christmas.