Gemma Godfrey (Godders) ran in the Loughborough Students Union elections 2006 for the position of Union President and NUS Delegate.
She won both!!

 Here's a quick rundown of all of the best bits of the campaign, for posterity and because I've got a bad memory and I want to remember all the hard work we put in and the good times we had!

All the photos are online in the photo gallery at www.losingtouch.co.uk/gallery/godders - this page is the information behind it all!

Posters

All of the posters were printed on pink paper, and some of them were used in the NUS campaign as well.  Most posters were A4 but a few hundred were A3.

Banner

This massive banner, measuring 12 foot x 8 foot was mainly made by Gareth, a professional graffiti artist.  With some massive stencils and a lot of spray paint he did a brilliant job.  Fee, Jim, Martin, Tara and Tiny all helped, and when it went up it eclipsed all of the other banners! Some cretin tore the D and the E within 24 hours of putting it up, so various fixes were attempted without much success, and then later on the wind ripped the GOD bit off anyway!  The final fix job left the banner looking hideously disfigured, but at least we tried!  On the last day of voting, the "BELIEVE" bit was cut down and put up outside EHB to great effect!

Hustings and Manifestos

Official hustings in the Griffin (a pub in town), the union, EHB, and live on LCR (Loughborough Campus Radio) were used to get the actual substance across.  The label manifesto can be found on the Label Website.

Door Knocking and Shoutouts

Gemma spent most of her time during each day running all over campus going into lectures, dinner halls and committee meetings giving short speeches about why people should vote for her.  Starting at the middle weekend, she and Neve set off on a door knocking mission in which they got round most of the rooms on campus, so this large amount of effort is recognised by voters and mostly appreciated.

Placards

Using some A3 posters, Jim made several placards (similar to the GOLF SALE) signs you see in the high street.  These were used to attract attention and on the event nights at the union they were a clever way around the rule about not putting up posters in the building.  They also showed where Gemma was in case people wanted to find her, and they were visible from a distance!

T-shirts

Gemma had a couple of black t-shirts saying "Godders for President" etc, and we also got about 30 white t-shirts saying "I BELIEVE" for various people to wear throughout the campaign.  These worked really well, as they had much more impact than stickers.

Body Painted People!

On the Wednesday and Friday nights for the 2 main weeks of the campaign, 3 brave people at a time swapped their clothes for silver or gold body paint, with a "BELIEVE" or "GODDERS 4 PRES" message painted on their backs.  They were a credit to the campaign, attracting attention and just looking damn cool!

Freebies!

Handout slips

We got loads of these little handout slips printed and Gemma gave them out when door knocking and mingling with people in clubs.

Extreme Flyering

On the last Monday night after making the van boards, we set off around campus putting hundreds of small "IT'S TIME TO BELIEVE" posters everywhere we could (A3 paper cut into 3 bits each).  We gave up at 2am due to severe cold, but Grogan (AU President) was up until 8am doing his extreme flyering, to the extent where he received an official complaint from the university!  That's extreeeeme!

Voting Days

We had the main polling stations covered by supporters over the 3 days of voting, including the union, the college, EHB, the library, James France lecture theatre, and all the big halls.  18kg of sweets were given away, and this got a very good response.  It was great to hear the positive response from people from quite early on, e.g. "Vote Godders" - to which the response was "I already have!" - this made the wait for the election results a lot less nervous, especially as the other candidates hadn't done anywhere near such a varied, visible and interesting campaign.

Final Results!

Gemma won by a landslide!  She got more votes than both of her opponents combined, and was only 18 votes away from winning the race outright in the first round (it's all to do with meeting a quota of 50% of the votes + 1).

See the official results on the www.lufbra.net/elections page or have a look at this bar chart of the breakdown of the results:

The Celebration!

It's safe to say a fair amount of celebrating was done on hearing the election results - we had a special elections party in Bocca bar in the union until 4am...!