ASA Executive Committee Candidates Forced to Campaign Online

Student Elections are another event that the Albany Student Association had to operate online in order to comply with the Level 2.5 restrictions placed upon Auckland.

Candidates for the 2021 Executive Committee had to do all their campaigning online and even the candidates’ Q&A, usually held in person, was a Zoom call live-streamed to the ASA’s Facebook page.

Candidates Benjamin Austin and Rohan Smith, who ran for President and Vice-President respectively, took advantage of the number of people looking to social media for direction on who to vote for by starting a Facebook page for their campaign.

“Rohan and I spent a fair amount of time considering what would be the best form of campaigning due to the restrictions,” Austin said. “We felt that creating an online presence to connect with Massey students was the best way of going about this.”

“Facebook makes online pages and advertising incredibly easy and since the ASA has their own Facebook page it made sense to run our campaign on the same platform,” he added.

“Based on the analytics from the page, we were able to reach out to over 1,000 students so we are very happy about that.”

Austin explained that he and some campaign volunteers tried to have an in-person presence on campus by creating large chalk advertisements for the students who were on campus in the lower restriction levels, so students that were on campus could still experience traditional election campaigning.

He concluded that the experience was “a lot of fun” and said that, overall, he was “extremely happy with how campaigning went this year.”

However, candidates who didn’t want to sponsor content online felt they struggled to engage with students and promote themselves with a limited number of students being on campus.

Mhairi Acheson, who campaigned for the roles of Engagement, Education and Welfare Officer, explained that it’d been “hard to reach people without sponsoring content or tagging every mate who was ever at Massey.”

“Last year, there’d be more people to see posters around campus,” she said.

“This year it’s a lot of randomly adding people on Facebook and not knowing what to do to engage with them.”

The ASA also offered support to candidates by changing the number of endorsements needed in nominations from ten signatures to just five. They also posted candidates’ campaign videos on their Facebook page; however, Acheson shared that there were some restrictions on how ASA allowed students to campaign.

“This year I had one blurb for three roles while last year I could tailor my blurbs to my role so I reckon they could have allowed for that,” she said. 

“I feel that the blurb should be tailored to the role and not allowing that meant that people with multiple roles tended to focus on just one.”