Platforms are important. Platforms are the literal embodiment of what an administration hopes to accomplish over the year. Year after year, what President's hang up in their office with highlighter marks and progress bars is their platform. When I ran for office, we agonized for weeks on what to put in the platform, and worked really hard to put together something that was realistic, matched our vision and sounded good.
Platforms showcase many things about a ticket: their experience, their vision and why they think they're the best pick for the student leaders of the University.
Our current tickets have their platforms published already, you can find them on their respective websites:
Katie and Renae
Jared and Tanner
I'm awaiting a guest post regarding detailed analysis from some NISG veterans, so I'll just give my initial reactions to browsing the platforms.
Jared and Tanner: Your platform (in it's current state) is 243 words. If I had to grade this, I would hand it back with an "incomplete" on it. You two can do better than this! Of those 243 words, I marked roughly 50 words as "fluff." For example:
PROMOTE
It is very important to our administration to promote the university in a positive way, including the promotion of an inclusive campus government that serves every group on campus to the best of our abilities...
It is very important to our administration to promote the university in a positive way, including the promotion of an inclusive campus government that serves every group on campus to the best of our abilities...
Listen guys, your platform isn't a place to re-air how much you love UNI. The platform is the place where you define how you are different, what you want to do and how! If a student never met you in person, and it's impossible to meet everybody, you would want them to vote for you based solely on what they read in your platform. You are the guys with less NISG experience than the other team, prove to voters that you know what you're getting into.
Kate and Renae: Your platform is too long! I'm still going through and making notes, so while I'll give you credit for doing your homework, it might be a bit ambitious for what one administration can do in a single year. My question to you would be: what are the most important parts of this, and how would we want to do it? One year is a really, really short amount of time to be in office (ask Kevin), so if elected you're going to have to have priorities.
Props on putting together a cohesive platform, but what I'd like to see from this ticket is more in the nitty-gritty of how to get these ideas off the page and into reality.
I'm scheduling video interviews for both tickets, so if you've got a question you'd like me to throw at one or both of the candidates, I'd love to ask it! Post it in a comment below or shoot me an email at coolingc@uni.edu.
Stay tuned for that guest blog post on some deeper aspects of platforming and platform analysis, and in the meantime I'll be going line-by-line through all the candidate bios, social media posts and websites to see what I can dig up. Get your friends to run for Senate, like the Northern Iowan's Facebook page, follow @NIonNISG on Twitter and keep a tab open to NISGElections.com for the latest in UNI Student Government.
I would like to see each candidate elaborate on their position vis-a-vis Performance Based Funding and the tuition freeze. What they think about it, what it means for UNI, what they would like to see happen, and what they will do in office to make that a reality.
ReplyDeleteI will copy this and be sure to bring it up at the debate! Thanks for sharing.
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