RaG Week

I meant to type this on Wednesday, then I was going to do it on Thursday, and yes, then Friday, and finally here we are on Saturday.

RAG Week is a week of Raising and Giving (Hence the ‘RAG’ bit) money around universities around the country for charities.

Southampton Solent chose to raise money for Hampshire Fire and Rescue, in memory of the 2 fire-fighters who lost their lives in Shirley a few weeks ago.

There were three or four events that took place over the week, including ‘Take Me Out’ – a Solent take on the popular ITV1 dating show, and “Radio Sonar – Get me out of here”.

That’s where I came in.

Basically, Management at the station decided they were going to recruit 8/10 people to be “locked” in a box, and not released until we raised enough money.

This actually turned into the 10 people being split into pairs, each spending an hour and a half (the length of a radio show on Radio Sonar) in a Trampoline with the safety net on. The head of systems/tech set up an Outside Broadcast type thing, allowing Radio Sonar to be blasted across the carpark/outside seating area and two headphones/mics to allow interaction to the studio. And they moved a studio webcam to look out of a window into the ‘box’ and put the stream online for everyone to watch.

The whole idea was pretty good.

I kicked it off at 11am on Wednesday, with my normal show, occasionally ‘going live downstairs’ to talk to the guys in the box. And actually, as I’d managed to lose Andrew to the editing I should probably have been helping with, I thought it was one of the best shows I had produced all year!

We raised £87.57.

And I can’t decide if that was good or not.

I don’t know why, but I expected more. Not just more money, but more from the event. I mean, I never got to see the outside set-up before I finished my show, but I expected a lot more people to be hanging about. Especially as I had to set them a challenge whilst in the box (make up a dance routine to Five’s ‘Just Dance’), but when I got there, although the presenters had swapped, they hadn’t stuck around, and there was only one other member of the station there, and that was because we had a technical problem.

I mean, I know we all have things to do, lectures and stuff, but it was right outside the student union cafe/bar entrance, and although people were walking past fairly often, no one seemed to look twice.

Have your uni done any fund raising events that didn’t quite go to plan?