AUT’s Pink Shirt Day tickled by active advertising

Those involved in this year’s Pink Shirt Day planning for AUT say when it comes to bullying, actions speak loudest.

Pink Shirt Day is an annual anti-bullying awareness day that originated in Canada when high school students wore pink shirts to protest the bullying of a classmate.

In New Zealand, the awareness day is run by the Mental Health Foundation, and involves local businesses and institutions raising awareness and funds.

AUT University marked the awareness day by holding a lunch event and bake sale, collecting gold coin donations for the cause.

Communications and reporting graduate, Katy Holden, provided communication support for the Pink Shirt Day committee at AUT University, and also approached students to help generate advertising campaign ideas.

Miss Holden said the collaborative approach was a great opportunity to try something new.

“Students have a wealth of knowledge that we don’t tap into as much as we could . . . it’s a great opportunity for the students to do some real world work that they can put into their portfolio and we benefit as well,” Miss Holden said.

Noor Nasser and Ashleigh Ilton, both third-year advertising creativity students at AUT, were keen to put forward campaign ideas as the event had seemed under-represented in previous years.

“You never really hear about it, there’s no advertising about it,” said Miss Ilton, who had attended AUT for three years but had not known about Pink Shirt Day until recently.

Miss Nasser said they believed eliciting student response and engagement was vital for a campaign about the day.

“With other [events], the campaigns built around these require people to take action, whereas the anti-bullying [message] hasn’t been like that . . . you really want to build something that would get people to join in,” Miss Nasser said.

Miss Nasser and Miss Ilton’s campaign revolved around using bullying language and a fake student club ad aimed to “provoke people to stand up” against bullying behavior.

Although their campaign was not executed this year, Miss Holden said the two students proved they were “capable of thinking very far outside the box”, and agreed that initiating action should be a key focus for Pink Shirt Day in the future.

“Everyone’s against bullying in theory, but in practice it's really hard to get people to convert that belief into an action or behaviour,” Miss Holden said.

Director of programme design and delivery for the Mental Health Foundation, Moira Clunie, said an active approach to tackling bullying is one of their current aims.

“We’re encouraging people to use Pink Shirt Day to show their support for the issue, but also to have a think about their approach to responding to and preventing bullying,” she said.

“It’s about making sure you have robust policies around the issue, organising professional development for staff . . . and supporting student-led initiatives and actions.”