Europe's Syrian Refugee Clothes Bank - DONATE DONATE DONATE

In our project we decided to try and increase the number of clothes bank donations made by University of Warwick students. We focused on the Clothes Drives run in order to give more suitable clothing to the Syrian refugees who are currently residing in the refugee camps in Europe. This was important to us as these individuals are living in extremely harsh conditions, especially in the cold winter months, with clothing that barely keeps them warm. 

We wanted to make even the smallest contribution.


The main aspect of our campaign was the video below. We arranged for it to be played on the big screen on the Piazza (evidence below) for the duration of our week long campaign. This amplified our project's exposure, allowing for us to gain donations (as can be seen in the bottom right hand photo below).

We also designed a poster encouraging people to donate their spare clothes. We distributed these posters around the University throughout the week including places such as the Library and the SU atrium. We stopped people to talk about the issue at hand and to raise awareness of our campaign on a more personable level. Below you will see examples of our poster, our distribution and a photo of one of the boys we spoke to.*

 In order to capitalize the exposure of our campaign we created a public Facebook page which many people had access to. This page served as a reminder for the drop off session we were running and as a platform to which we posted both our video and a digital version of our poster. The social media campaign further widened the reach of our important message. Our Facebook page is shown below:

We wanted to measure the general effect our campaign had on the students. So we distributed the questionnaire below to 10 students before beginning our campaign (these participants were an opportunity sample and we gained informed consent from them before proceeding with the questionnaire).

Once they had answered the questions and provided their contact information we thanked them for their participation. Should they have ticked the box indicating they were happy to be contacted again we proceeded to the second part of the experiment.

One week later, after our campaign had ceased, we contacted them and asked them the same two questions as before. We then recorded their second responses and debriefed them as to the purpose of the experiment.

We were hoping to see, in light of our campaign, that we had altered peoples donation behaviour or at least their perceptions of their own hypothetical donation behaviour

The results are shown below:

This table shows in improvement in physical donation behaviour and also an improvement in hypothetical donation behaviour.

At the end of our campaign we set up a clothes drop in session, the time, date and place of which were present in our video, on our poster and on our Facebook group. We received three donations. All three were a large bag of clothes which have all since been delivered to the nearest Refugee Clothes Bank.

We believe that we have made a positive difference with our campaign, albeit minor.

*we gained consent from the boy in the photo to use his picture on this blog


Lucie Petrides
Rebecca Tillman
Katie Twigger
Perry Campion