Every two years, Hofstra puts on the award-winning simulcast HOFSTRA VOTES LIVE, which is a student-led election coverage broadcast. For the 2024 election, I was a member of the PR/Marketing team along with 13 other students across majors and years. Here’s a little bit about my experience, from what my responsibilites were leading up to the stream and what the night of looked like!
Preparing for the broadcast
Most of our job as the PR/Marketing team is done well before election night. As a team, we were able to organize a broadcast watch party in the Student Center Theater as well as getting screens across campus to play the stream. Some of the other coverage we secured included professors across many departments promoting the broadcast to their students, a few articles discussing the production, (including this one!), and a promotional post on Hofstra’s student life Instagram story.
I was the head of on-campus media relations, meaning that my section of the team and I were tasked with reaching out to on-campus organizations to secure promotional content for HVL. We reached out to our Her Campus chapter, of course, but also The Hofstra Chronicle, The HEAT Network and WRHU in hopes of having them cover the broadcast. I contacted the professors of the Polticial Science department to ask for them to tell their students about the broadcast and encourage them to tune in.
The night of
The night of the broadcast is a hectic one, with hundreds of students coming together in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication to make it all happen. My team plays a support role on election night, helping out wherever we may be needed. Some of our members helped with social media production, either by helping curate social posts, writing captions or even working as the assistants to social media reporters. We were involved in some student projects by simply appearing in b-roll or being a journalist’s interviewees.
Overall, HOFSTRA VOTES LIVE is always an incredible production from start to finish. It’s so amazing to see so many students from all over Hofstra come together to create the four-hour broadcast and if you’ll be a student at Hofstra in 2026, I highly recommend you get involved! No role goes unappreciated, no matter how small.
As someone who also participated in our 2022 HVL production, it was really cool to see how the PR side of things has evolved since then. Rather than having one PR team to handle both the pre-show publicity and social media, the two have been separated, allowing both teams to be extra efficient. A huge shout out to the PR and social media leads, you all did such a great job, were amazing to work with, and I hope you’re proud of yourselves! I am so lucky to have worked alongside so many talented students to cover a presidential election in my last semester at Hofstra.
Congratulations to the anchors, line producers, directors and all of the other cast and crew members who made HVL 2024 come to life!