It’s hard to believe that after months of planning, panicking, and publicizing our site to as many people that would listen, we are finally successfully launched and up and running! Between the three of us, January was filled with literally hundreds of e-mails, lots of team meetings, marketing strategies, and a lot of editing. The arrival of launch night brought an enormous sigh of relief, the return of TV shows to our spare time, and immense happiness and pride in seeing our team’s published work. All three of us wanted to be a part of Her Campus because of the fact that it is a magazine for college girls written by college girls, and by bringing HC to Michigan’s campus, we have not only given Michigan girls a magazine with articles tailored specifically to their liking, but we’re also able to give a great team of writers the opportunity to be published.
Words cannot describe our excitement when we were informed that we launched as the top branch the week of February 8th with over 4,000 hits! All of our hard work truly paid off, but it could not have gone without a lot of help (remember those countless e-mails…) and for that, we want to say thank you to all who helped us become the successful publication that we are right now! If nothing else, the success we have enjoyed thus far reflects the value of not only hard work, but of our relative daring in bringing something entirely new to our campus.
Our team is currently about 50 girls strong, all of whom put in hard work and effort before every deadline, in making partnerships, and in publicizing HerCampusUMich! We also had a lot of outside involvement with marketing before launch. Our Marketing Director Carly would like to thank the following people: Matt Ellis, Madison Springgate, Danielle Ebstein, Nana Kikuchi, Nick Gregorich, Shannon Niznik, Mackenzie Lang, Sean Yang, Rodrigo Samuelson, Alex Lane, Joey Vee, Jordan Milanowski, Elizabeth Andraska, Jess Parlove, Grace Hawkins, Matt Maddock, and Ed Lee.
On our launch night, February 8th, our executive board had a Her Campus photo shoot and launch party! We had a great time getting dressed up and celebrating Her Campus coming to the University of Michigan. Thanks to Ariel Bond, our photographer on the shoot, and Liz Baker, who graciously made us a cake for our launch! Pictured: Editor-in-Chief and founder Nikki Williams, Assistant Editor Kylie Kagen, and Marketing Director Carly Boddy. At the end of February because of her hard work, effort, drive, and stand-out planning and scheduling skills, we added a new member to our executive board, Assistant Marketing Chair Franci Litvak, who is not pictured in the shoot.
We are all members of the same sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, so we took some photos showing off our diamonds, the symbol of ADPi.