Callie Henson, marketing chair for The Fuzz’s Fuzzapalooza Friday night at The Library on Franklin Street. The event culminated a semester’s worth of work for a UNC Journalism School class and raised money for Music Empowerment.
Staff writer Sierra Wingate-Bey spoke with Henson about the class, social media campaign and Fuzzapalooza.
DAILY TAR HEEL: Who is behind The Fuzz?
CALLIE HENSON: Our class is a new media technologies class in the J-School. Our professor, Gary Kayye, gave us very broad instructions and literally told us come up with an awesome new media campaign.
My class — there are about 39 of us — picked me as the team captain.
We broke the team up into all sorts of different groups to work on different things like donations, multimedia, design, social media, accounting and reporting. Everyone had a strong hand in this whole fuzz project from beginning to end.
There really wasn’t one person that did everything — it really was all 39 of us working together.
DTH: In your own words, what is The Fuzz?
CH: The Fuzz really became quite a personality on campus. There were so many people just randomly asking, “What is The Fuzz?”
It was more of the curiosity about it that made it so successful, how we didn’t really tell people what it was at first.
The social media was awesome, the people we had writing for The Fuzz were hilarious, and I think that really helped people want to know more about The Fuzz.
DTH: What was the main goal of the campaign?
CH: We liked the idea of revolving the whole campaign around music, and that’s how we got the idea of having our campaign benefit Musical Empowerment, which is a UNC organization that helps under privileged children in Chapel Hill and Carrboro have the opportunity to use instruments and learn how to play music.
From day one we kind of had the idea of music in the back of our minds and from The Fuzz wearing headphones to asking random questions about music trivia to giving away tickets to different a cappella groups.
We kind of had music in the foreground of The Fuzz.
DTH: How did you get out information about The Fuzz to the campus?
CH: We had a big promo day in the pit to kind of get people excited about The Fuzz.
Most of our stuff was definitely on social media. From our Twitter and Facebook and even our Pinterest page, we did a good job of branding The Fuzz so that people wanted to know more about him.
Our multimedia team was amazing too. Our YouTube videos they created were hilarious — from the “Mean Girls” parody to the video they made to promote Fuzzapalooza — they were awesome.
DTH: Tell me more about Fuzzapalooza.
CH: It was all about having an awesome music party. It was at The Library. We had two amazing DJs: Future Boys and Ever Vida.
It was one of the most amazing nights I’ve ever had. I spoke with someone who works at The Library and they said they had never seen it that packed.
In total 687 people walked into Fuzzapalooza — which I was not expecting at all.
The cover that we charged until midnight all went to Musical Empowerment and we ended up raising $389 for them, which is great.
Contact the desk editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.
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