"It's Just One Class"

How do you convince students to rethink a behavior they barely think twice about? As part of my Public Opinion, Persuasion, and Engagement class, we were asked to identify a common behavior and create a campaign that could shift it.

For my group, we focused on skipping class — something many university students see as harmless, especially when it feels like “just one class.” That phrase eventually became the foundation of the campaign itself. “It’s Just One Class” is a persuasion campaign that encourages students to pause and reconsider the long-term consequences that can come from repeatedly missing classes, even when each absence feels small in the moment.

Early into the process, we realized that simply telling students to “stop skipping class” would not work. Most students already know they should attend class, so the challenge became understanding why skipping feels so easy to justify in the first place. Instead of approaching the campaign from a disciplinary perspective, we wanted to place ourselves in the position of the audience and understand the different emotions and situations tied to the behavior.

This eventually led us to explore the financial, social, and physical aspects of skipping class through three separate posters. One focused on the guilt and financial burden placed on parents, another highlighted the fear of missing out socially, while the last centered on the temptation of comfort and repeatedly choosing sleep over responsibility.

Visually, we wanted the campaign to feel immediate and easy to process at first glance, while still encouraging viewers to think more deeply the longer they looked at it. Each design choice — from the phone interfaces to the text message format and muted color palette — was created to support the message rather than distract from it.