[Photo taken by students in the Public Art Class of a canvassing site by the IDEA Factory.]

Canvassing Around Campus

By Mary Eberhard, Colin Purcell, and Suzette Hernandez-Herrera

Fall 2025

What is canvassing and how is it used? Canvassing is the act of directly engaging with groups of people to encourage them to learn more about and participate in a cause and/or organization. More specific actions that take place during canvassing with these goals in mind are spreading information and answering questions and concerns to persuade individuals to care about a cause or organization. It is a technique often used by politicians during their campaigns. Local politicians canvas by knocking on doors of residents, phone banking, and sending out mail.

That’s where canvassing comes into play. When we directly talk to individuals, there's a chance to encourage them to care about the public art around them; however, strategies need to be used in order for canvassing to be effective. It takes more than just reaching out to individuals. There needs to be something that grabs their attention from the start. Sometimes that means relating the identity and values of individuals to the public art that's present in their community or handing out informative literature about the cause. It's important to remember that canvassing can make an impact on people if the meaning and message of a piece of public art personally relates to the audience when their attention is properly caught.

[Photo taken by students in the Public Art Class of a canvassing site by the IDEA Factory.]

[Photo taken by students in the Public Art Class of the candy + QR code cards used as incentives at the canvassing sites.]

On a campus that can be a busy and distracting environment, offering incentives like candy and a raffle can help spark interest in participation. More importantly, the incites gained from these experiences revealed that students and faculty not only want something visually appealing, but something that reflects on their lives and values. When involving the greater student body in the process of creating the piece, it brings a sense of community to an art piece that would otherwise be devoid of said sense. Canvassing allowed us to reach hundreds of students that we would not have been able to reach before and this gave us the opportunity to create something that truly represents the student body as a whole.

While canvassing on UMD’s campus we interacted with a lot of individuals, including students and faculty. We did this to gain insight on what people thought we should do for our art installation at the IDEA Factory. It is extremely important to make sure that the art that we put on campus is meaningful to students and faculty. These individuals will be the audience of this piece, so we wanted to ensure that not only they had a say in what we put on campus, but also had an opportunity to contribute input on the meaning behind it. This being said, in our experience canvassing to get opinions from college students can be very difficult. First we needed a way to get students to stop. As college students ourselves, we knew that we needed something to entice students or else they would walk right past us. We decided to use candy to get students to stop and a raffle to get students to take our survey. This proved to work, but also came with other problems. It was hard to know if the students were talking to us because they really cared about public art or if they just wanted the candy. Overall, we had some thoughtful conversations and survey submissions that really helped us gain some insight on what students wanted to see on campus. Through these conversations and submissions, it was clear that students wanted to see something that was pertinent to their life experiences. Some were even curious on how they could apply to be the artist themselves. While canvassing can be extremely difficult—especially for people who have social anxiety or any similar reservations—it allows for a message to reach as many people as possible

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