A Slop University campaign reports a survey of club raffle sellers and shed committees, now setting three declines as the fixed asking limit for every affiliated club.
A survey of raffle sellers, shed treasurers and choir committees sets three declines as the University's fixed asking limit for every affiliated club.
Three is the number behind Slop University’s newest advertising campaign, and by the time the campaign reaches a bus shelter, the number is already policy. The School of Continuous Improvement’s new poster distils a survey of raffle sellers, shed treasurers and choir committees across sports clubs, sheds, choirs and allotment societies, logging how many declines a solicitation survives before the asking stops.
The third refusal is the interesting one, not because it’s a large number, but because it’s the number most people quietly obey.
— Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor, Capability Sprints
The method, translated out of the survey instrument and into the campaign brief, treats each club’s raffle table as a small natural experiment in persistence: a volunteer asks, is declined, and either asks again or moves on, with the count logged each time. Aggregated across sites, the distribution settles hard around three, and the Capability Sprints program has taken the figure as its own: every affiliated club’s raffle table now works to the same fixed asking limit, no local exception and no committee override. The School counts it among the findings worth keeping.
“It’s a small number to build a policy on,” Dr Nwachukwu added, “and now it’s University policy.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2atzfa.