Case study: THE UNIs x CO-OP

The UNIs is a competition to find the best university society or sports team in the UK. First prize was £5k and each category had prizes supplied by category partners which included festival tickets, flights from StudentUniverse and mentoring from CALM.

The first stage was a public vote, which took place in October, 2018. This gave us six category winners.

In the two week voting period we had over 100,000 votes.

Nearly 1,000 societies registered their interest for the competition, out of these 180 submitted full applications that were good enough to publish.

In the voting period we had 95k unique visitors to The UNIs.

The category with the most votes was the STEM category – the winners of this category got over 9,000 votes individually!

The final:

The six category winners went onto present in a live final in Co-op’s headquarters in Manchester. They presented to a board of judges, made up of representatives from Co-op and Vibe Group, a category partners for the competition.

The judges were looking for the society/team that did the following::

1, The society/team that best supports its members.

2. The society/team that will make best use of the prize.

The treasurer of CSU, Eilidh Bowers, said:

“It will make such a difference to our club, we are growing and developing and becoming more and more established as a sports team.

We are completely self funded, and our facilities are poor with relation to our sport so the money will make a huge difference in terms of buying new equipment to develop our skills and allow us financial security for the years to come.”