Are Top 6 posters Worth It? A Statistical Analysis

It’s that time of year again when Top 6 posters adorn what seems like every wall in sight. “Top 6 my club!” “No, top 6 my club!” “No, if you don’t top 6 MY club you’re clearly a loser!” As I walked past this barrage of posters every day, I found myself wondering: do the posters really even matter? After all, I know I made my Top 6 decisions based on my pre-existing notions, with no regard to which clubs were shouting at me the loudest.

To answer this question once and for all, I embarked on a lengthy scientific endeavor, the results of which would lead me to question everything I know about Funding Poll and the very social constructs that underscore life at Reed.

Cue dramatic YouTube intro.

To collect solid, objective data, I spent about an hour this past Saturday walking around campus with a pen and notepad, hand counting every Top 6 poster I saw in the GCC, Library, and on the exteriors of all the academic buildings. I only counted posters that explicitly said “Top 6” or “Top 40,” leaving out posters simply encouraging people to join their club. I surveyed the GCC (237 posters, if you’re curious), library, and outsides of all the academic buildings, as well as the poles in between those buildings. I didn’t look at the dorms, mostly for reasons of time, and because I don’t have swipe access into every dorm anyway. I did not count the thirty Top 6 KRRC posters in the windows of the KRRC studio as those are there year round and are basically decoration.

In total, I counted 406 Top 6 posters. If we include the buildings I didn’t visit, I’d estimate there are at least 500 Top 6 posters around campus in total. At Reed printing costs of $0.30 per color page, that means Reedies spent around $150 on Top 6 posters. That’s not even counting blue tape ($5.45/roll from the bookstore), time spent putting up posters instead of studying, or the environmental impact of all that paper.

So, was it worth it? The data show a resounding… maybe?

To try to get answers, I conducted a sophisticated statistical analysis, by which I mean I stuck my data into Google Sheets and tried to remember anything from AP Stats three years ago. I think I got some useful results.

Does the number of posters put up influence a club’s Top 40 rank? No! I graphed Top 40 rank vs number of posters and got this awful scatterplot with an R2 value of 5%. For those of us who have forgotten most of our statistics knowledge, the closer to 100%, the more relationship between the two variables. This low a value means that there is essentially no relationship.

Does putting up any posters at all matter? Maybe! There’s a strong correlation between having any posters up and making Top 40. (I ran a chi-squared test and got p < 0.01.) However, it’s not a guarantee: there are 13 clubs in the Top 40 who did not have any Top 6 posters from what I saw, and there are 6 clubs who put up Top 6 posters and did not make it to Top 40. The club with the most Top 6 posters (46) was Trauma-Informed Kink Collective, which didn’t even make Top 40. 

It also didn’t seem to matter where posters were put up: I recorded how many posters were in the GCC as opposed to  elsewhere on campus (58% of all posters were in the GCC, if you’re curious), and there appears to be no correlation whatsoever between the percentage of a club’s posters in the GCC and their Top 40 rank or lack thereof.

For very well-known clubs, posters didn’t seem to make an impact at all. For instance, House of Elvira placed 6th on the Funding Poll with a grand total of one poster that I saw, which was possibly left over from last year. Giant Worm is ranked 14 with no posters, and five identity groups made it to Top 40 with no posters. Period Kollectiv, #1 on Funding Poll, had only seven posters up, and I honestly think they’d make Top 6 no matter what they did.

For most clubs, though, it’s hard to tell whether the posters made a difference, or if it’s simply that clubs who put the effort into putting up posters are more likely to be clubs with a large membership.  Reed Embezzlement Kollectiv may be the only instance where a club’s posters had a definitive impact on their presence in Top 40. There was only one REK poster remaining at the time I surveyed, but I saw more earlier in the week; REK signator Lily Larsen ‘26 told me that somewhere between 40 to 50 posters had been put up and they kept being taken down. This is a new club that was advertised exclusively through posters, and it made it to rank 21 on Funding Poll!

What can we take away from all this? It’s still hard to tell what impact posters have on Top 6 rank, as I don’t have the power to tell half of the clubs not to put up posters and see what happens. My general conclusion is that clubs should spend less effort on Top 6 posters than they do. Putting up fifty posters for your club is not going to guarantee you more funding. Putting up posters for your club at all is not going to guarantee funding! If you’re a well-known club that most Reedies know about (like any club that regularly makes Top 6), you honestly might not need to bother putting up posters at all. 

My theory is that the only clubs for which putting up posters is successful are clubs that students might not know about (especially new clubs), but which provide a service that’s of general interest to the student body or a cause students might feel morally obliged to support. For other lesser-known clubs, putting up posters is probably worth it too, but it might not be successful.

When putting up posters, the data also suggest that it’s not worth it to put up a ton. Perhaps five to ten sprinkled around the GCC and anywhere you already happen to be going would be enough. Putting up more posters, once you’re putting them up in the first place, doesn’t appear to have any influence at all.

Many questions remain for further research. Do these findings apply to non-Top 6 posters? What truly is the optimal number of posters to put up? Will this pattern stay the same next semester? What would happen if we were to do a true controlled study? Regardless, my conclusion is clear.

No longer should we spend hours of our time trekking all over campus with a stack of papers and a roll of blue tape! No longer should we waste $150 on printing costs! No longer should we scream and cry as the library printers refuse to do their jobs! No longer should we make campus look like a street corner on election week! Together, let us usher in a Nu Reed, one where we only put up a reasonable number of Top 6 posters and trust our fellow Reedies to make wise decisions on their own.