Moorhead university offers scholarships for best tweets

How much is a tweet worth?

This year, up to $2,500 in scholarships at Minnesota State University, Moorhead.

For the first time, the university decided to award six scholarships to prospective students based entirely on their entries in a Twitter campaign. To qualify, all they have to do is type out why they want to attend the university, in 140 characters or less, and post it on Twitter with the hashtag #BeADragon.

Already, more than 1,000 tweets have flooded in, and more are expected by the March 11 deadline.

"The feedback has been fantastic," said Doug Peters, interim vice president of student affairs at Moorhead.

The scholarship idea, he admits, was mainly conceived as a marketing tool to help reverse years of declining enrollment at the public university. At a brainstorming session, school officials were tossing around ideas about how to make better use of social media, where high school kids spend so much of their time.

"We thought it would be a great way to reach out and see if we could interact with potential students," said Peters.

It also seemed like something that would appeal to students already stressed out by the college application process. "It was fairly simple; it's not a huge commitment," Peters pointed out. "It's not writing a four-page essay."

In all, the university plans to award $2,500 scholarships to the four most creative tweets, and $1,000 each for the ones with the most likes and retweets. Only students who have been admitted to the school can win.

In February, the school picked its first winner: Camilla Herbel, a Moorhead High School student. She won a $2,500 scholarship with a tweet linking to a three-minute video she made about her dream of becoming a teacher: "Why I want to #BeADragon !!!! (30sec video limits are super lame) https://youtu.be/zSrFptPei-g"

In the video, she interviewed some of her own teachers about what inspired them.

"I want to attend a university that supports teachers who care. … Teachers like these," the video said. It had nearly 600 views on YouTube by Wednesday afternoon.

Peters, who oversees admissions at the university, said the campaign has unleashed an outpouring of touching stories.

"We left the door as open as we could to invite as much creativity as we could," he said. "We've seen some very heartfelt 140-character submissions."

Some people, Peters knows, might see this as a frivolous way to hand out scholarships. But he points out that the money didn't come out of the school's scholarship pool. "We didn't mess with that at all," he said.

Instead, he found money in his operating budget to pay for it. "At the end of the day, we have an investment of $12,000 that we'll award as one-time scholarships," he said. "After we go through this campaign, we'll see if it's something that's worthy [of doing again] or not."

maura.lerner@startribune.com.