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Back to School: Build your College Republican Chapter, Part III - Meetings
By punch bowl | August 15, 2007
Recruited - check mark; Communications - check mark; meetings - ???
This is all to often a typical thought process for a College Republican Chapter. They recruit, they communicate, but then they hold poor meetings that run all the new recruits off - recruits that they worked hard to get and communicate with.
And this leads to the imporatnce of planning good meetings: if you don’t hold good meetings your hard work recruiting will be undone. The first meeting and every subsequent meeting must be well planned and executed or members will stop coming and all the work you did recruiting and communicating will have fallen by the wayside.
There are several things to remember when planning a good meeting. First, be organized and plan ahead of time. People, especially freshman with an attitude, don’t like to feel like you have wasted their time, and if they do feel that way they won’t come back. This is very important to remember: poor meetings can undo your hard work recruiting.
In striving to be organzed, I would suggest making a agenda to hand out to the meeting and sticking to the agenda. Endlessly lecuring a CR group is the same as a professor lecturing a class: both are boring and get poor results. Make an agenda and have several different people talk and try to get feedback from old and new members.
Second, keep your meetings short, i.e. under 45 minutes. New members simply won’t want to spend any more time doing College Republican stuff. Also, you must be cognizant of the regularity of your meetings - don’t hold meetings any more than bi-weekly. More than two meetings a month in a non-election semester is just too much.
Third, holding different meeting types is one thing some readers have suggested. Examples include, planning meetings, group speaker meetings, group topic meetings or event meetings. This is a great way to bring variety to your group and thus give your group a perceived “freshness” and “edge.”
Lastly, give people responsibilities in holding meetings – delegate duties to other members to make them feel involved. The more ownership you give them the more active they will be.
Tomorrow will be the last post for the Back to School series. See you soon.
Until then, happy meetings…
Topics: Uncategorized, cr tips |
August 15th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
My chapter has found exactly the opposite about meetings…that bi-weekly meetings during an election off-season DISCOURAGES turnout. People forget which week they should be at the meeting. If there is a time conflict with one meeting, say a big name speaker, and a big chunk of your members miss a meeting, your members will skip the CR meeting and then will ahve gone a month with essentially no personal CR contact (other than emails). You are placing the health of your chapter in 8 meetings per semester if you only go every other week. It’s better to plan weekly meetings and cancel one or two if the need arises. Finally, it’s hard for members to go from bi-weekly meetings to meetings every week if they aren’t used to it. We are creatures of habit and if a member gets used to bi-weekly meetings, it will be hard to get the chapter to move to weekly meetings the next semester.
Have weekly meetings, just plan more social events for the chapter…not everything has to be about politics. Diversify your chapter’s “interest” portfolio (branching out from political stuff) and you’ll stay strong even in an election off-year.