How to build a world-class student-run organization that can impact thousands of students. (First part)

I will take you some years back, at the time when inventing the flying machine was the Holy Grail.

Pierpont Langley had everything that a startup or an organization starting would ever dream of. He was a highly educated engineer, he had just received a $50.000 grant from the War Department (a.k.a. Department of Defense), he had access to the Harvard University, he was Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and The Times followed him everywhere.

Starting a student-run organization especially in Greece isn’t going to be that way. You will face a lot of challenges and you have to be ready to overcome them.

Finding the right people to join your team, funding your organization’s projects, navigating through the politics of the Greek universities — especially those that are located in Athens — and building the culture inside the organization are some of these challenges.

It’s no wonder that in Greek Universities we mainly have student-run organizations that are branches of organizations that started abroad. If you start a branch you don’t have to worry too much about a lot of things such as branding elements (logo, colors etc.) or the organization structure and activities because you will already have solutions for them.

Note: you can find a list of all the organizations inside Greek universities here.

I was extremely lucky in my life to be a co-founding member in two of the most well-known and successful student-run organizations that started in Greece.

I served in Thinkbiz for three years in various positions and then went on to co-found Mindspace where I also served for three years and was honored to be the organization’s Chairman in a magical year.

In just six months (from October to May) we organized 10 events that were open to the public, we hosted 18 workshops (a grand total 182 hours), we had 1025 unique visitors to all our activities, we raised more than 60.000€ for our programs, we had an awesome team of 40 hard-working people that operated Mindspace in both Athens and Patras, we equipped and ran the first open makerspace inside a Greek university, started a youtube series of how to start your startup in Greece and ran a Panhellenic Challenge for students with innovative ideas called Mindspace Challenge. A lot of things for an organization that was run mainly by students that were all volunteers.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean anything if the organization doesn’t last for many years to come. Building an organization is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Now read again the last sentence because you are going to hear me say it again and again.

If we did it, you can do it!

This is an introductory blog post. I plan to write some blog posts on the following critical aspects that I believe are important when you start an organization.

Topics to be covered in future blog posts:

• Legal and accounting
• Building your organization’s culture
• People
• Strategy
• Marketing and branding
• Raising funds
• Structure and operations
• Leadership
• Expanding
• Why organizations fail

There are some excellent books that will help you on building a successful organization: Start with why, Winning, Good to great, Great by choice, The hard about hard things, The lean startup, The starfish and the spider etc.

But what if I fail?

I am extremely lucky to be an Angelopoulos fellow along with some other great young people in Greece. On the second day of our reunion, we were renovating a school in the center of Athens, as a way to give back to the local community.

The school’s walls were fully covered with graffiti. We were there to paint the walls and plant trees.

Just before lunchtime, an old woman from the local church arrived in order to take the snacks and fruits that remained from the breakfast. She was going to distribute them to local unemployed and poor people.

As we were walking together inside the school we were having the following conversation:

She (ready to burst into tears): You know I went to this school for 6 years…

Me: You should have a lot of memories from this place.

She: Yes and I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you are doing today.

Me (foolish wanting to make her feel better): You shouldn’t be emotional about it when we leave the walls will be vandalized again in a few weeks with graffiti…the walls weren’t prepared well to be painted and the paint will not last etc…

She (looking at my eyes): It really doesn’t matter….

I was surprised by her answer but she was right and I was a fool. Sometimes what really matters is the move, not the result. That’s the power of symbolism.

It really doesn’t matter if you succeed in building a great organization or movement. Even the smallest act can inspire other people to start something else that can improve the situation in your country.

Just start….your actions might have a bigger impact than you can ever imagine!

So I can’t fail… what’s next? Which are the things to keep in mind when I start an organization?

My experience suggests that there are four stages and things to keep in mind when you start an organization. If you fail to do them at the right time you may face serious problems as the organization evolves.

Stage 1:

- Have a clear goal/vision that you would like to achieve. Don’t complicate things as most “business best practices” suggests by writing a vision, mission etc. Have a clear statement that represents the change you would like to see, and that’s it.

- Organize some activities that have to do with the statement you put on paper in the previous step. Your goal at this step is to find out if someone else out there is interested in what you are doing.

Tip: don’t worry at all if only very few people show up at your activities. Even if one person shows up it’s a fantastic sign. At Mindspace we organized events the first months that only two people showed up….1 year later in only 6 months our activities had an impact on 1.048 people.

- Build the basic brand elements (logo, colors, facebook page, and a basic website).

– Use Wix, Wordpress, anything to have a very basic website don’t go fancy just make something. Find some friends that will be willing to help.

- Also use very basic tools at your activities that are free and easy to use like Eventbrite, Google docs, Mailchimp to build your mailing list etc.

Stage two:

- As you gain momentum find people that attend your activities and are really passionate about your goal. Recruit for fit into your organization and never for skills.

Tip: recruiting will always be your biggest challenge. It’s so difficult to find people that are a really great fit for your organization. More on that at the blog post about people.

- At this point, it’s crucial to write down the values you embrace and would like to see in the new members.

- Build a basic structure and start delegating important tasks such as marketing, hr, activities etc. Keep it simple and your organizational chart flat.

- On activities, you should have already tried a lot of different things to see which have the best fit for your organization vision and also have brought some results.

Tip: for an activity to produce fantastic results you must run it for a couple of years in order to perfect it.

At this point, your organization will have no more than 15–20 members and will be in its first or second year depending on how fast you run it.

Stage three (more than 15–20 members):

- Put some procedures in place that will put your organization in the position to succeed in the long term. Again: building an organization is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.

- Make some of your activities your signature activities. That means that some activities should be repeated again and again and you want them to be connected with your brand (more on branding in a future blog post).

- Focus on culture. The most important thing you have to do from this point on is focusing on people and culture and less on other things.

- Build along with your team a five-year plan of where you would like to see the organization in 5 years and reverse engineer the way to get there.

- Start standardizing the activities and procedures. Make things more scalable.

Stage four (when the organization matures enough):

- Expand

That’s some practical guide with some steps when you start an organization. You can find more information in the upcoming articles.

Tip: An important tip that can accelerate the way things roll in your organization, bond the team and increase productivity and professionalism is to have a physical space. Ideally, this place should be inside the university that most members of the organization come from or the university that’s actually easier to find one.

Finding a place inside a Greek university that you are going to completely own it’s a huge challenge. At Mindspace it took us one year and countless hours, meeting with professors, collecting signatures from professors in order to push the rector and many more things. Eventually, we found one after some technical departments of NTUA merged and a room was left with no owner.

However, if we haven’t made such an effort previously we wouldn’t be in a position to get the space. Everyone thought we are serious enough because we stubbornly pursued it.

Back to the story of Pierpont Langley…

At the other side of the Atlantic Ocean there were two brothers, who unlike Pierpont Langley, they didn’t have any engineering degree, actually they hadn’t even finished high school. They had to sell bikes to buy parts for their machine and the press didn’t follow them anywhere.

They were the Wright brothers.

They did it, even if they were lacking so many things. Jim Cantrell — founding member at SpaceX who left a year after the company was founded because he didn’t believe Elon Musk’s vision could be achieved in his lifetime — publicly admitted he was emphatically wrong.

He said that he comes to realize that the most important thing if you want to accomplish something great is to have a vision and dogged determination (read the full article here).

As Garth Stein, author of the book ‘Racing in the Rain’ wrote:

A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is a winner, a champion, and will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is still racing. He is still alive.

May your race be a good one and may you find the winds of your passion to fuel it to a successful finish.

So go out there and start amazing organizations! You have nothing to worry about if you have a clear vision and a stubborn will to make it a reality!

As we say at Mindspace:

Dream big. Start small. But most of all, start…

If you find it useful share this article with someone who is thinking to start an organization.

Special thanks: Dimitris Messinis — Founding Chairman of Mindspace and Konstantina Koulouki COO of Mindspace for reading drafts of this post.

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