Running A Campus Community
After a discussion on Ladies Storm Hackathons started by a woman looking to ramp up her campus’ women in tech group, I realized it would be helpful to list some things that we did at Case Western Reserve to revive Hacker Society. Running a group can be difficult- it doesn’t usually come with an instruction manual when you inherit it. Below is what worked for us. Every campus is different, but this is advice I think can help across many different situations. This certainly isn’t the end-all-be-all bible of community management, but it should be enough to help you jumpstart a group.
Get your emails organized.
Most of leadership is just effective communication, which in college largely relies on your ability to send emails that people want to read. Send them regularly but infrequently. We used to send once-off emails for every event. It created a lot of confusion, and put a damper on our signal-to-noise ratio for people. If members are frequently receiving emails that aren’t relevant to them, they slowly learn to stop opening them.
We started sending weekly emails that included the entire schedule for the week on the same day of the week, every week. It was structured as a calendar with brief descriptions of events (turns out people hate reading).
We kept track of upcoming events on a shared Google calendar so no one would double-book. This allowed students to work our events into their schedule for the week and taught them to expect our emails. It also cut down on noise. If we sent another email out during the week, it was an additional event that popped up last minute or a reminder for a previously announced event. We even made efforts to minimize surprise events by reminding outside event sources, like local meetups or companies, that we required at least a week’s advance notice of an event if they wanted to advertise their event through us.
Talk to newcomers.
It’s less obvious that it sounds. When someone new shows up to the group, make sure someone talks to them. It can be very alienating to show up to a new group and no one says a word to you. This can be exhausting if you’re more introverted, but I promise it pays off. Something as simple as thanking them for showing up and asking a bit about their interests are good starters. The larger your group gets, the easier this scales if you can continue to encourage people to be welcoming. Just make sure that people know the difference between welcoming someone and questioning why someone is there.
I’ve always sort of prided us on not doing “ice breakers.” I think it just makes people feel awkward and doesn’t give anyone much to talk about later. Consider other options. The only thing ice breakers bonds people around is the fact that they both hate ice breakers- not enough to build a friendship on.
Work campus resources.
If you’re trying to prep the group for a career fair or internship hiring season, make sure you’re reaching out to your campus Career Center if you have one. If you don’t, alumni who now work in the industry may be happy to review resumes or do mock interviews. If your group is new and you don’t know your alumni, reach out to your Alumni Association and see if they can find you volunteers in related fields. Consider other campus offices that relate to your goal who might be able to provide funding, meeting space, or other resources. Women’s centers, diversity groups, and related clubs may be willing to help you out in ways you hadn’t even imagined.
Love your alumni.
Alumni are one of our best resources. They’ve already been through what we’re going through, have industry connections, and are normally more than happy to give back. They’ve met up with us at conferences in order to mentor, come back to give talks to our organization, helped members get jobs and internships, and even funded trips, equipment, and events. Active alumni just plain rock.
Distribute your social media team.
Running multiple social media sites takes a lot of time. I recommend having a few people sign up to do it, just make sure they can be trusted to know what is and is not appropriate to post.
Look for free social media tools. Hootsuite gives you up to three social media accounts on their free tier. It allows you to schedule posts. I would normally queue up a bunch of tech related articles to share to keep the pages active. Not a ton of people “liked” the posts, but I could tell people were reading them when they started bringing them up at events.
I also started to follow our members on Twitter, retweeting their accomplishments that were related to Hacker Society- any time someone open-sourced a project, traveled to a tech conference, or started mentoring. Twitter and Facebook Pages both provide their own analytics tools. (Twitter’s analytics dashboard is at insights.twitter.com. Facebook’s analytics can be found at the top of the page you manage if you’re an admin.)
Facebook Pages work well for organizing events, advertising student blogs and projects, and interacting with outside sources like alumni, companies, and news outlets. They have a limited audience without paying for ads, but you can learn ways to increase your audience engagement. Facebook Groups work well for letting members interact with each other because anyone can post, posts are visible to anyone in the group, and it’s more conducive to discussion.
Outreach early.
This bit is especially specific to campus communities. With the yearly cycle of students, the best opportunity for new members is with the new crop of freshmen every fall. Upperclassmen joined the freshmen Facebook groups to answer their questions about college life. This let freshmen know who our club was, made them feel better about transitioning to college, and let them know to look out for us on campus when they arrived in August if we matched their interests. Social media was key for us to connect to people before we could meet them in person. When students arrived to the Activity’s Fair, we already had a bit of a name for ourselves and people sought us out.
Amplify your members.
By sharing stories about what our students were up to, it helped members find other members that were interested in the same topics, as well as help demonstrate that you can accomplish something cool even as a student or a beginner. It was great for alumni to see what our students were up to, as well as for professors to find out what we were doing. Letting them shine helped make waves for us in other parts of organizing.
Get a website.
GitHub pages offers free website hosting. If your group needs a website, GitHub offers free hosting through GitHub pages. You can customize the domain name afterwards. Don’t know web design? There are plenty of free templates available around the web that you can edit quickly to get something up advertising your group. It doesn’t even need to be fancy. Check ours out here.
Give people meeting options.
We didn’t just meet one night a week, and I think that helped reach a wider audience. In college, clubs are numerous. It’s tough for most students to commit to more than two or three organizations. By meeting on both Wednesday nights and Saturday afternoons, we gave people an option for how they wanted to interact with us.
Leadership turnover is risky. Encourage newcomers to step up.
You can spend a lot of time building up a group, but someone needs to be the ring leader once you leave. When we had a large part of leadership graduating, we noticed that getting new people to step up can be difficult, so we started scouting new leadership out. We talked to them personally about running when elections came, and the more confidence they had that they could do the job, the better they got about sharing and acting on their ideas. We looked for people that were friendly, organized, and regular attendees who were good with people. It paid off when they could pick up the organization, make it their own, and run with it, while the older leadership stepped back and let them take the reigns with minimal supervision.
It’s worth noting that we also change over leadership on the calendar year, rather than the academic year. This gives the previous leadership an entire semester to mentor and help the new leadership out if they need it. Additionally, summers don’t go wasted. The new leadership has already been at their jobs for an entire semester, and they can use the summer to continue working. If you change over on the academic year, it can be rather frustrating not having mentors around to show you the ropes.
I’ve since passed on my duties, but I’m looking forward to watching the new leadership succeed, just now from the role of an alumna.
Not all of these points are great for non-campus communities where people are only there for 4 or 5 years and there’s normally only one rush of newcomers. I’m still trying to figure out how community building and maintenance translates into Meetups and other post-grad groups.
If you have any other tips, feel free to share.
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