Effective Student Organization/Introduction

Organization is key when it comes to putting a group together. Without great organization skills, the club can only go so far until it falls apart. Organization leads to great advertisement and promotion, which is key when trying to attract new members to the club or people to an event. For example, CCF has over 300 members because they have a hired staff to organize all of the events and CCF on Friday nights. Even though Swing Kids does not have a hired staff to organize their events, they have specified leaders who give up their time to plan Swing Kids and without those leaders there wouldn't be Swing Kids. Organization is key to a vision, goal and purpose within a club.

An effective organizational strategy for any club has a few major components. The first component should be that a club must come to an agreement on the mission or purpose for the group. For example, on the Campus Christian Fellowship (CCF) website, it states "We strive to assist students in their desire to know Jesus Christ and apply his teachings to their lives." CCF does this by reaching out and spreading the news of God and faith to the rest of the student body. The second effective organizational strategy that a club needs is to plan out events or meeting in advance. This strategy is shown through Swing Kids. They plan all of their big events at the beginning of the year in order to be organized and make sure a space or an area is available. Although both of these clubs are vastly different with their intentions and goal they must plan in advance in order to achieve their mission or purpose. A third effective organizational strategy is recruitment. Once a club has been founded, how do you get the word out. Most clubs use the events fair, which is an opportunity at the beginning of the school year to have a booth about a club. This is the way most students learn about different clubs on campus. However, fliers and word of mouth are very prominent recruitment techniques as well. Finally, funding. Although clubs at Western get $50 to start with, many clubs need more than that. So, the organization has to decide whether it will charge its members, focus on donations, or host events.