Checklist for Chapter Events, prepared by Felicia Steele (Eastern Regent, steele@tcnj.edu)
1) Picture or it didn’t happen. Make sure that you get at least three pictures from any event and then share them on social media so that they can be broadcast by your hosting department, school, and college. Any Instagram or Twitter post should tag your institution’s “brand management group” as well as the central office (@EnglishCon on Twitter; @englishmatters on Instagram).
2) When scheduling an event, make sure that provision has been made for a microphone. Even if your speakers have a well cultivated “teacher voice,” you guarantee accessibility to participants with hearing impairment if you amplify the speakers.
3) Come up with a plan to how to distribute information. At our institution, each building has an electronic monitor that has a Slide Show on loop. When advertising an event, make sure that the publicity officer gives the people in charge of the monitors in each building a Powerpoint slide that publicizes the event. They can add this slide into their existing PowerPoint that runs in a loop in each of those buildings.
4) When planning an event, make sure that invitations to speakers go out a month and a half before the event. Always invite your dean and college president or the director of your alumni office!
5) Find reasons to celebrate past and future members. Have any of your alumni published a book? Host a reading and a book party for them.
6) If you want to do something big, be brave about passing the cup around campus. You likely have allies in places you don’t necessarily know about. Your dean of education might be willing to support programming around teaching. Your dean of business will likely be invested in your students who are minoring in marketing or other business fields. Don’t be shy about asking people apart from your immediate dean for funding for activities or convention attendance.
7) Make sure to see how the Central Office might be able to support your events. For example, contact your student leaders to see if it would be appropriate to do a “social media takeover” during one of your events. Apply for Common Reader awards to support your chapter’s events around the common reader chapter projects.
8) Work with one another to come up with a style guide for your flyers and instagram posts. Are you all committed to using gender neutral language? Plan ahead so that you know not to use “freshmen” to talk about your first year students. You can even come up with a set of templates for particular kinds of events so that no one has to reinvent the wheel each time you hold an event.
9) Cultivate, honor, and get to know the professional staff in your English department. They know campus processes better than any faculty member does and can give you more help than anyone else in navigating the labyrinth of the contemporary college or university.
10) Give Faculty an opportunity to talk about their scholarship. Host “faculty research talks” or a “sabbatical series” so they can talk about what they did when they weren’t teaching.
11) Encourage your faculty advisor to consider service at the national level. If they have the opportunity to learn about how the scholarship process works, or how the convention submissions process works, they can give you more and better advice when you apply for events.