Organizing Tips: Get-Out-The-Vote Drives
Voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives are popular projects for student governments. Here are a few tried and true tactics for effectively getting out the student vote.
The most effective way to increase voter turnout is by contacting students individually to remind them to vote. There are lots of ways to do this.Read more
Organizing Tips: Holding a Press Conference
Generating media attention for your issue is a great way to educate the campus and the public, put pressure on decision-makers to take action, and build your student government's visibility and name recognition.
A press conference is a short event where you invite reporters to cover something newsworthy. For example, you could hold a press conference to:
- Release the results of a survey or a study
- Launch a new campaign
- Culminate a campaign or part of a campaign (at the end of your voter registration drive, petition drive, etc.)
- Highlight a big event (e.g., at the launch of your community service day)
Here's what you need to do to make your press conference a success.Read more
Organizing Tips: Running Productive Meetings
Running a productive meeting is a skill. Once you learn it, your meetings will accomplish more, they'll be better attended, and your members will feel like part of a community.
Here are seven ground rules for running a productive meeting.Read more
Organizing Tips: Building a Student Vote Coalition
One of the best ways to get decision-makers to pay attention to students is to make sure that students get to the polls and vote during elections.
If you want to run a big voter registration and get-out-the-vote project, building a campus-wide coalition is key to your success. Having a broad Student Vote coalition lets you run the biggest possible voter registration drive by bringing together groups with a range of resources.Read more
Organizing Tips: Planning a Big Event
Whether it's a rally, a day of community service, an educational forum, or a community town hall, big events are often important to your success.
Why organize big events?
- They can help you win your campaigns. Big events can help you get your message across to a decision-maker, generate media attention for an issue, educate the public, etc.
- They create a ton of good visibility for your student government.
- They are a chance to team up with important people on campus and build your relationship with them. Events provide an opportunity to work closely with other student organizations, campus administrators, local VIPs, etc.
- They help to develop more leaders within your student government. You need a lot of people in your student government to step up and take on more responsibility. Helping plan a big event is a good chance for up-and-coming students to learn the skills that will make them better leaders.
Organizing Tips: Building Your Visibility
Part of building a strong student government is making sure that everyone on campus knows what the student government is, what you do, and how they can help.
Visibility helps to educate the campus about your accomplishments, increase your reputation as a group that gets things done, set the stage for students to get involved, and increase turnout at your events.Read more
Organizing Tips: Recruiting Volunteers
The beginning of each term is a prime time for student groups - including your student government - to recruit new members to participate in your campaigns.
With more people involved, your student government can bring more ideas to the table, generate more public support for your campaigns, be more visible and build a bigger buzz on campus, and develop more leaders to take on more responsibility - all of which means you’re able to win more victories on the issues that affect students.
Student governments should strive to have a large base of volunteers who are involved in projects, even if they’re not elected members.Read more
Organizing Tips: Campaign Planning
Once you decide what issue to work on, sometimes the hardest part is figuring out where to start. Here are a set of questions you can ask to help you take a problem and turn it into a campaign that your student government can work on and win.
- What is the problem?
- Why is it a problem?
- What are the solutions?
- What is the process to solve it?
- Who are the decision-makers?
- What do they care about?
- What's our goal?
- What's our strategy?
- What are our tactics?
Organizing Tips: Choosing Issues
There are no shortage of problems for you to work on, and it can be hard to choose where to spend you time. Picking the right issues for your student government to work on can help the organization recruit more people to get involved, focus your energy where you'll make the biggest impact, and build your image as an organization that gets results.
Here are some questions to consider when picking an issue to work on.Read more
Organizing Tips: Building Grassroots Support
When you're working to influence public policy, one of the most powerful tools at your disposal is building and demonstrating widespread public support for your issue. Even if you don't have as much power or influence as the groups pushing against your proposals, decision-makers care about what the public thinks. If you're working on issues that affect the student body, there are always a ton of students who care and are willing to take action - by signing a petition or postcard, writing a letter, or making a phone call.Read more