Chair

Author

Sumner Evans

In this document I describe how things went as chair of ACM for the 2018-19 school year.

Pre-Semester Planning

Over the summer, we did not have regular meetings. We did have a few sporadic officer planning meetings, but other than that, we did not have any meetings.

I also worked with Robby (Vice Chair) to organize tech talks.

We also prepared for a large advertising campaign.

Advertising

Close to the start of the semester, we began planning for our advertising campaign. Our goal was to make sure that every freshman and sophomore knew about ACM. (We assumed that most juniors and seniors should already know about ACM.) Our campaign consisted of two main advertising methods:

  1. Advertising in every entry-level CS class

  2. Celebration of Mines

The campaign was extremely successful. We had 114 people sign up for our mailing list. Given that the incoming class of freshmen was 1300 people, and assuming that most of those signups were from freshmen, that’s in the neigborhood of 5-7% of the freshmen class!

In-Class Advertisement

GitLab Issue

#10

We went to every section of CSCI 101, 261, 262, 274, 303, and 306 to advertise ACM. We figured that these were the classes that would most likely have freshmen and sophomores in them.

The first thing that I did was create a spreadsheet with a list of all of the sections of each of the entry level classes, their times, location, and who was instructing them.

Then, I emailed all of the professors of each of the classes and asked them if it was OK to pitch ACM for a minute during one of their classes on the first week. After the professors confirmed, I made sure that at least one officer went to each section.

Here is a link the spreadsheet that I set up to organize this.

Celebration of Mines

GitLab Issue

#9

Celebration of Mines is where we get the vast majority of our mailing list singups. Thus, it is a vitally important recruiting event and we always need to have a good showing.

There are a number of things which must happen:

  • Sign up for a table at Celebration. Make sure to get a table that has power for mailing list signups. Try and get a table next to LUG.

  • Get a bunch of ACM/Mozilla/Firefox stickers.

  • Figure out some cool computer to use for mailing list singup. This year, we had Jack’s Macintosh Plus.

  • Make an ACM sign for the front of the table. We just had two \(11 \times 17"\) flyers with the Mines ACM logo on them.

  • Work with Tracy Camp to get a question in the CSCI 101 scavenger hunt which encourages students to come by the ACM booth at Celebration. This year, the question was about what computer we were using for mailing list signups (it was a Macintosh Plus with 4MB of RAM).

  • Create and print flyers with information about both ACM and LUG and about the first tech talk. This year, we printed 50 of each, and we ran out of them in the first hour. Printing 100-150 would have been better. We printed the tech talk flyers on half sheets and had the print shop cut them in half. We left the LUG/ACM info sheets together.

  • Ensure that there are volunteers at the table at all times. This year, we probably had too many, but that’s better than having too few!

  • Have a short pitch for anyone who comes by the table that explains what the club is and encourage them to sign up for the mailing list. (Once they are on the list, they’ll get emails that will hopefully continue to reel them in.)

Tech Talks

Generally, Robby (VC) handled organizing tech talks.

On tech talk days:

On each tech talk day, there’s a lot of people that we have to manage. Here are a few things that I made sure happened at every tech talk.

  • Ensure that we have cups and plates.

  • Recruit 2-3 people to help manage the line (remove pizza boxes that are empty, make sure people aren’t taking too much)

  • Say hi to people (welcome people to the club)

  • Short announcements and then introduce speaker

BSO

I recommend that next year, you institute a policy that every single submission must be entered into the acm-officer-resources repo and committed as it is being submitted. The commit must also be GPG signed so that it can be cryptographically verified that we submitted the form on time.

General Notes

  • Spring has lower attendance. You may want to consider doing some sort of event to help bolster Spring semester attendance.

  • Start planning HSPC very early. I can help out with this, and I think that Tracy mentioned that she wanted to get everything done before Christmas break which is a good idea.

  • Overall, I think the year went well. The biggest challenge was trying to continue improving how people viewed the club. I think that there will always be negativity, and the trick is to figure out how to sort through the noise of complaints to find the real meat behind their grievances.

  • I might suggest that you keep better notes throughout the semester as to what you do each week/month. That will make doing this retrospective easier or even not necessary.


Tip

If you have any questions or want to suggest a change to this document, please submit an issue or PR to the GitLab repo.