There’s another blog post from me about the impact and value volunteers have on the Union, and Imperial as a whole. With that in mind, I wanted to spend a good portion of the year trying to make your life easier. 

A is for activity.

Being a club officer, or any other volunteer role at the Union, shouldn’t be about form filling (as far as I know, even Accountancy society isn’t big on form filling (I may be shaky on what Accountancy actually is)). 

I do want to hear from you about what’s going on with your club – what’s going well, what’s not going too well, how we can help you better.

This year, for the first time, we asked clubs to give us some general feedback about their first term. Now, the form was way too long, and a bug in the system meant that clubs had to have a picture of what they got up to to finish submitting it (all of this will be fixed next time, I promise). Here is one of the responses:

“Culinary Society is the best thing since sliced bread. We have had huge success in publicising the society which was almost disbanded last year. We have over 240 members and around 600 people on our mailing list (people love our Newsletter, with only a few people having unsubscribed). Despite having come across many problems we have hosted successful mingles which have included people bringing in different dishes and everyone trying them. We have created a shared recipe list which we hope to expand over the years. This has meant the society has gotten off the ground. Our first big event is currently being planned and is a cocktail masterclass at metric, it should be a really good source of income and a great night for our members!”

The feedback from the reports is amazing – it’s reminded me how much passion people have for what they do at Imperial, and, as well as highlighting some areas we definitely need to improve, it’s also picked up some of the best things about what we do – the responses are full of praise for secretaries, treasurers, other committee members and society members, who’ve gone above and beyond to make their club incredible.

Keep up the good work.

Objective Check-in:

Rewriting key policies and adding accessible procedures – in progress. We’ve made some big steps in redrafting the budgeting process, and learnt a lot of the important lessons about tours, new activities and the funding rounds.

Overhauling the support we give to new societiescommittees – obj. changed. We’re looking at the handover process next term, and trying to create a really solid framework. This term, we’ve started to trial a mentoring system with societies that have just been created, while the work of meeting club volunteers for support continues apace.

Compiling a guide to raising money from Sponsorship, Trusts, and the public – queued.