Student organizations—from the honor society, to the school newspaper, to the choir and book club and Habitat for Humanity—are a lot like businesses. You have products or services that you’re offering. You have customers you hope will want and appreciate them. And you have both leaders and employees in charge of making it happen. That’s an exciting prospect considering that you have the opportunity to learn and experience everything from leadership, to recruiting, to customer service, promotion and project management.
That’s why if your club or organization is simply repeating the same meetings, tasks, fundraisers, etc. every year, with no drive to improve or change or make an even bigger impact, you’re missing potentially a huge opportunity.
Imagine the reaction if a business declared their plans for the coming year:
Our goal is to simply repeat what we did last year and hope that it works. We’re not interested in changing or improving anything about how we operate. And we will not evaluate the performance of products, services, leaders or employees.
How long could that business reasonably be expected to survive?
Some high school organizations make a big impact, constantly pushing and experimenting to do even more with their work. But many others are simply going through the motions, holding regular meetings, repeating the same projects as last year, with no goals and no way to measure effectiveness. You might be surprised at how many students have responded to my question of, “What exactly does your organization do?” with some version of, “We pretty much just go to meetings.”
A club or organization operating like a business would have well-defined answers to these questions:
1. What does success look like? How will you know if the organization is doing a good job?
2. Who are your customers? Who do you exist to serve? How will you know if you’re meeting their needs?
3. What standards are your leaders being held to?
4. What are your expectations of your members? Will you allow people to do the bare minimum (or less) and still call themselves members? Or will everyone be held to certain standards of performance?
5. How are you helping members learn, grow, and make an impact within the organization?
If your group has room for some improvement in this area, consider taking the following actions:
First, discuss and agree on your group’s vision of what success looks like. Be as specific as possible. “We’ll do fundraisers” is less specific than, “We will raise at least $5,000 for juvenile diabetes.”
Then have the group brainstorm and vote on 3-5 things—projects, initiatives, changes, etc.—that you need to accomplish what you describe above.
And finally, ask each member which item on the above list of 3-5 things they would personally be most interested in working on for the remainder of the year. Then allow them to join a sub-group to focus on that one item.
Now, instead of one large group that meets weekly, you’ve got 3-5 tight-knit groups, each intensely focused on satisfying one crucial objective, who can meet and interact with whatever frequency (or infrequency) they need. You could even reschedule your weekly meetings to become monthly check-ins where each sub-group updates the larger group on their progress.
How much more could your group accomplish this year if you treated it like a business?
P.S. Here are a few ideas.