Starting and Running a Newsletter
In Fall 2016 at the University of Texas at Austin, I was elected Public Relations Officer of the Jester East Residence Hall Council. My duties were initially fairly simply: requiring weekly Officer Meetings, biweekly General Meetings, biannual University Residence Hall Association meetings, and the creation and posting (physically and digitally) of various flyers/posters/cards for events around the Residence Hall.
However, I decided to add another duty that became wildly successful after the first week and will continue to be a Jester East tradition: a weekly publication of all the events/deadlines/happenings around Jester East and campus. As a Jester East resident I knew what residents wanted to know (and that they wanted to know it succinctly, not in a thousand posters on a bulletin board in a busy hallway), and as a Jester East Officer I had the opportunity to interview representatives from various organizations to learn what events were coming up, as well as access to a supply room and printer room.
I have since been complimented on multiple occasions by residents who claim they love reading my newsletter, as well as gotten the green light by management and my immediate peers and superiors. Perhaps best of all, the Complex Coordinator overseeing Jester East gave me exclusive permission to post the physical copies of my newsletter not only one each floor and around the lobby, but within the elevators. I currently create the only publication allowed this honor and was asked to take down anyone else’s work in the elevators if I see it while putting up mine.
Leading 20 Floor Representatives
As Public Relations Officer of the second largest of 14 on-campus dorms, I was put completely in charge of the 20 Floor Representatives (there are two per floor and they primarily serve to build a sense of community on theirs). I was responsible for all of their work at Jester East, and allowed to delegate various tasks to them. To manage this, I held roughly bimonthly meetings and utilized GroupMe for notifications on the status of each task. 20 was too many to personally handle daily on top of my other duties, so I created the position of Head Floor Rep and bestowed it upon the two most worthy applicants.
Unfortunately, while they by-and-large attended my brief but informative meetings and responded in the chat, I was facing a low success rate on task completion for awhile. For example, I would find that days after I asked them to hang up a few of my newsletters on their respective floors, I would find a stack still remaining on the front desk. To fix this, I held a meeting and responded personally to each of their reasons for slacking. I then held them more accountable for future tasks by creating a quick sign in sheet to leave beside stacks of flyers to hang up, asking for them to signature beside their name to indicate they hung up the required number that day. I also encouraged them to take further responsibility by offering to hold a party for the most consistently helpful reps, making the sign in sheet an opportunity to earn pizza at the end of the year rather than a punishment meted out by a distrustful overseer.
Sadly, this group faced other problems over the year. One of the Head Floor Reps became frustrated with low turnout rates and became a little too overbearing in the chat, prompting complaints through email. I spoke to her to ensure a softer touch in the future, and held another meeting to address the issue with the rest of the floor reps and make sure they were okay with the new arrangement. We also faced recruitment problems; although Jester East is a large building with many residents, most are not easily convinced to contribute. To solve this problem and meet our required number of reps, I personally tabled in the lobby, handing out shirts and rapidly reciting a quick elevator speech about the benefits of signing on–then pointing them to my newsletters for my email to apply, successfully promoting two things at once. Thankfully this had a good effect and we gained multiple new hardworking reps from the event.
Before I took over, I don’t believe floor reps were ever used to their full potential. In fact, in the year before I joined the Residence Hall Council, I hadn’t even heard of their existence. Their duties were simply to hang up the flyers that the Public Relations Officer created. First I just added my newsletter to the mix, but I quickly realized what a wasted resource they were. To begin, as part of a campaign I helped initiate to improve residents’ attendance at our General Meetings every other week, I included in my newsletter that at the end of each month the floor with the most attendees (we kept track at each meeting with sign in sheets) would win a party. I then placed floor reps in charge of these parties, helping them fill out event planners to request funds and assisting with the planning and execution of the details of their actual event. This helped promote the community-building throughout floors that I felt floor reps were really about (not just hanging posters). Another way I achieved this goal was getting floor reps in contact with the Resident Assistants on their floors and getting permission for them to send emails about events coming up for the residence hall. This ensured more personal emails for each floor that helped improve attendance at the events and raised the overall sense of family as these residents learned about and went to things together. Finally, I gave the floor reps some more interesting tasks on special occasions to increase their interest in volunteering with other events. For example, a few RHC-led events in April required large promotional banners to be made; I left this task to the more creative floor reps. Similarly, a new event was created for the end of the year called Floor Feuds, in which the floors could create teams to compete in a few festival-style challenges. I put reps in charge of these teams, to help lead and guide them.
Although leading a group of 20 busy college students was at times frustrating and discouraging, it was a very educational and rewarding experience in the end. I know my hard work and constant attention helped change the workings of their organization for the better, and I can proudly point to individual times on campus that I helped make a little better through it.
Other Duties
There were of course also uncountable meetings, late-night crises, and so much more. From leading events to attending seminars, it was a long and busy ride that taught me so much and made me feel for the first time like I belonged in the vast UT Austin network. For relevancy to my portfolio though I’ll try to keep those memories brief and instead just post some of the flyers I made throughout my reign in public relations.
