Planning Your Year

1. AGM (Annual General Meeting)

Every year starts and ends with an Annual General Meeting. Now that your Executive has been elected, what should you do next?

2. Handover

This will be one of the most important things you’ll do as a member of an exec, get that institutional knowledge! Learning from other people’s success and failure is super important. If you can’t get a written and/or oral handover, you could also contact someone else on that exec, or someone who’s done that role in a previous year, or someone you know who has held a similar role in another organisation. (See also: How to Handover)

3. Your First Exec Meeting

This is a super exciting part of your year. It can be fun to have some icebreakers and some snacks if everyone hasn’t met before!

Some really important things to cover in this meeting are:

  • Does everyone know what they’re doing? If last year’s exec hasn’t given people handovers it’s super important to follow up with them to try and get a handover.
  • Expectations for the workload for the year – it’s important people know what they are signing up for.
  • Communication for the exec – does your society want to use Slack? Or Messenger? Or a Facebook Group? Getting a consensus on this is super important.
  • Establishing a centralised document location.
    • Most commonly, clubs use a shared Google Drive year to year to keep track of all of their documents.
    • This is super useful for communication and so nothing gets lost.
  • Planning Goals
    • What do we want to achieve for this year?
    • How is this going to be measured? (e.g., Feedback forms, Running particular events for the year, Attendance at events)

(See also: Executive Meetings)

Creating a Timeline of Events and Key Deadlines

  • Create a timeline for the year.
  • This can include goal dates and final dates to get critical tasks completed.
  • If you need to get a Functions on Campus form in on time, make sure you leave yourself enough time!
  • Knowing this at the beginning of the year when you have time means that tasks can be allocated to different people dependent on varying assessment schedules.
  • It also means that you don’t need things to snowball.

4. Casual Vacancies

It’s pretty normal for some positions not to be filled at AGMs, and it’s important to get those filled. The best method is to send out an Expression of Interest (EOI) to your social media and email if you have one. Feel free to share it in ANU Schmidtposting.

5. Reaffiliations

Each year, your society will need to reaffiliate with ANUSA to be eligible for funding. This process can be a bit tricky because sometimes there’s some governance involved. Please read up on Affiliations and get your form in early, because it can take a while. (See also: Reaffiliation Process)

6. Market Day (O-Week)

Market Day happens on Wednesday of O-Week, and it’s pretty exciting to have lots of people chat to you about what your society does. It’s a great way to put yourself out there and engage with potential new members. You should organise a roster of your executive so that people have short shifts. Bring some fun merch and provide an easy way for people to sign up, like a QR Code. When collecting information, please grab people’s names, student ID and email address, so you have a way to contact them. You will be contacted about Market Day by the ANUSA Clubs Team. (See also: Market Day Guide)

7. Attending Trainings

The Clubs Officer will run training sessions for club executives, and these are a super useful way to get to know a little bit more about what you need to be doing in your role, so keep an eye out for when these will occur! Your Executive will need to attend clubs training annually to be eligible to receive funding each year.

8. Clubs Committee

The Clubs Committee, chaired by the Clubs Officer, is a non-mandatory meeting for the ANUSA team to share updates relevant to the club’s space. This is also the best space for clubs to provide feedback to our team and help shape policy that will effect how they run.

9. Running Events

This is the most exciting part of running a club, events are where your club actually comes together! Events can range from serious to entirely social and should be reflective of your club’s unique purpose. Every club should strive to innovate with their events. Running exciting and fresh activities will drive people to join up and keep your clubs culture alive. Consider what your members would love to do and if all else fails, Badger & Co is a popular location for all clubs. (See also: Event Management Section)

10. Checking in with your Timeline

It’s a good idea to review your initial timeline at all exec meetings, or at least once a term to check whether you are sticking to your schedule.

11. Staying on top of your Inbox

Your club’s email should be checked regularly, this is how ANUSA communicates important information to clubs and a way that your members can get in contact with you. This is a core aspect of club management and should be delegated to a member of your executive.

12. Bush Week Market Day

This is quite similar to the O-Week Market Day, except it can be tricky to find enough people to be on the stall when people have class. Learn from what you did on market day, you should hit your stride now! (See also: Market Day Guide)

13. Ball Season (if applicable)

If your club is planning on running a Ball or Special Event, this takes quite a lot of organisation, time and financial planning. Make sure you support the exec members handling this, and allocate the workload fairly!

14. Annual General Meeting (End of Year)

Your AGM might happen at a different time of year, depending on your constitutional requirements. You’ll need to organise this in advance, and advertise it to your members. You’ll deliver a report to your members detailing what you’ve done for the year. (See also: General Meetings)

15. Handover (End of Year)

Now that your year has ended it’s great to continue contributing by helping the new people start their year well. This is by far the most you will do to help your club or society succeed in the future! (See also: How to Handover)