Leading Change in Clubs and Societies

ANU clubs and societies are real organisations: budgets, events, hundreds of members, and a whole operation handed to a new committee every year. Sitting on one is already leadership - but on its own it is not a Project.

What makes it a Project is a change experiment. You pick one thing about how the club works that could be better, make a deliberate attempt to change it, and at the end you can say whether it worked. The goal is agreed with the committee, it runs in a defined window, and the difference it makes is to the club's members.

The same thirty people come to everything, so you design three events for members who have never attended and track who turns up. Coordination counts too, provided it has a goal beyond "it happened".

Committee experience is common. Evidence that you changed something is not. You will practise persuading volunteers, who are unpaid and did not ask you, to try something different - then finding out honestly whether it worked. That means deciding what to measure before you start. Plenty of graduates can say they were Vice-President; far fewer can say what was different about the club when they left it.

Start with your committee. The project has to be something they want and will back - agree the goal, the window and who else is involved before you commit to it.

Then work out your baseline: attendance, sign-ups, how many members volunteer. Write it down before you begin. If you are not in a club yet, the ANUSA clubs directory lists every affiliated club and society at ANU.

Agreed with your committee at the start and written into your Course Pathway Plan: the change you are testing and the window it runs in, what you will measure against what baseline, and whatever the club itself needs from you.

At the end, a short account of what you tried, what changed, and what the next committee should keep - given to the committee, not only submitted.

Recommended to students who already sit on a committee, or are about to, can name a specific thing about their club that frustrates them, and are willing to be told no and come back with a smaller version.

Two cautions. Your ordinary duties are not the project - running the meetings you were elected to run is service. And a club year is short: pick a window you can finish inside.