“[An] effective leadership transition is the process by which past and future student leaders in an organization work together to review and learn from previous events and programs and prepare for the upcoming year.”  -Adrienne M. Craig

The transition from old to new leaders is vital to an organization’s success.  Leadership transitions allow members to reflect on the past and plan for the future.   Chloe Chavez, a former Vice President of the Hispanic Business Student Association (HBSA) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) had a very positive experience:

At the end of each school year our current officers hold a transitional meeting to brief incoming officers on the success and debacle of that year’s events, the most attention would center around the largest events that consistently brought in the most revenue and/or provided the most benefit for our members.  Our leadership transitions run especially smooth because our leaders create soft copies of important files such as event planning that future leaders may use as a How To Guide; this gives them a head start for the upcoming year. Efficient transitions enable the professional progression of our organization, officers and members.

Chloe’s situation is definitely the exception.  Other organizations lack a systematic way of transitioning new leaders into their organization.  Some new officers are even left with the responsibility of contacting a past officer, sometimes even after they’ve graduated, to gain needed event or contact information.  Some have no luck and have to start their planning from scratch.

In this situation, this leader’s valuable experience of what works and what does not work is no longer existent; the organization can no longer benefit from this leaders hard work and will have to, basically, reinvent the wheel over and over again until an effective leader transition system is implemented.  Sadly this is a problem for many organizations.

So how can organizations avoid this dilemma? Adrienne M. Craig, director of Student Activities at Johnson & Wales University-Florida, in an issue of Campus Activities Programming by NACA (May ’09) gives a few tips for effective student leader transitions:

1. Plan a retreat. Allow leaders to focus on having a successful year for their organization.
2. Create a map of the organization’s journey. Reflect on the past, in order to plan for the future and maintain traditions.
3. Be honest about the past and realistic about the future. Discuss and assess past events that way past mistakes will not be repeated.
4. Take time to learn your available resources. Whether they may me past food deals or other resources from staff.

What tips would you give students who are transitioning into a student leader position?

As a past officer of a UT business student organization, I know the challenges of communicating with 120+ members on a moments notice. Any student organization officer can tell you, it takes time, effort and skill to know each member, obtain member preference information, and inform them of last minute event details and changes.

What is the solution to these timeless organizational communication challenges? Simply put, OrgSync. On one hand, this Austin based company, OrgSync, Inc., hosts a platform to equip universities with the tools to oversee and manage their students and student organizations. On the other hand, OrgSync’s platform can also be used by student leaders, like me, to manage our organizations, committees, members and events.

My executive council initially wanted to use our website and our forum to inform and interact with our members. One entire year was devoted to creating a new “user friendly” website, and in the end that idea was scrapped because of time consuming inefficiencies with updating web content on a continual basis. After all, we were not a computer science organization teaching our members how to write code to build and manage a website. Our main purpose is to mold our members into young professionals with leadership experience.

After realizing that our website would not be an efficient method of communicating with our members, we focused on communicating through email and sending our entire member list serve [very lengthy] weekly emails, which listed out all events’ detailed information. Needless to say weekly e-mails were very tedious and time consuming and were merely a band-aid to our communication problem.

As a student and an officer, I know the importance of being time efficient and cutting out unnecessary tasks. Our time consuming communication efforts could have been cut in half simply by using OrgSync’s platform.

OrgSync’s SMS/Texting tool could have been the quick and simple solution to informing our members of event updates and details. We would have never needed to dabble in finding, creating, and managing a forum that never held up to our standards. Instead, we could have used OrgSync’s poll feature to interact with our members and to obtain unbiased and anonymous opinions and feedback on events. We would have even had an alternative to the pesky weekly emails. With OrgSync’s event and meeting tools, any officer could have uploaded event information and segment event invitations by specifying which committees and members to invite to specific events and meetings.

Kennie Blanco a graduate from the McCombs School of Business and a past President of a student organization said, “Finding a centralized and user friendly medium of communication was difficult. Our website was never advanced enough to facilitate communication effectively… it was not very easy for a member to go online to find information or to even ask questions about an upcoming event.”

In fact, OrgSync offers everything suggested by this experienced officer. With the tools that its platform provides OrgSync efficiently facilitates communication within organizations. I would recommend it to any school and organization looking to have a higher level of efficiency and effectiveness when communicating and interacting with their constituency online.

If you have been a part of the OrgSync community or a regular reader of our blog you have heard us talk about how the creators of OrgSync gained valuable leadership experience in college that lead to the development of OrgSync.  For this reason we are dedicated to providing students with opportunities for Leadership training and development. That is why we love working with the University of Arizona and the National Collegiate Leadership Conference (NCLC).

NCLC is a student-run annual conference that serves as the cornerstone of the leadership experience and training for hundreds of college students across the nation.  They have professional staff that advises them throughout the year, but overall the student leaders are completely responsible for organizing the annual conference.  Students recruit speakers, raise funds, manage logistics… and everything else involved in planning a national conference.

The entire conference was great, but Saturday was the highlight of the conference for us. On Saturday morning I presented an information session on social media and how leaders can leverage the power of social networks to allow their voice be heard.  Later that afternoon Eric had the opportunity to present “Leadership Lessons from a Young Entrepreneur.” Eric discussed how his leadership experience in college allowed him to successfully launch and manage OrgSync from the ground up.

It was the first time Eric was able to present the “OrgSync story” to inspire and teach others the importance of getting involved and being a leader. Justin Jones and James Castrission were the keynote speakers at dinner and presented a truly inspirational presentation on how they completed the world’s first Kayak expedition from Australia to New Zealand across the Tasman Sea.  Their story about dedication, endurance, and perseverance was filled with important leadership lessons.  In many ways their story is like Eric’s and OrgSync.

They chose an outdoor adventure, and Eric chose starting a company; both took on a great deal of risk, developed a strong team to support them on their adventure, and showed strong leadership skills.  We had a great time meeting these guys, and look forward to meeting up with them in the future.

OrgSync will continue to support the NCLC conference and any efforts that encourage leadership development and education to students.  We look forward to continue our long relationship with the University of Arizona, and working with them to support and develop new leadership development programs and initiatives.

This past week Cayce and I (Eric Fortenberry) traveled to the Sacramento (‘Sac’) State campus to meet with campus administrators and train student leaders. We met with various departments including Student Affairs, Career Services, Event Services and Student Government. During our first meeting we were honored to present OrgSync to Edward Jones, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs, Campus Life. Edward expressed interest in providing OrgSync to all the student affairs departments to improve their communication and cross department scheduling. We were very exciting when Edward realized “OrgSync’s only limitation is our imagination.”

During our meeting with Sac State’s accounting department we discussed their student organization treasury needs. An online treasury solution is much needed and will be implemented slowly to assure that current treasury processes can be re-worked for efficiency. Another highlight was meeting with the Career Services department. They gave us some great feedback and suggestions on how we can continue to improve our resume builder and Co-curricular transcript manager. Lastly, we had Rebecca Dietzler and Rich Clakeley from Events Services walk us through their entire room reservation process. It’s always so exciting for us to have the opportunity to sit around a table and collaborate with campus leaders to brainstorm how our innovative software can benefit their campus in more ways then we ever intended.

The OrgSync leadership training for student leaders was held all day Saturday. We kicked off the day with a 90 minute in-depth walkthrough of all the “Nuts & Bolts” of OrgSync. Thanks to the Buzz Café, there was plenty of coffee and breakfast foods to keep everyone attentive. After the walkthrough we got the opportunity to visit with many excited student leaders. They wanted to know why OrgSync hadn’t been implemented on every campus years ago! After more food from the Buzz Café, the student leaders broke out into groups based on their positions. I co-hosted the planning and time management session with Leanna Neves-Bogetti, Student Activities Program Advisor, and enjoyed showing students how they could leverage our Calendar and ToDos modules to better plan and manage their time. At the same time Cayce was presenting in the philanthropy and community service session where he demonstrated how students could track their involvement and activity hours using our resume builder and co-curricular transcripts.

At the end of the day the Student Activities Office was excited to use their new Plinko board to raffle off prizes to the 75+ students who attended. They gave away everything from an iPod Nano to Peak Adventure trips and team paintballing. It was a great end to an already amazing day!

Overall, our trip to Sacramento State was very productive and gave us the opportunity to gather feedback from both students and campus leaders. We were also glad to build closer relationships with Tom, Karlos, Joanne, Leanna and Courtney in the Student Activities Office. They have been with us for over a year now and we are thankful for all of their efforts to spread OrgSync across the Sac State campus, as well as for their helpful feedback and feature suggestions that will improve the OrgSync platform for all. I can’t wait to book our next trip to Sac State!

21st Annual
National Collegiate Leadership Conference
Hosted at The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona
February 13-15, 2009
Only $50!

Join us for the 2009 National Collegiate Leadership Conference in Tucson, Arizona!

The National Collegiate Leadership Conference is a 3-day leadership development experience for students and advisors on the beautiful campus of The University of Arizona. The 2009 conference, February 13-15 2009, will feature over 50 workshop sessions, a keynote banquet, teambuilding, networking, excursions, an awards banquet, service projects, and an opportunity to earn a leadership certificate. Register by January 25th for only $50 per person and receive a free conference t-shirt. After January 25th, registration will go up to $75.

NCLC is also excited to announce that James Castrission and Justin Jones will deliver our 2009 Conference Keynote Address. Justin and James were the first people to successfully kayak the Tasman Sea, “Crossing the Ditch” between Australia and New Zealand. Check out their story at www.crossingtheditch.com.au. The 2009 conference will also offer participants an opportunity to experience Tucson through one of many excursions. Take a hike in the beautiful Sonoran Desert, visit museums and galleries, or learn about the unique history of southern Arizona.

For complete information, including conference schedule and registration, please visit www.leadership-conference.org. For more information, please contact Tom Murray at tam@email.arizona.edu or 520-621-8046.

OrgSync has logged a few thousand miles over the past couple of weeks, attending two NASPA Regional Conferences (Long Beach, CA and Hyannis, MA), ASGA (Dallas), and ILA (Los Angeles).

ILA gave us a great opportunity to interact with current clients, and have face-to-face conversations with potential partners. We spent a lot of time with Dr. Corey Seemiller, the Director of Leadership programs at the University of Arizona. UA uses OrgSync to manage student organizations, and to track progress in their co-curricular leadership programs. UA and Corey were instrumental in helping OrgSync develop our 2.0 version of the co-curricular transcript and resume builder. We had great discussions over dinner about new and future developments and Corey was able to introduce us to other leadership faculty and program coordinators at the conference.

The last night of the ILA conference was inspirational. Leadership Studies is still in the early years of research and publishing so it was a great feeling to be in the same room as the trailblazing theorists and authors during the ILA book signing. Almost every major leadership author was present and made themselves available to the next generation of leadership educators.

This was our first time to attend the ILA conference and it was an excellent experience. It is always nice to spend time in sunny California, and the ILA staff was kind, courteous, and very helpful. We look forward to further conversations with the friends we have met during our travels over the past few weeks.