Month: November 2009

Four problems facing student unions and how to solve them

It is the first day of the Association for Managers in Student Unions and a number of leading heads from universities across the UK came to together to discuss problems facing student unions.

The group divided up into four teams to tackle the following major issues student unions face, and how best to solve them using social media:

  • Membership
  • Democracy
  • Brand
  • Reach

The blue team looked at the problem of reaching students:

Click here to watch the video.

The red team – Brand:

The Yellow team – Membership:

See the video here

The green team – Democracy:

How to solve a problem like a student union

How can student unions use social media to help what they do?

DSC00511

This is the question those who run student unions up and down the country have gathered at Fazeley Studios, Birmingham to discuss.

General managers, marketing officers, heads of communications, events coordinators and web developers have gathered to put their heads together with a couple of social media experts in the form of Nick Booth from Podnosh and Jon Bounds.

The two-day conference began with delegates voicing the points and problems which they want to discuss and talk about solving some of these issues using social media.

Some suggestions posted at the beginning of the session
Some suggestions posted at the beginning of the session

Some of the problems were:

  • Getting students to tell us what they want their student union to look like
  • Drawing out students’ stories
  • Knowing which social media to use for certain situations
  • How to do more with less resources
  • Getting the message across about what we do
  • How can we keep our finger on the pulse
  • How can we increase our membership using social media?
  • How can we continue to engage using social media with students bored with Facebook?

Spawning Social Media Surgeries.

If you’ve never seen a social media surgery before then John Popham’s video above is just about what you might expect.  He shot it last night at the first such surgery in Leeds, which he started after visiting our first anniversary surgery last month.

Folk in Leeds are  using a similar model to the central Birmingham surgery, you get some idea from this video at the most recent Birmingham social media surgery

It focuses on the informal and matching volunteer webby types to volunteer community types. As we found when we began these here in Birmingham, there seems to be a a great deal of enthusiasm in the digital community in West Yorkshire to get on and make things happen. Simon Duncan thought it a “great success”.

Why then do I say surgeries are spawning?

Huddersfield.  Their first is next week.

York (courtesy of the comment below from the wonder John Popham) is in December.

In South Africa Marlon Parker is adapting the idea for shopping centres and the general citizen.

Cornella near Barcelona will soon have one organised by Chris Pinchen of Citilab – who visited us again in October:

Talk About Local uses the technique and has now spawned the wonderful idea of a social media tent for fetes and fairs.

Lichfield has experimented with one.

Sheffield incorporated one in Unsheffield this summer (umh “unbrum”? – I wonder).

Podnosh has run them in Acocks Green – which was featured by the Birmingham Post and now has a life of it’s own – plus Lozells.  Alan Colson now also runs a social media surgery for councillors in Solihull.

Others include a more business minded approach in  Nottingham, (similar to our own work at Hello Digital)  SCIP in Brighton, and far afield  Mosman, Australia has now used there’s to created a site for their neighbourhood.

Any Missing?

Stuff I've seen November 7th through to November 9th

These are my links for November 7th through November 9th: