The Power of Individual Outreach (in university group organizing)

I’ve been an organizer for my EA uni group (EA Purdue) for nearly two years. Despite my relative experience, I’m often unsure of what exactly I should say when giving advice to younger organizers. Each group is different, its organizers are different, and what advice will make sense to them will also be different. Not every organizer is struggling with the same problems I once did or will benefit from the same solutions.

The one place where I do feel confident that almost all newer organizers are making a mistake is in individual outreach. From what I’ve observed, newer organizers have a pretty high bar for reaching out to someone on an individual basis, and don’t send many messages to specific people. I think newer organizers should be individually messaging their members much, much more. It seems likely to me that the best and most experienced organizers send ten times the amount of texts and messages for outreach, compared with newer organizers. This might look like the experienced organizer texting more than a dozen people each week.

As an organizer, you’re running a group that has various activities and programming. In order to get people to attend this programming and participate in these activities, you need to communicate regularly with your members and prospective members. To communicate, you can talk to people in person and then use some subset of the many digital tools available. These include email, Slack, GroupMe, Discord, and the many other messaging services and platforms that exist^[1].

You probably send mass messages to your group using one or more of these platforms. For example, maybe you have a mailing list you use every week. This is good. However, many of your members, even if they are substantially engaged with your group, simply will not read or remember the details of your mass messages. In order to consistently make them aware of the programming and opportunities associated with your club, you must reach out individually. And even if someone does read your emails, sending them an individually directed message will increase the likelihood they actually engage, or otherwise provide you with more information as to why they aren’t engaging with your club. (For example, your meeting could be scheduled at an inconvenient time for them).

So you should message your members. Maybe you’re already doing this or have considered it in some cases. Great. But based on my experience and the experience of some other organizers, your bar for messaging people is probably much too high, and there are a lot of benefits to lowering this bar.

There are many things you might want to do individual outreach for:

• General meetings/socials
• Fellowship meetings
• Special events of any kind
• Club meals
• Retreats
• Conferences

In all these cases, you might already be able to imagine a scenario where sending someone a message beforehand would be useful. Maybe you already text your friends about coming to club socials, for example. What I want to do with this post is convince you that there are many more cases where individual outreach would be useful, and that you should increase the amount of messaging you do because of this. Instead of just texting your friends about your upcoming social, you could text your friends and some of the people who don’t always come, but that you would really like to see at your event.

The last two entries on my list, retreats and conferences, are cases where you perhaps recognize that some sort of individual outreach and messaging is necessary. If you’re going to coordinate travel or accommodations, you probably have to do a fair bit of individual communication. But again, I’d like you to think bigger here. There are lots of ways to do individual outreach around an event. You can encourage people to attend the event, offer to review their applications^[2], talk to them about whether going would be a good idea, make sure they’re booking 1-1s, and generally provide a much higher level of support and encouragement than the baseline. Doing all of this will help some of your members have a dramatically better event experience than they would otherwise.

To provide some more concrete detail, here’s everything I did ahead of EAG NY this year.

• My co-presidents sent two emails that mentioned the conference and two GroupMe messages about it.
• I ran an info and application session for the conference. In it, I gave a brief presentation about why the conference could be useful for some members.
  • I texted people about this event if I wanted them there but was uncertain if they’d come
  • After the event, I started a minimal spreadsheet tracking if people had applied or were accepted, and texted people every few days to see whether they’d applied.
  • I made sure to follow up with everyone who said they couldn’t make it to the event or otherwise still had questions about whether they should apply and usually scheduled a call or meeting to talk about this.
• I continued to text people to ask whether they’d applied, or if they’d like me to review their application.
• Once I knew who got in, I texted them to fill out a form about their travel preferences.
  • I made travel plans including carpools that worked for everyone, then texted each person to confirm the plans worked.
• I texted everyone who was admitted about scheduling a 1-1 with me if this was their first EAG, then followed up if they hadn’t scheduled anything.
• At time of writing, EAG is still 1.5 weeks away, so I can’t describe what I haven’t done yet, although I think the importance of close communication right before the conference is more obvious.

Hopefully this example provided a little more context on what exactly “doing lots of individual outreach” can look like. I want to note that I don’t consider myself particularly skilled or exceptional here, and there are organizers who probably ran much more effective processes^[3] than this one in the run-up to a conference. I would encourage you to talk to other organizers about how they communicate with their members and share notes.

Do I really need to *text* them?

You may be averse to texting people, as compared to messaging through other platforms. You may not have people’s phone numbers, be uncomfortable asking for them, or think that texting someone you only know from EA events would be weird. I felt all of these things when I was first encouraged to do outreach via text.

There are several things that made me change my view. The first is that it’s not that hard to get people’s numbers. You might already want to make text message groups for your fellowship, or to coordinate event travel. For these it’s pretty reasonable to ask for people’s number on a form somewhere. Beyond that, many of your club members already know each other, and would be happy to facilitate your communication with other club members about a particular event or activity.

The second thing that changed my view was that it didn’t turn out to be that weird. People generally appreciate getting personally invited to events or encouraged to apply to things. My more detailed answer to the question of weirdness is below.

Isn’t this all kind of weird?

Well, if you make it weird… More seriously, there are two main reasons you might offend, displease, or upset someone by sending them a reminder about your club’s programming or activities.

1. They have a strong negative impression of your club

If someone has already engaged with your club, given you or the club their number in some way, and made an impression on you such that you would think to text them, it seems unlikely they would be seriously displeased to hear more about the club. There might be more benign cases where someone has just decided that your club isn’t for them, and in these cases, you’ll probably become aware of this pretty quickly, and no real harm will be done by a refused invitation or two.

2. They perceive you as being dishonest or manipulative

The simple solution here is to not be dishonest or manipulative! Only say things you mean, and only invite people you actually want to see. Only recommend that someone do something if you genuinely feel like it would be a good idea, and if you’re uncertain about any of this, say so. I can’t specify exactly how you should best engage with the world, but I would encourage you to be an open, honest, and ultimately benevolent version of yourself in whatever organizing activities you do.

Hopefully this post has been of some use to you in thinking about individual outreach, and if you have questions about this or any other aspect of organizing, I would be happy to have a call (or direct you to someone more competent than me). As I said before, I think it can be really useful to talk to other organizers about what they do here and why.

Thank you to Noah Birnbaum for teaching me all of this, and to Micah Hees for encouraging me to write about it.

1. ^{^}

   EA Purdue uses a mailing list, GroupMe, and Discord. I despise Slack.

2. ^{^}

   For EAG applications, my understanding of CEA guidance is that you should not be substantially writing or rewriting someone else’s application. I think it's fine to provide feedback about what you would like to see them cover in more detail, or to ask open ended questions about their responses.

3. ^{^}

   Effective in so much as their messages were better, they communicated with more people who would be good candidates for the conference, or they otherwise did a better job of supporting people.