Keep Your Alumni Chapter Healthy

Recruit and retain volunteers

• Know your constituents: survey; personally invite; match duties with skills and interests.
• Make volunteering easy: be flexible; establish short-term commitments; create a climate of participation; clearly define responsibilities.
• Value your volunteers: provide business cards, formal name tags, and stationery for chapter officers; find out what motivates and reward accordingly; say “thanks” many times in many different ways.

Be a Great Leader

• Rely on your volunteers: delegate responsibility and authority; involve as many alumni as possible to create wide support and ownership.
• Stick to deadlines: be organized; use timetables and schedules.
• Communicate with your volunteers: keep them in the decision-making process.
• Be flexible: allow creative input.
• Keep a scrapbook: keep a scrapbook of photos, fliers, etc. to showcase the work of your volunteers.
• Be grateful: appreciate and acknowledge volunteer contributions.
• Minimize board meetings: hold fewer and make them shorter; assign a facilitator to keep things moving; set an agenda with no more than three topics; stay focused.

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Build local membership

• Promote, Encourage, and Sell Memberships: it is our life blood.
• Walk in their shoes: evaluate and prioritize member needs.
• Don’t get stale: recruit young alumni and new members; keep a continual succession line.
• Define your chapter’s purpose and set attainable goals: celebrate (with your members) as you accomplish each goal.
• Maintain continuity: appoint a chapter leader to be the historian for the chapter; pass on organized records to new leaders.
• Communicate the benefits you offer members: establish a regular chapter newsletter and community announcement.
• Get personal: send hand-written membership invitations; offer incentives to members who recruit new members; write letters to prospective students.
• Survey annually: distribute surveys at events or include in your newsletter.
• Market your chapter: set up fair booths; link with community organizations; participate in local parades; list chapter activities in community newspaper; display fliers in storefronts.

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Event Planning

• Get involved in programs that provide services to the university and community.
• Plan ahead and promote early.
• Be creative with your event planning: find venues that are unique; pick a theme, decorate, and give door prizes; offer variety.
• Take pictures.
• Develop a program calendar: print and distribute to members.
• Focus on quality and quantity.
• Make personal phone calls to encourage attendance.
• Publicize events and programs in your community; use the Web.
• Involve local personalities and community leaders.
• Use a hospitality committee to greet and mingle.
• Use awards of appreciation for volunteers, members, contributing community businesses, and VIPs.
• Involve your chapter in a community service project that gives IU visibility in your community.
• Network with community leaders over lunch.

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• Be self-supporting.
• Be business-like and follow deadlines.
• Advertise local businesses for a fee.

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IU Alumni Chapters exist to promote our university...

• Through communications and community relations;
• Through student recruitment;
• Through fellowship and networking;
• Through programs and events;
• Through community service;
• Through service to the university.

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