From Treasurer to Club Captain and Fresh Fair

My Background

I wasn't meant to be the Club Captain for LUKS (Leicester University Kayaking Society). It just sort of...happened. As a very new club, we only had a handful of retained members from last year - so few that practically everyone got a committee position. I was previously the Treasurer, a role I was confident in. Dealing with money doesn't faze me in the slightest - I have always had head for business and my logical, methodical approach to work makes looking through financial accounts almost fun for me. (On a side note, yes I am that person who offers advice on ISAs to my family/friends/their pets etc.). However, what does faze me is being in charge. Fast forward a couple months, the person who was meant to be Club Captain didn't make it back into university and it is up to me to stand up to the plate and take on the role...eek!

The very few retained members from last year (Tom - social sec far left, Jo - secretary far right).

This may sound slightly weird from a person who has spent all of their teenage years  developing their leadership skills and confidence through the Army Cadet Force (from 13 - 19 as a cadet, 19 to 21 as an adult instructor): I should explain that I am a classic introvert. Before joining cadets I was extremely shy, very quiet and unlikely to raise my hand in class or talk to strangers. Generally I lacked confidence and so had very limited leadership ability. However, years of practice leading teams within cadets has given me a fairly solid base of leadership and team working ability - although I still prefer a supportive role rather than a leading one and still get a little anxious when talking to new people.

Me (left) giving a set of orders before a section attack.

To summarise:

• Reluctantly assumed role of Club Captain
• Above average leadership and team working potential
• Logical mind - good problem solving but perhaps lacking creativity?
• Slightly averse to interacting with strangers (which are just friends I haven't met yet!) 

 First Order of Business: Organising Fresh Fair

As LUKS is a fairly new club, with very few retained members, it was essential to try to attract as many new members as possible over the two days. Going from 5 to 25 members is no easy feat, and so it loads of forethought, preparation and communication was required to make it as successful as possible. Using my logical mind set, I broke the action of attracting a new member to join the club in the context of Fresh Fair. I also thought about the problems and issues that may occur, and what steps can be taken to overcome these:

1. Our stand had to be interesting and eye catching - there are hundreds of stands at Fresh Fair, and all the freshers have 101 different things on their minds at once being in a new environment. This only gives us a couple of seconds to attract their interest, or we will most likely never see them again. Using what limited resources I had, I prepared a slideshow of promotional images for the club (trips, nights out, pool sessions) and worked out how best to display them on my laptop. I also managed to find a banner used in previous years, a fetching hoody and we even managed to get a boat there one day!
2. Even after getting their attention, you only have a couple seconds to get them interested - again, the mix of hundreds of different clubs/companies and lots of new freshers means everyone is in a rush to see everything. In order to keep people interested in that 30 second window, I wrote out a quick speech for everyone to learn that quickly summarised what LUKS do, why it would be fun to join up and when our first event was. I also worked with Tom to get a small flyer designed that had these points, along with contact details and a facebook page in the hopes that people may follow us up after they got home.
3. Following up interest swiftly - if you leave it too long before making second contact, people lose interest. We had to get a good balance of contacting those who were interested enough (and in a timely enough fashion) so they didn't lose interest, but not so much that it began to be dismissed as spam. This is especially difficult with the limited resources of LUKS (one pool session a week with a capacity of around a dozen means it is much harder to involve a lot of people compared to something like football or frisbee where they cater for literally a hundred people on Victoria Park).

Our amazing banner.

For an inexperienced committee, the fair went really well. I spoke to loads of potential members, some more interested in kayaking than others and managed to get in the region of 150-200 email addresses. We faced some problems, adapting where possible but ultimately knowing what we would change for next time:

• Only having three members to run the stand meant long shifts of exhausting work - smiling, talking enthusiastically and more often than not being ignored is both tiring and emotionally draining. Although there was nothing we could do this year due to having few retained members, next year we will have a much bigger member base to draw from.
• Having two people at the stand at all times - makes the job a lot easier but also allows you to more effectively speak to potential members. One person can sit behind the desk whilst the other stands in front to draw potential members in. It allows those running the stand to talk to one another to make the quiet times go a little quicker and allows one person to leave to go to the toilet / buy water etc. which makes the day much more comfortable. 
• We collected some names and email addresses of interested people by pen and paper. We quickly learnt that not all handwriting is legible and may have lost a couple of potential members through errors in transcribing these email addresses. This is also a time consuming process which can be avoiding entirely by collecting email addresses on a tablet/laptop. 

The Skills I Developed from Fresh Fair

There are a number of skills that I had to use, develop and improve over the course of Fresh Fair. To state and expand upon but a few:

•  Preparation skills (logic, planning, problem solving and communication). It was necessary to fully evaluate our objective (gaining as much interest for LUKS to gain as many new members as possible) in the context of the event. This required the use of logic and problem solving to think how best to achieve our desired outcome, and how to overcome any problems that might hinder our success. It was also necessary to set out solid chains of communication in order to let everyone know timings so the even ran smoothly - as well as communicate any last minute problems if necessary to be able to hopefully find a solution quickly. I believe it was the proper planning was the main reason why LUKS' Fresh Fair was so successful and so every event since then has been thought about and planned in detail to make sure it runs as smoothly and as successfully as possible. 
• Evaluation skills (critical analysis, logic, problem solving, communication, adaptability). Both during and after Fresh Fair, I analysed whether we could do anything more successfully. This both my ability to adapt to changes during the event (shortening the speech to reduce loss of interest, standing in front of the desk to more easily speak to potential members with loud music in the background etc.) as well as improve future events using experience from this one. I asked the other committee members who had helped run the stand about what they thought had gone well, badly, what could be improved and how? This also developed my ability to communicate with others, and being able to combine ideas to make even better ones.
• Leadership and working within a team. Fresh Fair allowed me to work closely with my new committee, both in planning and actually running the event. This developed my ability to work as part of a team, which is essential for any future project with LUKS. This also allowed me to develop my leadership ability in a new environment, as it usually fell down to me to make final decisions after discussing options with my team. 
• Communication and people skills. One of the most notable skills that I developed and improved upon was my people skills - my ability to talk to complete strangers whilst being friendly and enthusiastic, to get them interested in something they may or may not care about. As I said, I am naturally an introvert and despite years of making friends and talking to people I still get a little anxious around strangers. After two days of almost solidly talking to people I didn't know, I feel much more developed as a person in my ability to strike up a conversation with anyone. This is extremely satisfying as I remember speaking to some of my (now) good friends as strangers at Fresh Fair, and knowing that it was because of my words at Fresh Fair that they became a member of LUKS and we became friends. I also feel this greatly helped me become a Leicester Ambassador when I applied later in the year, where a fair proportion of the job role is based on excellent people skills such as smiling and being friendly.