While preparing for my Graduate Assistantship interviews later this month and interviewing students to be my replacement at UWM, I’ve been forced to think about what skill is the most necessary for a Student Affairs student employee. I think most of the skills that we gain in Student Affairs, and the ones we ask students to learn are trainable skills. We can interview a student who may not have specific campus marketing or residential experience, but if they’re a well-rounded individual we can hire them because thankfully, when you’re working in Student Affairs, you’re always learning.

We’re now entering the second-half of the academic year and many of you are probably realizing that your programming budgets aren’t taking you as far as they used to. With deep budget cuts affecting universities across the nation, programming and student activities budgets can sometimes be the easiest for administrators to cut. But we still need to create fun, effective and educational programs for students. Below are some strategies that programmers use on my campus to cut costs and still run thousands of successful programs.

Dave ‘Gonzo’ Kelly took this video in Orlando in July, 2009 during a leadership retreat for the SGA leaders of four of Valencia Community College’s campuses. This is a team building exercise called “Tummy HA HA”. It is a fun activity that helps with a number of the steps or “building blocks” in team building.

What the….? “Where’s the Fun?” is NOT the first thing I thought when I saw these four t-shirts comin’ at me. Then I thought, “How the… are they getting away with that?” Followed immediately by, “Oh, I gotta ask!” — “Hey! You guys! What the…?” — That’s a conversation starter every time – especially in New York City!

I was facilitating a full-day orientation leader training recently and an orientation leader asked me how to get a group’s focus back without yelling at them. That is an excellent question and one that comes into play often- whether you’re doing an icebreaker with 500 new students or you’re running a committee meeting of 8.

Dave ‘Gonzo’ Kelly, America’s Student Leadership Trainer, speaks to student clubs and organizations about setting up an effective recruiting table at their next student activities event.

If you have access to a student email list on your campus, this simple but effective triple-action, strategy can put it to efficient use. By composing a repetitive, three-part email campaign to promote your campus speaker everybody will get the details about your event in logical intervals. Conducting a triple action campaign is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

It can be hard to get students to come to a speaker-based event – no matter how well you’ve planned it. You’ve got to overcome that fact that they’ve been sitting in class all week and WILL NOT come to another boring lecture. First, don’t pick a boring speaker and second promote the heck out of it using every available channel. Budgets are tight, but these low-cost (and sometimes free) ideas can have a huge impact on the attendance at any student activities event.

When the outcome is on you, you may feel pulled in a thousand directions dealing with all the details, disruptions, headaches and nightmares of your next campus event. Dealing with the details is necessary, but we can do without the disruptions, headaches and nightmares. Let’s go for ‘teamwork,’ ‘smooth sailing,’ and ‘a good time was had by all’ with these six ‘big picture’ leadership tips.

If you’re gonna pull of your next campus event you need everybody’s support! The faculty, the staff, the dean, the chancellor, the provost, the president, the librarian, the janitor, the lawn maintenance guys – I mean everybody! We spend lots of effort trying to get students to attend, but what if we got professors, staff and advisors totally on board?!