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Sam Dumitriu

Chair, Giving What We Can: Manchester

samdumitriu@gmail.com

BUILDING A CHAPTER

Notes from the Manchester Chapter

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Agenda

Building a Chapter

Starting the Manchester Chapter

Friend held a Giving What We Can dinner party. That night I watched Singer’s TED talk and joined Giving What We Can.
Noticed that Manchester (despite being massive) lacked a chapter. Had some experience running societies in the past (worked with the Debating Union and The Mancunion).
Emailed the Student’s Union, registered, and got two course mates to form the skeleton of our committee.
We’ve held two events, the committee has now grown to 6 members, we’ve got 5(?) people to sign the pledge and have 4 events planned already for the next semester.

Building a Chapter

Finding a Committee

Start with friends on your course
Check to see if there are any other pledgees in the same university
I sent Peter Singer’s TED talk to around 6-8 friends and couple expressed an interest in joining.
Was then able to double the committee’s numbers after talking after our first event. In general this is the best way to build a committee, pubs are your friend.
Erwan had some good advice about using Facebook that i’ll touch on later.

Building a Chapter

First Event: Lessons Learnt

We held a screening of Peter Singer’s TED talk in the Union.
We promoted primarily by inviting people on Facebook, and I think we put around 5-10 posters around the University. We even offered refreshments although this wasn’t widely publicised.
Unsurprisingly only around 6-8 people came.
However, while barely anyone came, almost everyone who came joined the committee.
The real advantage was that I had about 60 minutes to speak directly to 4-5 people who were interested enough to come along in spite of the poor promotion.
The real lesson was that as important as it is to have well-attended events, the real value of an event is the number of people you get to a) join the committee, b) sign the pledge.

Building a Chapter

Working with the Union

As a rule the SU are bureaucratic and move slowly. However they’re necessary to get favourable room bookings and society funding
When organising events it is then a good idea to plan ahead and engage the Union far in advance.
Try to find alternate venues for events if the Union fall through, we used a pub opposite the road and it probably boosted attendance if anything.
Take advantage of the Union website and their promotional facilities.
Try to get RAG involved early on, they’ll usually be helpful and willing to promote your events. We’re currently organising a Giving Game with the Manchester RAG and they’ve handled a lot of the promotion/ room bookings.

Building a Chapter

Social Media

Erwan gave some great advice at the last chapter day (worth going online to read in full).
Each committee member should join 5 university Facebook groups, tailor a post about Giving What We Can in each of them and share a link to your Facebook page. We got around 30-40 new likes by doing this and most where to relevant students.
Try to post relevant and interesting content on your Facebook committee page. Greg Lewis’ How Many Lives Do Doctors Save blog was the most popular we shared. It might be worth giving someone a responsibility to just run the Facebook page.
Have the entire committee like each new post by your chapter’s Facebook page, this increases reach (at least in theory).

Building a Chapter

Working with other societies

The best way to get new members is to team up with other societies.
What Manchester did: Asked the philosophy society to co-host an event (we did most of the heavy lifting, but they covered promotion). Jonathan Courtney gave a talk on the Philosophy behind the giving pledge and we got around 35 people into a pub. Almost all philosophers (which I assume is a group more susceptible to signing the pledge than most).
This term we’re working with RAG to host a Giving Game and hopefully use them to promote the rest of our talks.

Building a Chapter

Planning for the next year

So you have a committee, some members, and have a few events under your belt. What next?
Plan for the next year - what do you need?
A committee in place to take over (hopefully you’ll still be a part of that committee)
More frequent events. We planned 4 over the summer, working on our fifth.
Freshers Fair plan heavily to put something good on for Freshers Fair (we missed that opportunity last year, hopefully it’s not the same for others.)

Building a Chapter