How to Help your Registered Student Organization (RSO) Succeed in the Years to Come

  • Hold meetings once a week for shorter meetings, consistency, and efficiency.
  • Begin each meeting with a fun activity or icebreaker to lighten the mood and to get to know one another. Focus on building relationships with people in your RSO. This will help you recruit members and leadership for the future.
  • Hold members accountable for attendance by incorporating a point system. Offer rewards for members who are active.
  • Have meals or enjoy fun activities together outside of meetings to create a personal connection.
  • Acknowledge your members who are “diamonds in the rough.” Allow them time to practice and hone in on their leadership skills.
  • Offer positive support and encouragement to all members in finding personal identity within their leadership style and themselves.
  • Encourage students in all classes to participate in leadership positions.
  • Have outgoing officers provide guidance for the transition process based on their own experience.
  • Identify key positions within the organization that your RSO had this year and new ones for next year such as new officers, committee heads, and chairs.
  • Establish “job descriptions” for these positions so student leaders know their roles and responsibilities. Determine what skills and traits are necessary for individuals to be successful in each position.
  • Identify interested and potentially successful candidates who exist within the present organization, helping to form a diverse group, and then take these students under your wing.
  • Establish a mentoring or coaching program for the emerging officers.
  • Select mentors from within the organization that can offer the necessary guidance and support and are committed to the succession plan.
  • Assist new officers in setting goals for the next year.
  • Consistently evaluate the effectiveness of the transition planning process. Evaluate significant accomplishments, key leadership strengths, opportunities for development, potential successors, and readiness for advancement.
  • Create a binder that you can use to pass down from one year to the next to help ensure continuity from year to year and to help ease the transition process. In the binder, have important phone numbers and contacts, program ideas and “to do” lists, your RSO mission statement, goals, etc.