Project Planning Made Feasible: A Guide for Student Organizations

By Julia Dunn on November 20, 2016

Are you part of a student organization at your college campus that plans events or executes community projects? Do you run a student media organization that publishes annually and holds a large student reading event to celebrate?

College students at universities far and wide have flocked to student-run organizations to supplement their college experience, and for good reason.

Why would you want to join a student organization?

For one, it’s a fantastic opportunity to develop leadership and team management skills. You can work on varying methods of communication during staff meetings and learn tangible conflict resolution skills. Notably, the work that you put into a student organization translates into skills directly applicable to post-graduation job opportunities and gives you an edge during interviews where an employer might ask you to describe your professional experience. Sustained involvement in an organization can get you much closer to achieving your future career goals.

But how do you really harness the power of your organization to plan large and small scale events for the campus community? How do you actually get things done when everyone in your organization is a busy college student?

These questions can be answered with project planning skills. To pull off a fundraiser, a literary publication or to bring a well-known public figure to campus, your organization must engage in substantial planning as a team. Here are three crucial steps to project planning:

Brainstorming

Brainstorming entails idea generation as a team. It also involves welcoming underrepresented voices and making sure that meeting facilitators accurately record ideas that members come up with. The best way to lose members of your organization is to make them feel that their ideas are not heard or are not understood properly.

After you’ve heard from everyone in your organization, work through ideas to determine which ones garner the most interest from people and verify that the idea is feasible. If your organization is registered under a certain department or student programs office at your university, you likely have some sort of staff advisor who can meet with your organization throughout the planning process. This advisor may help verify that your project ideas are realistic, and they can serve as a valuable resource for getting connected with departments on campus that may be related to your projects.

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Create an action plan.

Devise a grid on a large piece of poster paper to identify the following:

1. Tasks involved in making your project happen

2. The resources necessary to carry out those tasks

3. The key dates and deadlines involved in completing the tasks

4. The name of the person (or people) responsible for completing the task

With a tangible plan like this, everyone can be held accountable for their delegated task. If a task does not get completed, there is no misunderstanding about who to contact for a follow-up check in about why.

Create a backwards timeline.

When creating large projects and events, organizations need to recognize that there are many smaller tasks to plan for in advance before the project can take place. If your event is on campus, you’ll have to jump through many financial and administrative hoops to approve your event, fill out a proposal form and identify processing times for purchase orders and reimbursement forms.

To create your backwards timeline, identify the date of your big event or project, and as you might assume by the term “backwards timeline,” you’ll work backwards from that final date to determine the order and series of steps required to carry out your project.

On your timeline, include deadlines for important purchase requests, time to get a food permit if you want to host an event involving food, and allocate more time than you think you need for every task; things often go wrong when you don’t expect them to, and sometimes paperwork is misplaced or processed late by the different offices with which you correspond to get everything ready for your event. The safest way to avoid snags is always to start planning way earlier than you ordinarily might. That’s the whole point of backwards timelining!

Once you’ve drafted a timeline, find some way to share it with all members of your organization so they can refer back to it as needed. It might be a calendar (like Google Calendar) or simply a shared document of dates and tasks in chronological order that gets emailed out to all members. Prepare to tweak certain elements of your timeline along the way to accommodate unexpected issues that might arise between the moment you finalize your idea and the actual day of the event or project completion.

Different student organizations possess diverse goals — student media organizations that mainly produce magazines or newspapers will have different action plans and timelines than recreational organizations that only like to hold a few events throughout the year.

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The best part of working in student organizations is that you get to learn from others who are both similarly-minded and differently-minded as you. Thus, as different problems or challenges come up during your planning, you’ll be exposed to opposing perspectives on how to resolve them. The above suggestions for project planning aim to keep student organizations as prepared as possible.