August 30, 2010 Welcome to the first PRSSA-UD Executive Board meeting of the 2010-2011 school year!

I am excited to work with all of you this year, as we rebrand our PRSSA Chapter to provide the most valuable skills and experience for our members. I am looking forward to hearing all of your ideas in the year ahead. My overall goal for this year is to rebrand our Chapter as the premier pre-professional society on campus. I want to provide our members with multiple opportunities to gain public relations experience, if they chose to do so. I hope these opportunities will include on-campus networking functions, attendance at regional and national PRSSA activities, visits to local PR companies, and an opportunity to a build strong relationship with the PRSA-Delaware Chapter. With this said, this year should focus on a few key messages. The most important message is that PRSSA is a pre-professional society, and we want to be sure we uphold this idea consistently in our meetings, our advertisements, and even when we talk about PRSSA-UD in general. We want to stay on message. In addition, we want our members to see PRSSA as more than just a resume booster, which will be a change to emphasize overtly; we want members to get concrete resources from our Chapter. This way members who choose to be active in the organization will feel vested in our Chapter and take pride in being a PRSSA-UD member, and will spread the word for us! Rather than focusing on increasing our membership numbers, lets identify a few high-value individuals who arrive motivated to put time and effort into the organization. I want to encourage those individuals to take smaller leadership roles on specific tasks (i.e. someone to head a certain fundraising effort or someone to set-up a field trip to a PR agency). These individuals will be known as Action Team Leaders (ATLs), and they will work with one (or more) of us on a task. This will serve two functions; first, it will help lessen our work load as e-board members, and second, it will encourage individuals to become more involved in our organization. Our new promotional messages will clearly explain that individuals who step up in our organization will be rewarded by putting them head-and-shoulders above their peers in this competitive job market and give them something tangible to put on a resume or talk about in a job interview. Another change will be how we structure our Chapter meetings to maintain a level of consistency. Because we want to provide the most value for our members, each meeting will provide them with helpful field skills and experiences. This includes providing members with PRSSA-UD

Success Stories (such as talking about an internship one of us got through the PRSSA-UD database or a successful UD alum in the PR field) and beginning each meeting with brief reports from each e-board member. To cultivate an environment of organizational pride and inclusion, we want each committed member to know why joining PRSSAUD is worth their $60 fee and what the organization is currently doing. Finally, I hope these ideas will make the organization more efficient, provide more leverage for members, and encourage a professional environment. All of you are extremely talented and already have a wealth of PR experience that our members will certainly benefit from. Each of us realize that being successful in the PR field is not about classroom work, but rather about tangible work experience and who you know. This new structure will allow PRSSA-UD to focus on providing our members with practical experience. As always, please share with me your ideas, questions, and comments. I hope each of you are as excited as I am to rebrand our Chapter and do some great things on campus, while simultaneously gaining valuable experience for ourselves! Sincerely, Abby Stollar President, PRSSA-UD