I know, I know.  You just got back from the holiday break or for those of you are a bit luckier, you may have a little more down time left.  Regardless, if you are planning on attending the NACA national convention, you need to start thinking about preparing your delegation.  No one questions the value of any student trip in which they have the opportunity to network with other students from across the country, or learn valuable leadership and programming skills.  Experiences like this not only benefit the individual student, but they also benefit the program board as well as potentially make your job as the program board advisor that much easier.  With all of that in mind, it is also important to remember that your institution is often times making a sizable investment in you and your students by sending them to the NACA national convention.  What does that mean to you......it means choosing your delegates, meeting with them at least a couple of times prior to the convention, and setting up expectations for all delegates for before, during and after the convention.

At Simpson, we started the process back in September, yes, I said September.  We started to talk about the convention in regular program board meetings and had students who had been delegates in the past talk about their experiences at the convention, what they got out of the trip and why they would encourage others to apply to be a delegate.  Then in early November, we made applications available to all of the students on the program board with some very basic questions for them to answer.  We also included a copy of our delegate contact which in detail, explained the expectations for the trip.  The application and the signed delegate contract were due back just before the Thanksgiving holiday break and we started to review them at that point.  While it would be great to take all of our students to the convention, we have limited the number of students we take to somewhere between 6 and 8.  We chose this number because we felt it offered us a good representation from the program board as well as it was a manageable number of students for the two staff members in attendance to work with and provide the much needed guidance.  Let's be honest, it is an expensive venture to take students to the convention and if you are investing that much in your students, you want to make sure they are getting as much out of the experience as is humanly possible.

Now back to the selection process, in the first week of December, we (myself, the activities board co-presidents, and the asst. director of student activities) interviewed all of the students and from those interviews, made the tough decision on who to take to the convention.  Yes, we did choose not to take some people.  Some of those people are great members of our program board who would have made excellent delegates, but in the interest of choosing a well rounded, diverse and energetic group, we had to make the cuts.  Some of those people who we had cut, had been delegates at previous conventions.  For us, just because you have been a delegate to the convention before, does not guarantee you a slot.  The only guaranteed slot in the CAB president.  I would be lying if I said this wasn't a tough decision for us.  It was very hard for all of us and the last thing we wanted to do was to push a great member away by not choosing them as a delegate. 

Now that the delegation has been chosen, it is time to make the airline reservations, register them all for the convention, etc.  You know all of the fun little details that you get to do as the program board advisor.  You also need to communicate to them.  Share with them all of the information that you get.  The convention preview, the loads of emails and mail.  Meet with them at least two times prior to leaving.  The more, the better as you want to build a team, not a group individuals.

The last couple of thing that could really make your life easier.
1.  Create an email distribution list for all of your delegates.  This can make emailing them all so much easier
2.  Get ALL of their cell phone numbers and put them in your cell phone.  Texting them is a great way to get ahold them when you need too.
3.  Make it fun.  While there is work to do, I am still a firm believer that you can make that work fun
4.  Create a shared network folder for the convention preview.  SCAN THE ENTIRE PREVIEW and make it available for your delegates.  If you can't scan it into a computer and put it in a network folder, make copies of it for the entire delegation.  I am just trying to be a tish green.
5.  When you get to the point of registering, do it online if at all possible.  I know some people don't like this much, but for all of our students, I put our CAB email as their personal email when I register our students.  Then I have all of that email forwarded to them directly.  Why go to all of this work you ask, when students graduate, many times, their emails go with them.  The last thing these former students want is to still be getting emails about potential good acts for their campus to book.  This way when they graduate or move on with their involvement, the emails will stop.  I know you may find this hard to believe, but I still get emails from the CAB account to students who graduated 4 or 5 years ago.

I think this is enough for now.  I will keep you posted on our progress as we prepare for our trip to Nashville.  Our first formal delegation meeting is next Wednesday.  If you have more questions, please don't hesitate to contact me directly if you want more details than I can go into on this blog.  My direct email is rich.ramos@simpson.edu and my office phone line is 515-961-1536.