It’s been three years since I was editor of the student media at the University of Central Lancashire. Blearly eyed, cold pizza and a whole lot of fun is how I remember it – but I thought I’d offer some advice for all those about to begin what will be one of the best year’s of their lives.

Being in charge of the student media is a tough role. You will be working for an average of £1.50 an hour for all the hours you do, you’ll never really be able to switch off but you will sit back one day and go ‘Shit. Yeah. That was good.’

So, here we go, here’s my far from definite guide for how to have a good year running your student media (this is general advice covering radio, newspaper, TV and online).

Don’t get too attached

You will only be there a year. Don’t get too attached to the idea of doing it. If you seek re-election, good luck. But your maximum tenure can be two years and by the end of that you’ll be ready to leave. Don’t treat each issue like a baby, as soon as you send to print you need to be thinking about the next one. Once the station shuts down for Christmas, you should be thinking about January. The team focuses on the issue or the show, you look beyond and offer something more long-term.

Listen to your team

Your volunteers are the most important thing to you. They will be the ones to pull you out of the shit. If you’ve graduated, you’re not a student anymore. You get paid money, they don’t. They are still students, you’re not. Things can change very quickly on campus, new trends, new issues and you’re not going to be involved in the same way. Be a friend to your team, have an open door, advice some life advice on stuff like money/housing/course problems.

Also remember what a wide audience will consume your media. Students aren’t just 18-year-old-beer-loving-away-from-home-for-the-first-time-freshers, they might be returning to study for a top-up degree or doing a postgraduate degree and completely focused on their career. Appeal to a wide audience and make sure your team reflects this diverse readership.

Be fearless…

You’re only there for a year, so grow some balls. Got a splash? Make it a damn good story. Go the extra mile, put in the extra two hours. Find the extra contact. Is it going to annoy someone? Then it’s probably news.

…but make friends with a law lecturer

Your team won’t respect you if you take risks and leave them exposed. Make sure all bases are covered. You are responsible for what goes on those pages or out on the web, so check the hell out of it. Make friends with a media law lecturer, ask them to informally look over anything contentious. No one wants to get sued do they? Least of all your cash strapped Students’ Union that is facing the biggest financial challenge it’s ever faced with the impending higher education cuts.

Get ready for feedback

People will be reading/listening/watching what you’re producing. Always remember that and make sure you respond. The letters page should be vibrant, don’t find yourself having to make up letters to fill it. Respond to queries, explain your decisions and defend your team. Be prepared to invite disgruntled readers into your office to discuss a story, be prepared to have a blazing row with the owner of the University book shop in-front of the rest of the team. Don’t be a wimp, make your case but if you do make a mistake there’s no harm in apologising.

You find the leads, let the team do the rest

Don’t write anything or do your own show. Hopefully you’ve put the time in previously as a reporter or show host. But, you will in your position be privy to information and contacts your team don’t have. You’ll attend meetings, get reports and other things that make good stories. Give them to your team, don’t keep everything that’s half-decent for yourself to try and build up a portfolio. You’ve got the whole paper, radio station and a lot more to run. However, if there’s an editor’s blog or column make sure you do a good job of it and keep it up-to-date and on the bleeding edge. If you speak often people get bored, if you speak occasionally but hitting the mark with what you say then people will listen.

Be a stickler

You want everything to be the best. You’ve got 12 issue, you’ve got 36 hours of programming, you’ve got 12 programmes going out on Internet TV. It might be student media but that doesn’t mean it needs to be shoddy. Pull out all the stops, don’t just nick an image from Google Images get a proper one with a proper camera. Get good kit and argue about the budget until you’re blue in the face. Check everything, spelling, facts, names. Don’t get anything wrong.

Distribute

What’s the point in producing the damn paper if no one is reading? What’s the point in broadcasting if no one is listening? Go out of your way to promote the student media. Distribute it yourself around campus, as soon as the delivery truck arrives get it out their. Give the team a bundle to take on their way to a lecture at that far off campus building (they’ll need the exercise, all student journalists end up piling on the pounds). Hassle the printers if it doesn’t arrive on time, bring delivery forward an hour. Up the print run for good issues. Push it outside the campus boundaries. Get your radio station streaming online, promote it in the uni library, push for money for a two-week FM licence. Put the website address on t-shirts.

Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!

You can never have too many volunteers. Why? Because the numbers will dwindle as the year goes on. It just will. Do talks at the beginning of the year, promote people if they are good. Encourage people. Put up posters. Create a big email list. Hold an end of year awards. Do anything and everything you can to get people involved and keep them involved.

Use the summer

The summer is quiet. If you’re going to change the design around, do it in the summer. If you want to improve the website, do it in the summer. Create a calendar and put key events in it. Spend the summer meeting with contacts who will give you stories. When the crunch time arrives in September you want to be so prepared so you know exactly how the next 12 weeks are going to play. If you sit around doing nothing during the summer you will have a rubbish year.

There’s some advice, I’m sure there’s plenty more. I’m certainly not saying I was the best student media editor, I made plenty of mistakes, dodgy calls and there’s so much more I could have done but I do know our work won awards and we caused quite a stir with some stories.

Image credit to makeyougohmm

If you’ve got advice for student media editors, memories from your time in student media or you’re about to start a year running student media and have questions then leave your comments below

Ahead of the event we’ve been asked to answer the following questions:

• the biggest single issue your students’ union is facing and also
• one thing you think social media will be most useful for

The biggest single issue UCLan Students’ Union faces:

How to keep doing what we’re doing, but potentially with less, and proving our impact and legitimacy

It’s no secret that in the future there is going to be less money around. Less money means less resources, less people and less time. But, as a Students’ Union how do we keep giving our members best value, innovative opportunities and chances for involvement without comprimising on quality? It’s not going to be easy to keep current services operating the way they are. And at UCLan, it doesn’t seem like student numbers show any sign of slowing down and also the students that we have in our numbers are becoming increasingly diverse and spread out across different campuses. The pressure will also be on to prove what we are providing, show how we measure that and as a lot of Unions become charities – show our impact.

One thing you think social media will be most useful for:

Engaging and mobilising groups of students

Social media can be a driver for getting students involved. Not just in the Union’s business, getting them to vote etc but also by empowering them to use social media themselves to campaign, inform, mobilise other students and make friends/contacts. If we have a membership that is twittering, facebooking, blogging, creating video, posting photos that is an active and engaged membership that will help the Union achieve its goals. At the moment a lot of that activity is lacking and we need to find ways of inspiring and instigating it – but this needs to be balanced with letting students have their own opinions in an increasingly policied space (both by the Union, the University and other organisations).

I’m hoping from the social media course I am able to learn what other Unions are doing, pick up some hints and tips and put together the start of a plan of how the Union can use social media particularly in its membership functions.

Image from flickr: Felice de Sena Micheli

‘Are Students’ Union recession proof?’ that was muttered by our chief executive during a meeting the other day. He’s not the only one wondering. We’ve kicked off a discussion over on The Charity Place about how Students’ Union’s can respond to the challenges that are potentially ahead. So here’s my key points about how Union’s can respond to the threat of a recession, some are specific to UCLan but some could go for the sector as a whole.

1. Make sure no one can question our legitimacy. This means showing what we do, how we do it and why we’re important. This makes it harder for people to take things away if we are shown to be doing an excellent job. Also, as Union’s officially become charities it’ll be important to consider our impacts as an organisation and be able to measure them. The days of just giving money to said club and society and saying ‘that’s involvement’ is going to be harder to justify, or running said campaign because someone sitting in an office thinks ‘it’d look good wouldn’t it?’ are dead.

2. Get smart with technology. We’re looking at investing in technologies which will allow us to use students data to increase loyalty to student services, get smarter with how we communicate with students and ensure that destination events are promoted effectively. Poster/flyer blindness is rife and especially for us being a city campus we’ve got to compete for every single penny to ensure we are still the ‘gatekeepers’ of the student market and student pound.

3. Customer service. Ensure that commercial outlets are 100% switched on and ready to please every single customer who comes through the door. Students are going to be thinking twice about spending, and we need to make sure that when they do spend that tenner they are very happy with what they’ve got – not just the product but everything that comes with it.

4. Don’t rush into things. Just because there is a recession looming (or already here) doesn’t mean we should just retreat into the trenches. There are umpteen opportunities for Students’ Union’s to partner up with loads of different organisations and work with them to deliver services, create a market, deliver information and much more. This is especially relevant if there is going to be a big government splurge in spending, as some of that might be up for grabs for new projects or promotions.

5. Innovate. Be a leader, take the odd risk or two but make sure you’ve backed it up with resources. Not easy in a recession, but if you spot an opportunity to expand then make sure you’ve got the support behind it and do it properly.

6. Engage the membership. They after all are in charge, go out to the membership and ask them how they think things can be improved, get them onboard, get them working with you, for you, feeding back to you and most of all being loyal to you.

7. Develop niches. Ensure that while you’re appealing to the 18-22 student pound market that you’re developing niche products/services/communications that satisfy a particular demographic of the student body. We know that the demographics of students are changing to include international, mature, part-time, commuting and a whole host of other ‘groups’ – identify them and develop strands to appeal to them and bring them into the mix.

What do you think? Are Students’ Union’s actually recession proof? Or is that bullshit? Will some go out of business? How can they survive?

The overwhelming mood in the room was ‘No, you missed the boat about 5 years ago’. But, there is a huge area where NUSSL could provide something very useful to Students’ Union’s. Business solutions and in particular web based ones.

If I was in NUSSL and looking for ways to diversify I’d be considering:

- Taking an open source CRM solution and modifying it for Students’ Union’s

- Providing membership solutions in terms of clubs and societies

- Working on data solutions for Union’s to offer loyalty products such as swipe cards etc

- Offering training to Union’s on how to use social media, web technologies and how to generate income from the web

- Working on ideas for how to generate new revenue streams from mature, international, part-time and postgraduate students, because the student movement is not getting any younger

Unfortunately the event didn’t allow for much exploration of these ideas because it was dominated by lots of ‘no, no, no’ rather than ‘what about, maybe, could we’. NUSSL needs a culture change and to figure out what Students’ Union’s need in the 21st century to connect with their memberships and remains as the gatekeepers of getting messages to the student body.