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One of the most critical responsibilities as a society or community leader is making sure that your group can continue once you are gone. In this section, we'll cover the important steps in ensuring good continuation between years.

Have representation from multiple years

For most societies and communities, members of their committee will graduate and leave each year. One of the most obvious ways to ensure that a society can continue running is by making sure you have plenty of representation from first and second year students.

The best time to recruit new committee members is after Welcome Back Week in January. For six months, you could have a larger committee while training the new members and eventually hand it over to them to continue running the society or community.

Documentation

Write. Down. Everything.

  • Just because you remember which room you booked, it doesn't mean everyone else in your committee does.

  • Just because you remember what sponsors you've approached and what the status is, it doesn't mean that everyone else in your committee does.

  • Just because your phone automatically logs into the Twitter account, it doesn't mean anyone else can access it.

...you get the idea. It's important that you document important information and share it among your committee members. This means that if you are unable to continue running the society or community, you can easily hand off everything to someone else.

Example Handover Document

Here is an example handover document we have created that you can use throughout the year to keep track of everything, and so you have a detailed handover to give to the next society committee.

Finances

Write. Down. Everything. (again!)

Just because you remember how much money you raised, how you raised it, how it was spent and what's left, it doesn't mean everyone else in your committee does. This is important to do when there are updates, as it is hard to go back and figure this out afterwards.

Handover meeting

You should try to organise a handover meeting between the incoming committee and the outgoing committee. Share what went well during the year, where all of the files are (posters designs, finance sheets, logos and so on). At the end of this meeting the new committee should be equipped to crack on and start work.

Applying to be a society next year

Each year, we require every society to tell us that they want to run in the next academic year. This is for a few reasons:

  • To make sure there is still interest

  • To make sure you have completed elections

  • To give us information on the new committee members