 Hey guys, what's up? My name is Sonali. Welcome to my channel or welcome back to my channel. Today I'm talking about a super fun topic. I've been wanting to film this video for so long. I really just had to get all my thoughts together so that I can make this the best video and give you all the advice that I have. So the past two years I've served as capital to UCF's Vice President of Public Relations. So this past November my term has come to an end because I'm graduating next semester. This position really just helped me find my passion in my chapter and allowed me to give back to my chapter. Throughout my time as VPPR I actually won an award at the Capital to Convention and it was the Community Visibility Award for 2017 and I was so honored to receive this award because honestly it's just the best feeling having your hard work being recognized. Sorority PR is not all about the social media outlets. It's about keeping relations and that's why it's called public relations. You have to maintain relationships with not only your chapter's organizations like other chapters on different campuses but also fraternities and sororities on your own campus and most importantly you must maintain relationships with your alumni. So I don't want to scare you guys but this will be a lot of information because I want to go as in depth as I can. When I applied for this position I didn't really know that it had all this responsibility. It's overwhelming at first but it's definitely doable once you get the hang of it so let's get started. So first let's talk about all the social media platforms that you should have. So I would say the mandatory ones are obviously Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Anything else is really optional and if your chapter is a new one just starting off I really do recommend just keeping to those three main ones. Start to go your following on those and then you can later expand out. Other platforms that you should consider having are your chapter website, Tumblr, VSCO, YouTube and Pinterest. Next let's talk about something super important and that is knowing your audience. So for all these social platforms they might be different for each one but here is a list of all of them so you can kind of think of which one could fit who. So the first one being PNMs and this actually stands for potential new member. These are the girls that are looking to join your sporty in the next couple of years. Then you have sisters. It could be sisters in your own chapter or sisters that are all across the United States. Next we have students that are in Greek life or not in Greek life and then lastly we have alumni and advisors. So for the first topic of this video I wanted to kind of cover the basis of planning. This is super important and this whole kind of help you keep saying because if you don't plan your whole term out or just a little bit at a time you could slowly go crazy. I'm not gonna lie like it's a lot to handle but with all these tips you should be fine. So for our chapter we have recruitment in August and the most important time to kind of be updating all your social platforms is probably three to four months before recruitment. So summer was a big time to just kind of like crank all your content out all your best content because PNMs potential new members are going to be stocking all of your platforms. You want to keep them coming back for more and kind of giving them that good first online impression before they come into your house for recruitment. Another really important time is right before any of your philanthropy events. So for us we have a dance competition and it's really important to promote that on all of your social media so that you can fundraise as much as possible. So my organization Capadel to celebrate international women's friendship month the whole month of September. So it's super important for the VPPR and the sisterhood chairs to work together at this time to bring awareness spread the love on campus and especially boost your morale within your chapter. So for this month we did this mild campaign as our tabling event on campus and I'll insert a little clip of the video I made for that. Also for this month we planned an internal event and an external event so there's just like a lot going on in this one month so it's really important to plan ahead and create a PR plan for this month alone. Founder's Day is another big event where we actually invite a woman to come join us for our meal plan dinner and kind of just make it more fancy and decorate for it. But we do have appointed office chairs to plan all that out so I personally don't have to do much for that event but maybe you should consider reaching out to alumni whether it's via Facebook page or emails. When creating your PR plan you should really look for campaigns that your organization supports. So like I said I did this mild campaign and then I found out that they also kind of raise awareness for teen dating abuse and so for my first term I kind of brought that on our campus to raise awareness for that. You should also check with nationals to see when your reports are due. This is super important because this is how they grade you or at least for my organization this is how they do it so try not to be late because I know they take points off for that and it's never anything too hard it's mainly just submitting photos and kind of telling them what's going on. It's incredibly important to keep your alumni involved so consider planning events for them specifically or even inviting them to already planned out events. Every year they come back to do a mock recruitment and we show them our recruitment video and philanthropy video for that year so that's always super fun. But just like any events that they can kind of come to and have like a little reunion it's always fun and it makes them feel involved in their chapter. Planning ahead is super important especially for holidays such as Christmas because obviously you are not at your chapter during that time so you can't really just take a quick photo of girls next to a Christmas tree so you really have to think about that ahead of time maybe snap a picture of a few girls in front of the tree before you leave to go back home so that you'll have that picture right in time for Christmas. It's also kind of fun to look up the national days um so national donut day national pizza day it's not super important but it's something cute to post so if one of your chapter members ends up having a picture of her in the donut you can always post that. So as VPPR you must take initiative just being on your council or executive board doesn't mean that you're involved you have to come to majority like 99% of events especially in this position because you have to take all the pictures or film videos or get live content for your social media platforms. Being VPPR really forced me to be a little bit more outgoing inside my chapter because you have to talk to girls that you may not talk to on an everyday basis um and kind of reach out to them get pictures get content you also have to think about getting content literally wherever you go for example like if you're at the beach maybe you can write katie in the sand and just take a cute little boomerang and post on your stories you just always kind of have to be in that mindset of getting content especially when you're at events even if you're not able to make it to every single event you should know about all the events happening so that way you can reach out to one of the girls going and remind them to get pictures because obviously not everyone always thinks about pictures but it's really important for your position to get that content so that you can post about it. If there was one big thing that i learned about this position it is the importance of delegation. By first term i did have one assistant but i kind of just did everything on my own because i wanted it to be perfect i wanted it to be my way and i honestly just couldn't bring myself to trust anyone else with the platforms and then my second term rolled around and i learned to delegate the smaller tasks to them so i got their help to post on the tumblr the pinterest twitter all of the smaller platforms and then i still had the main control over the instagram the youtube and the facebook page this honestly made the position so much better because i was able to focus more on the bigger platforms so the next topic i have is collaboration being on your executive board or council means that you all have to work together collectively you also have to learn the importance of confidentiality because things get misconstrued when people tell people and then they tell people it's also really important to all be on the same page and have each other's backs for this position you're going to work with every other position on your council so for example you will work with the president to show her your goals and your plans for your term and kind of meet back up with her at the end of the term to see what you have gotten accomplished you'll work with the vice president a member education to maybe get a videographer for midday or maybe film it yourself take pictures at midday and then talk about how you can show off your new members whether it's on instagram stories or through a youtube video or anything like that you'll work with a vice president a membership to either film the recruitment video and the philanthropy video or plan it out and also roll out a summer pr plan so that you can get the best potential new members you'll work with the vice president of operations to find out what appointed offices fall under your chain of command and then you'll also make sure that they are doing their jobs you'll work with the vice president of community service to reach out to along me to invite them to philanthropy events or just film and take pictures of those events and also work on the philanthropy video with them you'll work with standards to make sure that all of your chapter members are portraying your chapter in the best light you'll work with the vice president of finance to see what your budget is and what you need to spend that budget on and lastly you'll work with your secretary to submit your chapter reports and keep the chapter up to date on whatever you are working on so like i said before we have something called appointed officers and these are positions within your chapter that are not on executive council so they're positions like fan or chair or t-shirt chair and these specific positions would actually fall under the pr umbrella so it's kind of in charge of making sure they're doing their jobs and meeting their deadlines you'll also be collaborating with your assistant or two assistants and then it's also something to consider to make a pr committee i know a lot of other schools do this so that one person can kind of be in control of one social platform and that just takes a lot of weight off you like i said before there are a lot of social platforms to talk about but i mainly wanted to cover instagram in this video because i do think that is the most important one especially in today's age so at events i usually focus on taking pictures on my dslr and then i ask my assistants to take boomerangs or videos or anything that's kind of like live content so that i can post it on the instagram story it's really nice to have help with this because it's obviously important to get those high quality photos but it's also important to have live content as the events going on so even if your assistant isn't available for that event maybe try asking a sister to help out for instagram stories try to be different try to stand out definitely use all of the features in the instagram stories such as the polls or the question box or even the music thing i always love seeing stories that are super interactive four stories you can think of this as a place that you can engage with other chapters on your campus for example during recruitment a lot of stories pass out gift baskets with a bunch of goodies in it um so you can go ahead and take a picture of the basket and thank them on instagram stories instead of making a whole instagram post about it um because i don't think it's worth an instagram post but you also want to thank them so you can also do that on twitter but i think there's more viewers on instagram stories i would personally say to try to be as active as you can on instagram stories think of something you can post every day or even on special holidays if your chapter needs a morale boost maybe you can do a question box saying compliment a sister and then you can kind of just put a picture in the background of the sister that they're talking about especially around recruitment i do recommend using these question boxes because you can post simple questions every day like what's your favorite katie memory or why did you choose katie you can create graphics for your chapter members to share whether it's an event that you're promoting for or just a cute little graphic or something for the holidays this will definitely make your engagement rates go up because a lot of people will be tagging your account from those graphics so for the feed i really recommend keeping it simple and not bombarding the feed with too many group photos and for group photos i think they do really well when they are overcrowded with too many people so like three people or four people and then the next photo you post could be an individual picture um and then another group picture i just think this layout works really well because it obviously shows sisterhood but you also want to have those trendy individual pictures in there and this really helps keeping the layout simple and not too overcrowded one of my big goals as vppr was to show off how diverse our chapter really was so so really try to show off your whole chapter i know it's really hard if you have like more than 200 girls but for example if i was at an event and i needed a picture for that event to post i would kind of look at the instagram feed and see who hasn't been posted in a while and go ahead and take a picture of them definitely keep an eye out and follow every single sister on your personal and the chapter's accounts so that you can see all their accomplishments and make sure to shout them out whether it's on twitter or instagram stories so when the feature came out that you could post more than one instagram i kind of went crazy i definitely regret doing this i recommend posting one to three good pictures from the event because when you don't have anything to post you can post all the other great pictures that you took so let's talk about instagram themes are they important or are they not please weigh in in the comments down below because i really want to know what y'all's opinions are on this i feel like for personal instagrams it's not as important but for chapter and serum accounts i think it's really cool because pnms look at your feed as a whole anyways so i think it's really cool to have a cohesive feed encourage sisters to use your chapter's hashtag especially when they're on summer break so for example we use hashtag katie ucf summer and this way you can encourage pnms to follow that hashtag too so that they can see what all of your sisters are doing over break so obviously it's super important to stand out your organization might have its brand and you should definitely look up its goals and values but it's also important to come up with your own values and goals for your chapter you want to stand out against other chapters while respecting your organization think of how to do normal things differently for example when we came back to school i took a little snippet out of the recruitment video and made it a GIF or a looped video and i thought this was a different take on the soviber back with their sisters post one of my big goals and how i stood out to capitol to nationals was through my video series keeping up with capitol toz honor youtube channel i wanted these videos to be sisters sharing their struggles their successes and their love for katie i asked these girls to tell me their stories in hopes of relating to pnms watching these for example we had one video of a girl talking about how her transfer process was we also had an out-of-state sister talking about her experience and then there was an alumna that talked about her past four years and how caba delta got her connections after college i highly recommend going to check out the capitol to ucf youtube channel it's literally my baby majority of those videos i filmed and edited so they're super cool and i'll definitely have the link in the description box for you guys to check out so the next topic is rituals these are kind of self-explanatory but i wanted to throw them in here to remind you guys about what you should be doing weekly daily or even monthly so obviously the first one is to update all your social media accounts depending on which ones you should be updating them daily or even weekly so this is mainly for instagram and emails but i know you guys have your personal accounts but make sure to be checking these at least once especially for dms because it could be about a chapter visit or a flip the event coming up and you definitely need to answer them asap think about coming up with a weekly campaign such as motivational monday or even talk about it tuesday where you can use the questions box on the instagram stories you can ask chapter members a question and then you can post a corresponding picture to their answers i think it's important to stay active on twitter this is a place where you can really interact with other organizations on your campus not only in greek life but other rso's as well don't be afraid to retweet their tweets or promote their events and hopefully they'll reciprocate it when your event goes around check your content calendar every day and make sure you're planning ahead and this will definitely keep you motivated make sure you know when all of your chapters events are because you need to know where they are and when they are so that you can be there taking pictures taking videos getting that live content reporting to nationals is probably the most important thing that you have to do nationals always wants to know what's going on in your chapter and making sure that you're doing your job so be sure to stay up to date on your reports or even just emailing them photos from past events lastly i wanted to talk about my favorite applications that kept me sane and helped me throughout this position google drive is what i use to upload all the pictures from events i was able to send a link out to chapter members so that they could download all these pictures and post it to their social media accounts live removal was the app that i used to edit all the pictures and presets changed my life it helped me really maintain an instagram theme and it was so easy to do so i sell presets on my blog and these presets were actually created while i was kind of making the countdown to instagram theme the top sellers are sapphire gold and the everyday preset they're actually super affordable so i'll have a link in the description box so that you can check them out and i will also have a video explaining on how to download them and use them in that box below so i usually love to use photoshop for any graphics that i make for instagram stories or any flyers for promoting events but when i don't have immediate access to a computer i like to use the app unfold and you guys have probably seen these on everyone's instagram stories but these are really easy templates to use i know that the basic white templates are free there are other packs that you can buy for just a dollar and they're super easy to use and can spice up your instagram stories better is my favorite planning app and i've tried a bunch but this is the only app that i've come across that actually posts your instagram for you when you schedule it most instagram schedulers will just remind you to post the instagram picture at that given time but this one you do not have to worry about it once you schedule it it posts you and it gives you a notification that they posted your picture this app is also really helpful when you want to create a theme you can see all your future pictures laid out and how your theme looks before you actually post it to your feed i think you can post up to three times and get it free but if you want to post more than that with the scheduler there is a subscription fee but i would definitely recommend asking your finance to help get it covered by the pr budget the next app is boomerang and i highly highly recommend getting the app i don't know why but it's so much higher quality when you use the actual app instead of using the instagram stories feature in the actual instagram app if that makes sense so yeah just use the boomerang app because they will turn out so much better lastly continual is a great app for when you want to post a talking video and you have to cut it up into the 15 second limit for instagram stories so you can possibly use this for when chapter members are taking over your instagram stories for a specific event so that is all the advice that i have for my last two years of being vice president of public relations i hope this video helped a lot of you guys out if you're interested in this position or even if you're already in this position and needed a little bit of info i hope i gave you guys a little bit of motivation i would say the last piece of advice is to definitely read your manual you most likely have a manual so would definitely read it inside and out because that manual will have a lot of ideas that you can implement within your own chapter so if you made it all the way to the end of this video if you were in a sorority comment down below your school and your sorority's name if you're not in greek life comment your college's name and if you are not in college then comment your dream school that you would like to attend i'll see y'all in my next video bye