Yay, productivity!

Today was an awesome day.

I met with my officers today, and we discussed at great length the feedback we got from the brainstorming session last week. We made a lot of decisions, in terms of what we need to be doing before fall. In mostly chronological order:

We are going to have my VP talk to Phil Plait about speaking for us this fall. He has already offered to come speak to the astronomy club (that my VP is president of) for free, so we think this will not be too hard a sell. He will, we hope, be our big name speaker for the fall. We also decided there was no harm in trying to find out about getting Neil DeGrasse Tyson for the spring. I wrote an email to the "Request a Speaking Engagement" address on his website this evening, asking for information about bringing him in in the spring. Here's hoping!

The first big event we are concerned with is the Celebration of Mines, our fall club fair. I've ordered tabling supplies from the SSA, found a link about buying Darwin fish and other things in bulk, emailed the RDF about buying Out Campaign stuff in bulk, and my treasurer is going to talk to the person in charge of such things tomorrow to be sure we have a booth space reserved. We decided that instead of having people write their name and email on a list, we'll have them type it into a spreadsheet on my tablet-- no handwriting issues, and my tablet has enough battery to last through the day with no problems. We'd like to have event cards to give out-- that is, an index card or smaller sized thing that has information for the next event we are doing. We also talked about having people fill out surveys so we can get a better feel for the campus's attitudes, and about having some sort of game for giving away swag. We're not yet sure what we will do to attract attention, but we'll put some thought into it.

We talked for a while about other events-- debates we could host, movie nights, getting a group together to go to the Reason Rally next year-- and then moved onto service. We love the idea of helping with Jeffco's Outdoor Lab program, and reaching out to the Girl Scouts (but NOT the Boy Scouts-- they allow neither gays nor atheists). In the nearer future, we'd like to help clean the campus-- pick up trash, mostly-- and donate to the food bank, or a similar organization. Those are simple things to get started in, and if we're going to reach Tier 3, we have to do at least 3 service events a year.

Then we moved onto education, and started talking about my VP's pet project. He wants to collect videos of people talking about how they came to be atheist/agnostic/humanist/whatever label they wear, and put them online somehow. It's rather nebulous at this point, but this does make it very convenient that our faculty adviser is also in charge of the AV Club. I decided to find out about what it might cost to get a more professional website set up; a friend is researching that for me now.

Fundraising is always a challenge; we have decided that our big event is going to be an annual Flying Spaghetti Monster Dinner. Buy a plate, get spaghetti and a raffle ticket (more raffle tickets can be purchased at an additional cost) and some kind of entertainment. Servers will dress as pirates, naturally. We're thinking this should happen in November; we've already decided that there will be a committee for it.

Finally we talked about other groups we could cooperate with. Sigma Lambda (the local GLBT group) came up again, as well as APO-- I am told they do a lot of philanthropy, and would be happy to work with us. We also talked about gradually taking over the newspaper-- apparently a few years ago they were all super conservative and Christian. This has improved, but it's about time we got another voice in the paper.

As the meeting wound down and we talked about committees, we got a little silly. The committees would all have excessive names:
- Fundraising: There's Always Money in the Banana Stand Committee
- FSM Dinner: The Committee Touched By His Noodly Appendage
- Outreach: Really, We Don't Eat Babies
- Events: Cool People Doing Cool Things
- Planning: Hindsight Is 20/20, Foresight Should Be 20/20
- Executive (officers): Committee for Investigation of Recursive Committees

Then we made a to-do list, which I have already made a good start on. All in all, a very productive day.