This guide has two primary objectives:
If you’re experienced in leveraging faculty driven outreach, feel free to skip to Using Yet Another Mail Merge.
Faculty driven outreach involves asking a staff or faculty member to promote your group to their students, typically via a newsletter or email blast.
<aside> 📈 Many EA groups find that faculty driven outreach is their most effective form of outreach, in terms of new members per hour of organizer time. As such, establishing a solid faculty driven outreach campaign seems like a first priority for any outreach push.
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Focus on department faculty rather than professors teaching individual classes, this maximizes your reach.
<aside> ⚠️ The below advice has rapidly scaled EA Groups. Growing too quickly can limit groups ability to build good culture, focus on the most promising members, and spread an accurate notion of EA. If your group is not accepted into UGAP proper (separate from the UGAP starter program) we recommend that you wait to pursue FDO until your group is more established.
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Reach out to all departments which are even loosely EA relevant, including chemistry, international relations, psychology, engineering etc. The YAMM sending sheet includes prewritten “Major Specific Note” column for an array of relevant majors. This unique note will be added to our email template based on the contacts major, when the email automation is in action.
For departments which are in no way relevant to EA, including music theory, Russian, art history etc. We recommend you give them a general EA pitch, not specific to their major or avoid reaching out to them altogether. For example, you could use our email template, and not include a “Major Specific Note”.
It will take time to build out a strong faculty email list and you should expect many rejections initially. If a specific major advisor says no, or doesn’t respond, reach out to another major advisor or a member of department staff. It’s plausible you’ll have to email 1-2 people per major before finding someone consistently willing to promote.
Note: if you get a hard rejection from a Major, you may want to stop reaching out to them altogether to avoid being rude. A hard rejection might look like “Our department does not promote student orgs” or “we request you stop contacting us”.