By Meredith Trapper

As a student, I often find myself relating activities or hobbies to the things I am learning in class. However, this year I was able to do the opposite and take what I have learned in the classroom and apply it to my executive position in Delta Zeta sorority.

This past year I served as the vice president of membership for Delta Zeta. In this role, my main purpose was to prepare our current members for fall recruitment. Training for recruitment can begin as early as January and include a number of workshops.

Being a young PR professional, I started to ask myself some questions. Why am I doing this? Why do I need to train my members? Why do we do recruitment? In doing this, I was reminded of the book we read in Orientation to PR, ‘Start with Why.’ In this book, we looked at the importance of knowing your “why” in all aspects of life. I took this very simple lesson and applied it to our first training session. I found a TED talk about the book and a poem that got our members to reflect on the questions I had been asking myself. By doing this, members were able to find the purpose of our activities and stay motivated for all recruitment workshops.

The next training session, I applied yet another classroom lesson. We completed a SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) of our sorority. We also discussed who our target audience would be during recruitment. We looked at ourselves internally and then discussed the types of women we wanted in the future. This helped us strategize on how to engage this type of women we were searching for.

Spring semester is also a good time to look at our “brand” and what we want that to look like to those outside of the organization. We pride ourselves in being a group of intelligent, diverse women who empower one another, but how do we show that? We took to social media to try to reflect this. We took an old idea of a hashtag and ran with it. #TakeoverTuesday was used in the weeks leading up to recruitment to show ways that our women had empowered one another.

If you want to empower your brand, “start with your why” and build from your answer. You might be shocked what you learned about yourself and your organization.