So... You've signed up to leading a team on a life-changing challenge, in a vibrant and culture-rich location in order to raise money for an incredible cause. What are the next steps? And what can I expect from the year ahead? Being a Challenge Leader is a great responsibility. This blog will help prepare you for the year ahead, and should be used as a reference point if you feel like you're stuck.

RECRUITMENT

Recruiting your team is without doubt the most important part of your Challenge Leader journey. After all, you can't lead without a team!

Over the next couple of weeks one of the team will be getting in touch to set a recruitment plan for the first weeks of your university calendar. Recruiting a team will include handing out flyers, promoting in lectures and generally spreading the word all around campus. Check out this blog on how to succeed in face-to-face promo. You’ll also spread the word on social media - check out this blog how to success in this. The aim of this stage being getting as many people into the information meeting room as possible - then it's up to us. Once you've had your introductory call with one of the team, the next steps are (again, generally) as follows: 

1) Book a Freshers' Fair stall to use as a base to promote from. The more days the better!

2) Book a room for your information meeting. As soon as this is done, we can send over marketing materials (flyers, posters etc.) for you to distribute on campus.

3) One of the CaC team will create a recruitment plan. Generally, we'll try and have a plan in place for 2 or 3 weeks prior to your information meeting. We'll then have another call to talk through and confirm the plans.

INFORMATION MEETINGS

The purpose of an information meeting is to, put simply, get as many students signed up to the challenge as possible. One of our team or brand ambassadors will travel to your university and present on how the challenge works, how much it costs and how to sign-up. Note that our presenter will always be experienced in the challenge at hand. 

As mentioned, throughout the recruitment process your main priority is to get as many people into this room as possible, then the job is up to us to convince them that a life-changing international trip is a good idea - sounds easy right?

Right. But we'll need your help. It'd be awesome to get an introduction and maybe also a speech to close. An introduction from you (or your RAG) really helps us build rapport with our audience, seeing as you guys are students and are generally trusted more than external speakers.

From the moment we finish presenting people are free to sign-up. We'll usually have a laptop at the front of the room so people can get signed up straight away.

AND BEYOND...

Within the recruitment plan set prior to the information meeting, we'll set a follow-up plan to chase up those who either came to the information meeting and didn't sign-up, or showed interest but never turned up to the information meeting. Check out this blog on how to best succeed at follow-up. From your end, you'll be Facebook messaging for the most part; we'll train you on how to respond to questions people may have at our Challenge Leader Training Day. From our part, we'll be emailing and texting.

You'll then have access to a live spreadsheet with all the relevant information of your signed up participants. You'll create a Facebook group and add your participants in as they sign-up.

Your fundraising journey now begins! Once you've formed your team you'll be supported by your charity from start to finish. We'll be available around to give you advice or guidance when you need it. Also, for the first time this year we're providing template presentations for you to use in workshops for training and kit packing! For more on workshops and their uses, check out the workshop blog here.

From this point onwards, our communications will be mostly via Facebook (on the Challenge Leader Forum). If you’re not yet on the Forum, get in touch with one of the team and we’ll help you out.