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It’s been 11 days since I emailed Alpha Phi Omega President Maggie Katz to offer her a few National Convention suggestions.  I still have yet to receive any kind of response; not even a canned “Thank You” in return.  This is exactly how you shouldn’t do things – then again, the National Office has never been good at communicating.

Here’s a Google Search result for Alpha Phi Omega blog.  The National Headquarters is nowhere to be found.  Instead of leading the way, they’re simply nonexistant.  There is an unofficial blog ranking in at #1 with individual chapters rounding out the top few (my chapter is the fourth result).  Here’s a results page for Alpha Phi Omega Twitter.  You won’t find the National Office anywhere in these results – they don’t seem to have a Twitter account.  The first result is my chapter’s FriendFeed account, the third result is my chapter’s Twitter account and eight down you’ll find our chapter’s web site.  National Office = nowhere.

In case you were wondering, my suggestions to Mrs. Katz revolved around social media and Alpha Phi Omega’s need to embrace the medium.  I offered to round up my chapter and host a “Social Media Workshop” at the National Convention.  It was my hope that other chapters could use these tools to converse with their communites as well as each other.  I even thought maybe, just maybe, our National office could learn something, too.

Judging from the lack of response, though, they’re exactly what they deserve to be. Social media ghosts.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter probably knows that I haven’t been having very much fun lately.  I’m the Fundraising Chair for Alpha Phi Omega, a community service fraternity here at IUP.  I have what should be a pretty easy job description – make the fraternity money.  I had a few ideas of things I wanted to do that I feel would have been pretty successful but, unfortunately, things got mixed up along the way.

We started the semester almost broke due to poor money management from previous officers.  This meant that I had very little money to spend in order to make money.  We decided to make working security at Heinz Field events mandatory for every brother and pledge.  This meant that I not only had to be a fundraiser, I had to become an expert in scheduling and logistics.

On top of the Heinz Field requirement, we also required that brothers and pledges complete three fundraising hours for the semester.  So not only was I scheduling everyone to go to Pittsburgh to work security, I was also trying to plan other fundraising events – just so people could meet their requirements.  Of course, there were snags along the way; Heinz Field switched security firms on us, we had to go through all new training with their new company and not everyone could make it.  I was forced to try and strike a fair compromise between those who had already worked games and those who wouldn’t be able to.  Things got messy, so I played the cards I was dealt – even though they weren’t that great.

And here I am today.  I feel that I made the best out of a poor set of circumstances, yet at the same time, I’m really disappointed that I didn’t get to do a lot of the things I wanted to do.  We missed out on doing Homecoming shirts for the first time in who knows how long.  I wanted to experiment with online sales as a type of fundraiser, but again, I felt like I had to focus more on creating physical events so that people could meet our fundraising requirements.  I was bitter for a day or two, but I’ve grown to accept it as a life lesson.  Not everything is going to turn out the way I want.

So what can YOU take away from this?  We all have dreams, goals, ideas, ambitions, wishes, wants, needs – but sometimes, things don’t go the way we planned.  I’m not telling you that you’ll never hit that homerun someday, but base hits are okay, too.  Aim for the rafters, but don’t feel like a double or triple constitutes failure.

And when you strike out completely, go down swinging.

So, it seems we’re in a bit of trouble.

The Mu Chi chapter of Alpha Phi Omega is now, for all intensive purposes, broke.  We were sitting on a hefty sum of money at the beginning of the 2007-2008 school year, and we’re now in the red.  How did we get this way?  Reckless spending, failure to collect dues and little to no income from fundraising projects.

For the 2008-2009 year, there are new officers with totally different philosophies on how things should be done.  I am totally confident that each one realizes we’re in a bad situation at the moment and is doing their best to get us out of it.  In this post, I’m going to lay a little bit of my fundraising plan out.

1.  Ask Businesses for Donations

I am not above begging local businesses to donate to APO.  We do a lot of service projects in the community, probably the most out of any group on campus, and that is not cheap.  I have already drafted a letter I”ll send out which kindly asks for any donation, big or small.

2.  Sell Advertising

The Alpha Phi Omega web site is not even finished yet, but when it is, I plan on selling some ad spots to any business that will pay the price.  Paying for an ad might be more of a goodwill gesture by a business at the start, since we won’t have much traffic.  It will at least give a business something in return for contributing to us.

3.  Find a Sponsor for Everything We Do

I mean everything.  I will look into getting a sponsor for homecoming t-shirts, date auctions or whatever other ideas we come up with.  I want to spend as little of our own money as possible and I’m going to try my hardest to spend zero of it.

As we get closer to the beginning of the semester, things will begin to take shape.  By then, the web site should be complete and I will have hopefully heard from businesses regarding donations and advertising.  At that point, I’ll be able to judge how successful these tactics are going to be for the coming year.

Have ideas?  Drop me an email or leave a comment.