The Campus Conservative

(Source: via Flickr) Knowing how to campaign is an important skill for a student representative. Those who can launch a basic, effective campaign can move others to action and rally support for their cause. Contrarily, those who do not know how to campaign effectively often go unheard and lack important support for their priorities.  If you are going to be an effective student representative, then you must learn how to run a basic campaign. In this post, I share steps for how to implement a successful campaign. While there are different types of campaigns (such internal and external SGA campaigns, or re-election campaigns and letter-writing campaigns), they all contain the same basic elements.  By working on the fundamentals, these skill of knowing how to launch a successful campaign will follow you anywhere you need to go, whether in an internal election to support your senator project or an external effort to win re-election. Master these common fundamentals and you will be ...

(Source: via Flickr) Student government is the most powerful lobbying group on-campus. In 2016, a group of four senators used student government to successfully lobby university leadership to adopt a campus-wide tobacco-free policy which is still in effect today. Student government in 2016 also called on leadership to raise tuition, raise the mandatory athletics fee for all students and in other years advocated for many other initiatives that moved university leadership to act.  The lesson here is that if student government adopts your cause, then significant things can happen for your cause. However, inside the organization, SGA governs itself by a popular parliamentary rulebook called Roberts Rules of Order. Created by Henry Martin Robert in 1876, many regard Roberts Rules as the authoritative manual for how to govern an organization  according to parliamentary order. However, this rulebook means that while senators are free to voice opinions, official adoption of those opin...