Arizona Phi Beta Lambda State Officer Report: June, 2012 Update-Quarter #1

Summary:
Hello everyone! First of all, thank you all for your support of the new officer team! We hope that this quarterly report will allow you to actually see what we have been doing these past few months since our election. The officer team is hard at work making sure this upcoming year is great for everyone. In short, PBL is looking to be in good shape. We have already done so much; from doing officer visits, to updating the website. While we might not always hit every single one of our goals 100%, we are striving to be better for you and the organization in general. On that note, we are going to give you an in-depth summary as to what the officers have been doing this year, what goals we have set, and if we are currently meeting those goals. We have divided this into several sections so you can look at what we are currently doing in detail. This wont be sugar-coated, but it will be informative! So with that, here we go.

Officer Team Visits

For officer team visits, we have currently visited 5 different schools around the state: Millennium, Liberty, Raymond S. Kellis, We made a goal of getting at least 6 chapters, and we came up a bit short. But, we did achieve some contacts who are interested in PBL next year, and that it very good. We will be in contact with them through email and social media outlets. One of our officers was not able to visit any school as per circumstances beyond their control. However, 4 of us were able to visit at least one, which is a very good start to our year! We want to continue visiting chapters throughout next year and ultimately, want to hit about 20 chapters visited by the end of our terms. We have also set a goal to visit every PBL chapter in Arizona at least once over the coming year. That includes Embry-Riddle. These do not have to be at their meetings, but can be at socials that we do throughout the year. More on this as it develops.

Website Update
Vice President of Communications, Jonathan Bailey, and President Austin Lincoln have recently revamped the website. To put it mildly the website look was okay, but the behind the scenes area of the website (otherwise known as the dashboard) was a mess. And we put it off for a while. But, about 3 weeks ago, we managed to organize the website to our liking. If you would like to check it out, it is the website: azpbl.org . Things we added are the Bylaws, a complete program of work, updated local chapter information, and links to all of the PBL State chapters that we could find. We are also going to add our budget for the upcoming year, our complete CMAP curriculum and this quarterly report. In addition, we will be adding the dates and times of the local chapter meetings at each local chapter so that people can easily find their local PBL chapter should they transfer schools (that was a campaign promise). The process should be done by the end of the summer. We also realize that you dont want to have to read a whole bunch of stuff and for that, we are going to try to keep our updates and web content short and simple (as much as we can, that is). As per the Program of Work, we have gotten our link posted to the AZ FBLA website. Lastly, our goals are to update the website (mostly starting in the summer) twice a month as per our Program of Work.

Email
At first, we started off very well in getting you the email updates on time. However, this has been lacking in the past month, and we very sorry for the inconvenience. Rest assured that we will be returning to a regular bi-monthly update of what we are currently working on. These email updates are meant to help you, and will be used to convey important community service events, activities, conferences, and CMAP information to you throughout the year. We ask that you please read over the emails. Also, we offer a video option on Youtube for those who do not want to read! Also with regard to email, we intend to use it for some of our community service projects with FBLA. Going through Ryan Hamilton, the AZ FBLA state director, we will use it to send out information to local chapters once every month updating them on what we are up to and marketing to FBLA. We want to use this to build a bridge between our two divisions, and we are confident in our ability to do that. In fact, we have already sent an email to many of the FBLA advisers; some of whom have responded for possible officer visits next year. One of the members of the State Board of Trustees for FBLA-PBL mentioned that she had never heard from the officer team for PBL this early in the year; a very good sign for the abilities of this officer team to accomplish our goals! However, we also want to use this medium between PBL chapters! The officer team has already been in contact with local chapter presidents and members in order to help foster dialogue between us. We will continue to do this throughout the year.

Social Media
This will perhaps be the longest section because we have done so much with it. In particular, we have been using it to connect with people we otherwise wouldnt know at all. Through the small connections we have made with current FBLA members, we have been able to slowly grow a list of incoming college freshman and to get in contact with them about joining next year. This has fared greatly for us. This led us to discover and facilitate the likely new U of A chapter next year, as well as finding members who are going to our current schools. We have done this by individual chat messages. Though a long and tedious process, it is very important to build that personal connection with people and to show them that we do care about them as individuals! In short, our efforts have been very helpful and we continue to use them to gain members for next year. There are no less than 20 people that we could muster automatically for next year; something that could easily replace any seniors that may be graduating (but we dont want to stop there!). We have also started multiple groups of Facebook. One group we are particularly excited about is the group proposed by President Austin Lincoln to combine the FBLA and PBL officers into a Boardroom group so that communication is more efficient and easy. All of the FBLA and PBL state officers have joined this group and we hope to use it for community service projects and other activities that we do with FBLA. Another thing in regard to Facebook is the fact that we have increased our Facebook likes to 205 from 177 when we took office. That is a very good sign as most of the likes have come from potential FBLA members. We have also marginally increased our Twitter followers. We hope to get this number up. Another social media aspect we have just introduced is a new Youtube channel. As of right now, we are still trying to work out the kinks. We have just 2 subscribers and we are still taking baseline data about our view numbers. Overall, we feel that we can improve our videos a lot. Unfortunately, it is very hard to do so without a good camera and someone who knows what theyre doing. We would love very much to make them in nice locations and perhaps to enjoin some graphics to them. As for right now however, we simply

dont have the means to do that. We do have the means though, to make them more fun! And we definitely want to do that for you. Boring is very lame in our opinion. So, we will try to make them better and better as the year progresses. Lastly, we have been lax on updating the social media outlets as well. We will get on that and not disappoint. It is very important that we keep the momentum going.

Sponsorships
The Vice President of Marketing, Nirmal Vijayavel is currently compiling a list of potential partners and sponsors for the upcoming year. He has gone to Mill Avenue near the ASU campus and solicited businesses for their help. Some of them seemed willing to help, but others not so much. Some of the businesses he visited were mostly banks such as Chase, Bank of America, M&I Bank, and a few others.There was also some talk about Nike and Monster.com, but for reasons beyond our control, Monster was eliminated, and Nike was put on hold. More on this in the next quarterly update.

Community Service
The Vice President of Programs, Kyle Crosner is currently away for the summer. He has been preliminarily working on community service projects and there are none to report on currently. However, he has been granted a sizable budget through a group he is involved with that will allow us to put on programs that foster community involvement. We will keep you posted. Our main goal in community service projects is to give back and also to market PBL to FBLA students. We think it is important to work with FBLA to show the community that we are united. It is also important to show FBLA that we are interested in them and want them to be involved in college. As we move toward the fall (were shooting for October), we want to do a large-scale community service project with them. The State President, Austin Lincoln is proposing a park clean-up project in conjunction with the City of Phoenix or the City of Tempe. However, nothing is set in stone. But, we are working with Ryan Hamilton (the FBLA State Director) to set this up.

CMAP
The State President, Austin Lincoln has already put together a curriculum for the CMAP program. If you dont know, CMAP is a recognition program for members of PBL that helps to edify our members and chapters. People who participate do activities that help them earn a national award when completed. These events include bringing a friend to a meeting, writing an article for your state newsletter, and so on. They are quite honestly, very simple. However, they help our chapters and our state! There has never been a program to help our members gauge their progress in the program and to help them get through it. Therefore, the State President (as per his campaign promise) will be implementing a program in the fall that helps students get through it. The program will be monitored by the state officer team to ensure that members are doing their required materials. Members in the program will submit their materials online AND to the state officers. Although sending the materials to the state officers is not required, we would like some oversight on it. We are going to be approving this curriculum (as per the Program of Work) at the June state officer meeting on June 9th. After this, it will take effect on the first day of the program on September 3rd. Every activity will be allotted 2 weeks to do, so each member should have plenty of time to complete each activity.

The last thing regarding the CMAP program is that we may or may not have each chapter register individually. This is to help the state officers ensure that people are registered and actually doing the program. The state officers will discuss this at the June officer meeting. We are very excited about this, and we hope to get 10% of our members to do it. All of the state officers will be participating (hopefully).

Newsletter
The Vice President of Communication, Jonathan Bailey is helping to spearhead the initiative to bring back the state newsletter. We feel that local chapters should have a fun outlet to let their ideas and events be seen by the other chapters. This newsletter will focus exclusively on local chapter activities. Jonathan is currently working on the template for the first edition of the newsletter and will present it at the June officer meeting. After this time, we hope to send it out to everyone immediately following the meeting (assuming we have enough information). Regardless, we will have an edition out by the 1st of July which highlights our nationals trip and what awards we bring home (because we WILL bring them home). More on this as it develops.

College Expansion
With this section, we have some solid leads, and others that we are simply looking into. When we first started discussing it, we were very enthusiastic about U of A, Yavapai, NAU main, Phoenix College, and Arizona Western College. However, we decided to focus in on; U of A, Phoenix College, and Arizona Western College. We decided it was better to hone in on a few potential schools then to cover a lot of ground at once. After this, we looked at our historical data on what chapters we had. The highest ever was 11 chapters in Arizona in 2007-2008. We wanted very much to get that up as it would give us a catalyst for building members there. The officer team decided that a realistic goal was to activate 2 chapters this year. Since we have started, we have been able to make connections through social networking, email, and phone contacts to several schools. Many people are going to our current chapter schools. However, there are a lot of people going to schools that we are targeting for expansion. This was the case with Ironwood HS, where they are attending U of A. Also, there is some interest in Yuma for starting a chapter at Arizona Western College. U of A has already started a facebook group for their chapter, and the only thing they are waiting on is an adviser. After this, they will most surely join our ranks. Arizona Western College is still fuzzy at the moment. We are not sure clearly how many people are interested in joining a new chapter there. At last count, there were only 2 for sure people who wanted to join. We are trying to find more members. Phoenix College is also fuzzy right now. One of our main contacts there is no longer attending that school next year, so we have to go through other channels to see about starting a chapter there. However, we are continuing to make connections with people so as to see it get up and running. Overall, U of A looks pretty solid. The other two schools are still up in the air.

Committees
We have had a bit of trouble recruiting for these committees. We have three committees so far: Recruitment, Community Service, and Sponsorships. So far, we have had minimal success in trying to get members. However, we are continuing to see if members will be involved so that we can start building our ranks. The

recruitment committee will hopefully be utilized more fully this year by involving the chapter presidents more directly.

State Theme
This year, we want our state chapter to have a fun theme that goes with what we want to do. This would be like what the national office does every year. The state theme will be determined at the June officer meeting (as per our program of work).

Recruitment Materials
We will be discussing making generic recruitment materials for our chapters at the June officer meeting. This will probably extend throughout the summer so, we will keep you posted. Our goal is to develop at least a PowerPoint presentation and flier in conjunction with our state theme.

Scholarship Fund
This year, the officer team plans to introduce a scholarship fund to get members more involved with Phi Beta Lambda. In our current budget, we have allotted $200 for this purpose, but we may increase it as more money becomes available for us. We hope this will be a start to a scholarship fund every year to help our members become successful.