Money Money Money

Let me start by saying that money is important for running any organization. During my years as President of Mechanical Engineering Association at IIT Bombay in 1999, I have had the experience converting an IIT level competition to nation level event, which is now a (international level event) and in that year we raised a lot of money from sponsors. The success formula is no secret. Invariably, you approach former students and some companies. I tried the same stint here too. Wrote to many companies and also requested our former students who were now in influential positions in large corporations. I started writing even before the spring semester had begun and in the beginning I received a positive reply from ILOG. The whole team was very happy. But ILOG never funded us because of their changed marketing priorities. But in any case, we tried industries to fund. Letters were written, brochures were made and uploaded on the website. I emphasised on a very well maintained website, and insured that our activities level does not fall down and our membership based grows significantly high to attract industries. For example, SEC easily received so much funding because of their membership base and their outlook. Since we were new, we had to build our image. The kind of image that attracts industry is generally built over the years, but I had only one year to do whatever I can. Therefore, I made two strategies. One, short term, and second, long term. In short term, we were asking companies for small amount, as small as $100 or even $50. For the long term, we decided to build a alumni database and heavily market our activities to the current events so that after a few years when they assume positions to give, they remember us. So, keeping the long term gaols in mind, alumni website and alumni membership letters were prepared.

For immediate funding, we also approached the department. We actually had a very strong case. We were not only doing fun activities but also activities which department would like to support, the two most important of them were Free Technical Workshop, and Industry and Graduate Seminar series. The reasons are simple. Department just cant afford to offer workshops in matlab, c++ or LaTeX to their students, but would love the students to know that stuff. These workshops just filled the void. Second, the department had regular visitors for academic seminar every Monday, but there was no industry seminars. So INFORMS Industry Seminar just filled the void there too. Also, our HoD Dr. Peters has been trying very hard to build our department, and probably he saw in us the potential of filling all sorts of voids, and happily offered support for 1. Industry Seminar (As large as $1000) and Field Trip. A promise to support these two activities was a phenomenal moral booster. In the end, we did 5 Industry invited Seminars, in which every company paid almost $200 or more for Pizza as opposed to asking us for their travel and hotel expenses. The companies also paid their own travel related costs, collected resumes. All the company visitors were given the marketting material about the possibility of chapter funding. The success of seminars could be seen in the form of sky rocketing memberships, and popularity of the chapter.

As I wrote before, another source of money for an initiative like ours is former students. I was planning to talk to advisory council. It was like as if everything has fallen into place. When I came to know about the advisory council visit, I wrote to Dr. Peters a wish to make a presentation to them. This was towards the end of fall and we had a list full of activities, more than 100 members, and a lot of success stories to share. We made a short presentation to the advisory council and proposed a moderate budget for next years events and requested their support. The summer came and went, and by the beginning of fall I started making visits to Dr. Peters until one day he told me that he has received funding from 2 companies, and he will split the money between us and IIE chapter, and we got $2500. By the time we made our second presentation to the advisory council, we were awarded $3500 funding, in addition to the cost of Sodas and Coffee and Cookie. We received $150 from INFORMS, and about $1500 from Industry visits in the form of Seminar pizza sponsorship.

A closer look will reveal, that 90% of our attempts for funding failed. Industry did not sponsor us for their logos on our website or so. But what they did was to accept our invitation to visit us and support our expenses on food for that event. You may not realize, but its a smart move. If we host 10 seminars a year, and ask one company to sponsor our seminar series, we will ask them for about $1500, which is a pretty hard thing to get, given the condition that all you have is a membership of 100 or so. Therefore, we divided and asked each of them to support THIER own seminar. This way, the visitor didn't have to go through administrative procedures and we got all our events covered.

Our long term strategies will start paying off now. Slowly we will have more and more former students who would be in the hiring team of their companies and they have been made aware of the recruitment talk and industry seminar series. It will only become easier to get industry seminar speakers.

Advisory council will always support us as long as we keep on doing well in terms of our activities. Therefore, I am feeling ease at leaving the office of President. I can see that it is hard to fail the chapter now, as opposed to make is succeed when I joined.