Category Archives: Leadership

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The Proven Way to Prepare Chaperones and Students for a Fun-Filled Spring Trip

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It’s spring trip season for many booster clubs, and the key to fun-filled travel is forward planning. Before you hit the road, be sure that everyone is well prepared and knows what to expect. The best way to communicate your expectations is by meeting with your chaperones and travelers in advance.

Here are the key points for success in each of these meetings.

1. The chaperone meeting. Meet with your chaperones two to three weeks before your trip and tell them what to expect. Here you’ll share guidelines, rules, and expectations for travel.

The chaperone meeting gives them a chance to meet each other and exchange contact information. You’ll have the opportunity to answer questions and to make sure that everyone is “on the same page.” This is where you’ll share room, chaperone, and bus assignments with them. Occasionally, they will identify problem areas or suggest changes to the assignments. Always welcome their feedback and make every effort to implement their suggestions.

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Three Key Assignments Every Thriving Booster Club Makes Before the Spring Trip

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Spring is here, the time when many booster clubs take their students on an annual trip. When it comes to travel, a booster club’s role is to provide a safe, affordable, and fun experience for the students. By now, you’ve already scheduled your trip and registered your travelers, so it’s time to prepare for travel.

There are three key assignments when preparing to travel: assigning rooms, assigning chaperones, and assigning buses. Let’s take a look at each activity in detail:

1. Assigning rooms. Travel helps students build lasting friendships and create lifelong memories. A best practice from my experience is to allow students to choose their own roommates. You may simply post a sign-up sheet formatted in blocks, where each block represents a room. Divide each block into four sections for students to write in their names. Here’s an example:

Room Sign-up Sheet

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Which Parent Are You?

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Each year during the final home football game of the season, the Blaze Band recognizes its seniors and their parents for the students’ participation and dedication to the program. Each year, I never ceased to be amazed at how many parents I didn’t know. It was like, “who are you, and where have you been?” Remember, these were parents of seniors, not incoming freshmen, and I simply didn’t know them.

I realize that each family has its own unique challenges, commitments, and priorities. Life is full of “curve balls” that seem to hit us unexpectedly from out of the blue. However, I firmly believe that what gets prioritized gets done. I always left the stadium on senior night feeling as if many parents hadn’t prioritized their children’s activities and, subsequently, hadn’t participated in the booster club.

I contrast these parents against Steve, our Truck & Equipment Committee chair. Steve selflessly volunteered his time and developed one of the most thriving committees in the booster club. During his tenure, he grew the committee in numbers never before realized. He created a culture of acceptance, teamwork, and pride. Steve acted on the ideas and suggestions of his committee members, and achieved unprecedented accomplishments.

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Seven Ways Your Employer Benefits When You Volunteer in a Booster Club

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When counting the benefits of volunteering, you may immediately think of the value you provide to the booster club you’re serving. Expanding from there, you may easily quantify the benefits that you receive personally. But there’s another beneficiary of your volunteering that is rarely considered – your employer.

Volunteering with a booster club provides many opportunities to enhance and expand your skill set. Many of the skills you develop in a volunteer setting are immediately transferrable to your career. As your skill set grows, you are able to provide more value to your employer. Here are seven benefits that employers realize when you volunteer with a booster club.

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Want to Improve Your Work-Life Balance? Volunteer With a Booster Club

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Today’s communication technology allows us to stay connected to our work, and that often takes a toll on our work-life balance. When we’re away from the office, it’s easy to answer a call or two, reply to an email, and send a few texts. We like to tell ourselves we’re multi-tasking, but truth be known, we’re simply robbing the time away from our families.

29 - Work-Life Balance

You have an outstanding opportunity to improve your work-life balance by volunteering with your child’s booster club. Spring is a time of transition in the life of a booster club, when seniors – and their parents – graduate out. There will soon be many opportunities for you to plug-in and get involved.

Zig Ziglar illustrated his Wheel of Life with seven spokes coming from the hub. Each spoke represents an area of focus that we must maintain to achieve balance in life. The spokes are Personal, Family, Career, Physical, Mental, Spiritual, and Financial.

In the context of Zig’s seven spokes, you can significantly impact the Personal, Family, and even Physical spokes in your own wheel of life. Let’s get started.

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3 Best Practices to Recruit Qualified, Trustworthy Financial Officers for Your Booster Club

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In my past three posts, we examined the attributes of highly effective booster club presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries. Today, let’s take a look at the financial officers’ roles.

Thriving booster clubs separate financial duties between two officers: the treasurer and the bookkeeper. I have outlined the division of their responsibilities in my post, 5 Proven Ways to Insulate Your Booster Club from Embezzlement.

The treasurer and bookkeeper are vital to a booster club’s success. They are responsible for:

  • Operating according to sound accounting practices
  • Complying with school board requirements
  • Complying with IRS requirements
  • Interfacing with the booster club’s banker and financial advisor
  • Reporting financial performance to booster club officers, instructors, and school administrators
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Nine Attributes of a Highly Effective Booster Club Secretary

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When it comes to communication, we live in an unprecedented time. Never before have there been so many media outlets vying for our attention. Today’s media “noise” has created a distracted audience that has little tolerance for lengthy and unclear messages.

This environment creates significant implications for your booster club as well. When communicating internally, you must be clear, to the point, and right on time or else your members will ignore you. When communicating externally, you’ve got to compete with other extracurricular programs in your school and community just to be heard. Therefore, well-written communications are vital to your booster club’s livelihood.

The secretary is a booster club’s chief communicator, and holds one of the most influential roles in the organization. Effective communicators are hard to come by, so you must be intentional in recruiting the right person for the role.

Here are nine attributes of a highly effective booster club secretary:

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Four Ways to Increase Your Booster Club Vice President’s Influence

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In last week’s post, we examined five attributes of an effective booster club president. Now, let’s take a look at the vice president’s role in a booster club.

The vice president’s role is often ambiguous and commonly misunderstood. The booster vice president typically:

  • Presides at meetings in the president’s absence
  • Performs administrative functions delegated by the president
  • Performs other specific duties as outlined in the organization’s bylaws

Now, vice presidents, are you ready to go to work? You know exactly what to do, right? Well, maybe not.

Thriving booster clubs prepare their vice presidents to become future presidents. During their tenure, vice presidents learn the responsibilities and expectations of the organization’s senior leadership role. They see first hand the issues that face the president, and learn the rationale for addressing those issues. This on-the-job training helps to ensure continuity in leadership year after year.

While preparing for the role of president, the vice president usually takes on a special leadership assignment. Here are four suggestions:

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Five Attributes of an Effective Booster Club President

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When I became president of the Blackman High School Band Boosters, I was beaming with enthusiasm. However, I had never led a student support organization. There were many aspects of a nonprofit where I simply did not know what I didn’t know. So I quickly became a “student of leadership.” Here’s what I learned.

The booster club president is the chief executive officer and sets the tone for the organization. He or she oversees the organization’s operations and is accountable for its actions. The booster president typically:

  • Presides over all meetings
  • Oversees all aspects of the organization
  • Appoints committees
  • Chairs the executive team
  • Enforces the organization’s bylaws
  • Resolves problems in the membership
  • Regularly reviews the organization’s finances with the treasurer
  • Schedules an annual or special audit of records

While all of these tasks are necessary, what really sets an exceptional president apart from the rest? What skills are required to inspire and lead the organization toward a common purpose?

Five Attributes of an Effective Booster President

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4 Common Conditions Leading to Booster Club Embezzlement

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This week, the former treasurer of a high school volleyball booster club pleaded guilty to sealing nearly $10,000 from the organization. When sentenced, she could face up to six years in prison. But this was not her first offense. In early 2013, she was arrested for embezzling allegedly $170,000 from her former employer. She pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to ten years of probation and ordered to pay more than $156,000 in restitution.

Embezzlement is a crime that is widespread among booster clubs from coast to coast. Behind each incident of embezzlement, you will find several common factors. Here are four: