About a month ago, I was elected as Scribe for my fraternity, ΑΕΠ at George Washington. As such, I took over responsibilities for communicating our events, not only to brothers but also to the university administration, our overarching national organization, and the public at large. Before I was elected, Scribe was seen as a sort of fake job, being limited to filling out mandatory forms and taking the occasional few notes. The real power of the position, as my peers treated it, was in having a voice on the executive board, allowing one to promote their vision of what the fraternity should look like. However, speaking with our assigned consultant from nationals and reading up on training materials he provided, it became increasingly clear that this interpretation was causing quite a few problems for our chapter. Given that my role at the time was Brother at Large, which I had gotten elevated to the Executive Board by reading our constitution, I realized that we could benefit from better workspace and communications infrastructure. Despite having a lot of very competent leaders, I found that they would often exchange hundreds of texts in our executive groupchat debating situations that they didn’t have enough information to make decisions on. Events were planned through long chains of texts, both in groupchats and between officers and event chairs, meaning our meetings often centered around people opening up iMessage and reading things aloud as opposed to operating off an agenda. Furthermore, members of the chapter would often complain that events weren’t being communicated well enough. So, I ran for the role and won. Now it’s time to do the work.

THE TRANSITION PERIOD

One of my first acts was to transition away from our legacy infrastructural solution, an app called Flare. To start, I replaced its calendar functionality with a more traditional google calendar, which was to be shared out to all the brothers. This means that people can now integrate the chapter’s programming into their personal calendar apps, which should hopefully drive up event attendance. This was actually surprisingly difficult to do, requiring an overhaul of our roster system to collect appropriate google accounts from members. (more on that later)

I’m currently working on implementing an SMS blast system as well, ideally getting the message out even more. Last Friday, I spoke with a couple people from Switch, an app which provides free SMS blasts as part of a greater banking scheme. Previously, I tried to use Remind, which I had used for a few clubs I was a part of in High School. Unfortunately, due to carrier fees, Remind only allows for SMS notifications for K-12 institutions. I looked into paid solutions, but they are priced with small businesses in mind – there were no real great options I could find for a frat.

That brings me to a crucial complication I’ve been working with as Scribe: the unique nature of GWΑΕΠ as an organization. As a dues-based 501c(7) social club (re)established in 2023 with whereabouts 40 active members at the moment, we are limited in what we can use as far as SAAS solutions go, which are developed to serve more traditional businesses. Unlike such businesses (hopefully), we have historically provisioned exactly zero dollars for IT. Furthermore, given that members only serve in leadership for a year or two, continuity is difficult to ensure. Hundreds of dollars or tens of hours could be spent by a hopeful Scribe (such as myself) on implementing a solution that doesn’t work in the long term simply because incoming leadership is unwilling to figure it out or do the work to keep it updated. For instance, the reason I am trying to implement SMS notifications at the moment is because the previous administration would blast near-constant announcements via Flare, leading people to just tune out the app. Event chairs, who were expected to use Flare to send their own accouncements then threw in the towel and stopped, leading to a spiral of rot. In sum, I was faced with a challenge: to replace the other functionalities of Flare with a variety of solutions that are as user-friendly, unified, flexible, and most importantly cheap as possible. These would lay the foundations of the fraternity’s information systems.

Having immediately started making a google calendar upon being elected, and with the transionary period still ongoing, it seemed only natural to accompany it with a google shared drive. A relatively new feature in google workspace, shared drives allow an administrator user to give users access to files through an easily managable centralized permissions GUI. This hosts things like photos, templates, assets, health and safety documents, and meeting minutes in a central location. Previously, these sorts of files were spread out between Flare, GWEngage (the school’s site which nobody uses), myAEPi (nationals’ site which nobody uses), and in the case of meeting minutes a private folder that was shared with all of two people. Working over the course of the transitionary period, I filled the drive up with any nonconfidential file a brother of GWΑΕΠ could possibly want to access. I even reached out to members who were in leadership before I joined, compiling resources and archived documents that had been forgotten about.

I also made a logo for the shared drive, which I have continued to use for various projects. K2 stands for Kappa Deuteron, our chapter designation. The logo took a decent bit of iterating, and opinions are somewhat mixed. Some feel that it looks a little too “new age”. Others were confused about what it meant, having never learned the deuteron is the Greek equivalent of the number two. Though said individuals were laughed at for revealing that fact at a recent chapter meeting, such issues with identification could prove a legitimate issue. That said, the majority of the guys I’ve spoken to have expressed their approval. We’ll see if it sticks.

In making the drive and calendar, I wanted to ensure that everything would be as easy as possible to transition over to new leadership when the time came. Also, with plans to send out a newsletter soon, I wanted our correspondence to look as official and put-together as possible. Towards these objectives, I reserved a domain name for the fraternity using cloudflare, gwaepi.org. Currently, it’s registered in my name (and payment info), but I’m working on a way to pass it to the frat. The cost will be about $20/year going forward – more than manageable for the organization. This allowed me to register the email scribe@gwaepi.org with an accompanying google account. By creating the calendar and drive under that account, the foundations of our infrastructure will be easily transferred to whoever next holds my office. Though it took a few days to authenticate everything on the DNS side (DKIM was a pain for some reason), I can now send out very official looking emails to alumni, parents, and other interested parties. I can also now create accounts on other platforms through google, again centralizing the authentication. I have privately documented all of these measures in the account’s private drive, which I hope will prove useful to anyone using it in the future. The account will cost the fraternity $7/month, again a justifiable expense for us. Google workspace is intended for multiple accounts, charging per member, but I can make do with just one.

With everything created under a central account and still about a week left in the transitionary period, I was left unable to actually roll anything out. As such, I started working on some lower priority projects, such as a website. I had promised to make one in my campaign speech, so I figured I might as well get started on it. Though I can code websites from scratch myself (as evidenced by this page), I decided to make it as a google site. Again, this was to prioritize ease of maintenance and updating going forward. At the moment of writing this, the site is still private, but I plan to get it published for the public by the end of the semester. Given that the chapter was just reestablished in 2023, a website would go a long way towards helping us get back in contact with the massive network of Kappa Deuteron alumni, which reaches as far as the current owner of the Chicago White Sox. Make no mistake, however: I am not and will never be a fan of the White Sox, irrespective of whether Mr. Reinsdorf ends up filling out our contact form.

ROLLING OUT

Once the transitionary period came to an end two weeks after the election, I immediately got to rolling everything out. With the passover holiday ongoing at the time, many guys were home with their familities. As such, we did our chapter meeting virtually, formatting it as a two page google form with information and a quiz instead of an hour long slideshow presentation. I appended a series of roster questions to this form, gathering emergency contacts, shirt sizes, and most importantly google account emails from brothers. Within a day, I had shared the drive and calendar with about 80% of GWΑΕΠ members. A few stragglers didn’t fill out the survey by the deadline, so I reached out via text to ensure they got it done. Going forward, I would like to further refine our format for virtual chapters to make the process as smooth as possible. Usually event chairs make their own surveys and then send them out via a snapchat groupchat in order to get information from brothers. By centralizing such data collection in well designed forms shared to brothers google accounts (which I just collected) as necessary, rates of completion can be massively improved.

Taking advantage of the now rolled out Google Workspace, I created a template for event planning. Chairs who seek to run an event using frat funds will have to fill it out and get it approved by the executive board. While this may seem somewhat imprudent, it will resolve many longstanding issues wherein executive board members have felt the need to step in to ensure the execution of an event, inadvertently stepping on the toes of their peers in the process. My mandating the use of an easily readable and standardized resource for planning, I believe that events will be executed much smoother going forward. It will also allow me to communicate event details much more smoothly to nationals, as our assigned consultant was unsatisfied with the degree to which the prior Scribe filled out event information on their portal. The form also ensures that we are in keeping with the various guidelines around Health and Safety that both nationals and the university stipulate for our chapter. As a “red line” student organization per GWUs classification system, we need to be extra vigilant to ensure that event chairs follow such rules, no matter how overly strict they may seem.

With the kid gloves now taken off, I became responsible for keeping track of attendance and roster information. Though the survey basically took care of the roster, attendance was a different matter entirely. The last scribe sent me the existing attendance spreadsheet, and in examining it I felt as if I had been quite suddenly lobotomized. In order to mark someone as either present or absent, a cell in the same row as their name and the same column as the meeting had to have its background color changed by hand. The cell was colored green if they were present, and red if absent. Every so often, someone would go in and count each cell, again entirely manually, in order to decide if any brother was a chronic truant and thus deserving of a fine.

Seeking inspiration to make this spreadsheet less awful, I met with the Scribe at the nearby chapter of ΑΕΠ at American University. After our meeting, he sent me their attendance spreadsheet, and by god it was incredible. Taking inspiration from it, I redid the attendance spreadsheet implementing conditional formatting. This achieved a similar aesthetic to the old one, except now I can just type in a singular letter in order to mark brothers as in attendance (A), missing (M), excused (E), or nonaffiliated (N). The formatting sets the text and cell background to the same color when a given letter is detected, granting a similar smooth look to the old spreadsheet. Furthermore, with letters now typed in each cell indicating status instead of just a changed background color, I was able to implement a formula that calculates each brothers’ attendance percentage. I also changed the font to Roboto Mono because I love monospaced fonts.

As you may have already noticed, I have been trying to define something of a brand for the fraternity by standardizing colors. I use #3B54A2 for the blue and #3EFBF04 for the more occasionally employed yellow. Both are sampled from the logo of our nationals organization. The white for everything is #EFEEE6, which I use across a number of my projects (including the background of this site). I believe that by building up our brand in this way, even if just for workspace templates and graphics, the integrity of the organization as a whole is reinforced.

Another responsibility I took over post-transition was the making of chapter slides. Our old chapter slides were based on a preinstalled google slides theme and recolored white, teal, and orange, a scheme in no way similar to that of any of our other branding. As such, I saw fit to remake them in Adobe Express, proceeding to put the design into Google Slides as a template for future use. Of course, this template was uploaded to the shared drive.

Last but not least, our spring philanthropy week took place right after the transition ended. Given that I was in charge of getting the message out, I chose to create story graphics for Instagram. The idea behind this strategy was that people who know brothers of the fraternity are the ones most likely to turn out for philanthropy events, particularly when there is a dunk tank involved. As such, making good looking graphics for brothers to post on their personal stories seemed the most effective way of reaching our target market.

Alright, that’s about all I’ve done so far. I’ll be posting more about my work in this role soon, as things develop.