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My Ideas
Although the role of Senior Member on Finance Committee is mostly to provide extra experience and skills gained from life after graduation back into EUSA, it's also important to have ideas and principles that can be used as input into EUSA's financial and service provision strategy. The following should be taken as examples of how I would think through different issues facing EUSA (the product of my brainstorming), and if you elect me I would be able to assist the Sabbaticals by suggesting different approaches and being there to bounce ideas off of.
Increasing income for societies: Societies are one of the best things about Edinburgh University. Yet many could do so much more with more money. And the money is out there - it's just difficult to get, especially as most committee members are busy running society events. There are two obvious ways in which this could be helped: coordinated support to get advertising + sponsorship and advice on writing grant applications. Societies are eligible to apply to schemes such as Awards for All which are perfectly suited for them. With more advice, societies at Edinburgh will be able to get more money for capital projects, allowing the Disbursement Fund to concentrate on revenue grants and more risky, innovative projects. By selling societies overall, it should be possible to attract better advertisers and negotiating deals on services of use to societies, whilst still giving individual societies the option to opt in and out of specific programmes or advertisers. For instance, selling advertsing for the Student Festival is easier than for a regular event. Why not band together a number of loosely related events each month and do cross promotion and seek a common sponsor?
Enabling choice of food: at many smaller EUSA outlets, it is often difficult to get sandwiches with decent fillings by the time the main lunch rush comes along. Many of these outlets are located in buildings with large numbers honours and postgraduate students. Forms of advance ordering complemented by user surveys could help both ensure better choice, shorter queues and still maintain low stock wastage levels.
Increasing building utilisation: It's important to set trends as early as possible. Many of the habits, such as where to go to drink, are set early in the first semester so it is important to provide enough differential to attract a wide and compatible set of students to each venue. This requires more than just effective advertising, it requires effective scheduling of rooms and promotions to ensure that people are happy to stay in the unions. Nights like the Big Cheese have been successful in getting people into Potterrow - the Teviot Redevelopment should succeed in providing a better variety of spaces to suit other events.
Attracting better bands: Why aren't the live acts as good as they used to be? Well a lot of the nights run by societies certainly are very good, but it is difficult to attract decent acts to the unions. Part of this might be down to image problems, part down to the large competition from other venues. This needs to be built up slowly - pick something which is achievable and then use word of mouth and good marketing to increase the audience and attract bigger acts. Why shouldn't Teviot Underground become the top ska venue in town?Increasing participation: The problem of increasing participation and awareness of EUSA has always been a problem. Of course, when EUSA is working well, people don't notice it. There is already a good number of people who dedicate their time to helping to keep EUSA running. Why do they do it? - because they care in some way or another. We have to make more people care about EUSA. We could do this by giving people more responsibility for the running of EUSA, by making people more aware of what would be lost if EUSA had to cut back on services, and by making sure that people know other people who are already participating in EUSA activities.
Cutting down on waste: whilst most students are in favour of cutting down waste in principle, the majority of students face barriers to actively doing so. The easiest way that EUSA can promote this is by removing and reducing these barriers. For instance, cutting down on packaging is an obvious solution, but also considering things like providing more effective ways of publicising events would cut down on the amount of paper wasted by posters. By campaigning for better regulation on HMOs, we can reduce the heating bills and energy wastage in student flats. By working with class reps, we can persuade more lecturers to provide course materials online as the primary method of dissemination.
These are just a few examples of the way in which I would approach strategic issues - they may not all be the best ways of doing something, but at their worst they provide something to criticise, and then to build on. I would be happy if elected as Senior Member of Finance Committee to provide input on more issues.