#LeadSTF Leadership Summit

#LeadSTF, the Final Post: Our Year of AWESOMENESS

This week, we ran a series of blog posts on our She’s the First Leadership Summit held last Saturday, which was when our city and campus leaders convened at Chelsea Market in NYC and live tweeted our brainstorming/training with hash tag #LeadSTF. You’ve read about (and seen in pictures):

This box holds wishes for our Year of Awesomeness, on magenta & teal Post-Its ;)

To conclude, we present you with this box, which holds our wishes for 2011…the Year of Awesomeness. After our breakout mentoring session, we asked each leader to write (on magenta & teal Post-Its!) what would make 2011 an awesome year for them and She’s the First. No one has read the notes aloud yet…our President Tammy has not even peeked! Do you think we should keep the lid shut till our next Leadership Summit in 2012, like a time capsule, or open these up and share them on the blog soon?

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#LeadSTF with @cynthiahellen: Effective Storytelling through an Event – Embracing Technology – and Making Crazy Dreams Come True

Cynthia was our third speaker at the Summit.

Our afternoon at the She’s the First Leadership Summit continued with a presentation by She’s the First board member and GIRLS WHO ROCK co-founder Cynthia Hellen. Cynthia had just returned from a two-week trip to Peru, where she had also traveled this past summer when piloting the She’s the First 360 travel series with Tammy Tibbetts. This time, Cynthia was visiting her family in rural villages, and she showed us a photo of the shantytowns where people lived, the kind of environment into which she had been born. Cynthia and her hardworking parents who immigrated to the United States are a living example of how profoundly one can change his or her life if given an education.

Cynthia spoke to us about effective storytelling through events — how can you make fundraisers like GIRLS WHO ROCK not only be entertaining, but also get the message across about the girls you’re supporting, who live drastically different lives? (For example, at GIRLS WHO ROCK, we invited Ashley Shuyler, the founder of our beneficiary, AfricAid, to speak and show us photos of the girls in Tanzania before the show began.)

Cynthia touched upon the importance of using social media to raise awareness and build alliances. She concluded with an inspiring pep talk on how you can make even a crazy dream — like GIRLS WHO ROCK originally was, for a small group of young women who resolved to pull it off only two months before show night — come true. Just take it one step, one daily to-do list at a time. And never stop being curious; learn everything.

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#LeadSTF, Mid-day Activity: Speed Mentoring for Our Campus Leaders

She's the First*{Hofstra} in the red room

After lunch at the She’s the First Leadership Summit, we broke up into three small groups, where our campus leaders (from Manhattan College, Hofstra, Quinnipiac, and Notre Dame universities) had the chance to ask the post-graduate leaders within She’s the First for direct, personalized advice on their fundraising ideas for Spring 2011. The Mr. Youth office, which generously donated the meeting space, had bright-colored rooms to get our creative juices flowing.

She’s the First*{Hofstra} President Gennifer Delman filled the group in on a clever Valentine’s Day-themed fundraiser, which she first told us about here on Aspire:

When you were in college, did you ever plan a fundraiser that was a smashing success? What for? Tell us about it!

Tweet!

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#LeadSTF: Lunchtime, Thanks to Qdoba!

Lunch break at the She's the First Leadership Summit, Jan. 15th in NYC

When an all-volunteer team spends their Saturday, 10am-5pm, working hard for a world-changing cause, of course their President wants to treat them to a free lunch! But without an operating budget (which we are separately fundraising for among companies and grants right now — 100% of what you give supports girls’ education), that could be costly.  So, we include this post in our week-long recap of Saturday’s Leadership Summit to say, THANK YOU, QDOBA MANHATTAN, for donating lunch! We won’t name any names, but @shesthefirst tweeted a few take-out places in NYC, and no one responded nicer than @QdobaMexGrill.

Qdoba’s donation is a reminder of how even if you don’t have money to donate to a cause, think about what services or products you might have to make in-kind donations. This taco spread for 20 surely fueled us up for an afternoon of workshopping our fundraising ideas, which will send several girls to school in the course of the next year. Never underestimate the power of non-monetary donations to a cause!

Speaking of acts of kindness, we had some leftover tacos at the end of the day. Some of our volunteers — Hannah Brencher, Stephanie Rushford, Cynthia Hellen, Kat Sytnyk, Carla Blumenthal, in particular — packed them up into two tins and handed them out to street vendors working in the cold outside of Chelsea Market. Pay it forward! :)

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#LeadSTF, Session 2: Jerry Chu on Being a Creativity Powerhouse

Jerry Chu tells us how brands can create movements

Our second speaker at the Leadership Summit was male — because although She’s the First directly supports girls, we’re a movement involving women and men! Jerry spent about four hours of his busy Saturday meeting and mingling with the She’s the First team, and just before lunch he treated us to a presentation on thinking outside the box with our brand and fundraising ideas.

Jerry is co-founder of The Think Cloud, a firm that develops innovative new products that will make a profit for companies. He’s all about projects that use new and emerging media platforms to maximize the life cycle of brand, product or campaign, by making real connections with consumers. Essentially, this is what She’s the First does — except our ‘profit’ is money from fundraisers, or products like our bracelet, that is invested in girls’ education.

If you would like to see Jerry’s full presentation, email info@shesthefirst.org and we’ll send it to you! With case studies ranging from water bottles to fire extinguishers and the pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness, he showed us how social interactive marketing, word of mouth buzz, and partnerships & alliances build a brand. The lessons were equally applicable to She’s the First at large and to our local presence at colleges via our She’s the First*{Campus} network.

Live tweets from Chelsea Orcutt, Gennifer Delman, and Devin Tomb, during Jerry's presentation

p.s. tomorrow is Jerry’s birthday — happy birthday, Jerry!

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#LeadSTF, Session 1: Networking for Good with Lindsey Pollak

Lindsey Pollak, She's the First Board Member and #LeadSTF guest speaker

Lindsey Pollak is author of Getting from College to Career and has mentored Tammy Tibbetts, President/Founder of She’s the First, since her sophomore year of college — years before She’s the First was even a thought.

Today, Lindsey serves on the She’s the First Board of Directors. Lindsey travels the country speaking on college campuses, and through her blog, lindseypollak.com/blog, has become a virtual mentor to our generation, the Millennials. It gets better: Last year, when She’s the First signed on to be a Social Change ambassador in Levi’s Shape What’s to Come community, which fosters mentoring among women online, we later discovered that Levi’s had invited her to be the national spokeswoman — without even realizing she was connected to She’s the First! Lindsey is the go-to for advice on gracefully navigating your way through a network that not only will help you further your own career, but will also help you make your fundraisers for sponsorships successful.

Lindsey shared her do's and don'ts and fostered an amazing Q+A! She's at the head of the table, with the shapewhatstocome.com website on the screen behind her.

If you read Getting from College to Career, you’ll see for yourself how Lindsey provides tips that stretch beyond common sense. Some pieces of advice that apply as much to your pursuit of donations as they do to jobs and internships:

1. Keep your emails short and to the point (But personalized them! No one likes to receive a template email.) Make your subject line strong and specific.

2. Give the person/company options on how they can help, i.e. 1) In-kind product donation, 2) Financial support, 3) Publicity. Show them how the partnership is mutually beneficial.

3. Follow-up with thank you notes, always! E-mail for sure, snail mail for an extra special touch, and a Tweet can be icing on the cake (when applicable). If someone makes an introduction for you (i.e. to a caterer who can donate food to your event), let them know the outcome.

4. If someone turns you down, still send them a note to say thanks for the consideration — always be gracious, and they might change their mind next time.

5. MOST IMPORTANT TIP! When negotiating, know when to stop talking. Get your points across, but then let the potential donor fill the silence with what they can do to help you reach your goals.

Get a peak at the #LeadSTF Twitter action around Lindsey’s talk below, and tweet her your appreciation at @lindseypollak!

Tweets inspired by Lindsey's talk

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It's #LeadSTF Week on Aspire!

She's the First leaders put in a full 7-hour day on Saturday, Jan. 15th for our Leadership Summit in NYC

On Saturday in NYC, She’s the First hosted our first Leadership Summit! 17 of our campus and city leaders gathered offline, with two phoning in, to finetune our fundraising plans, spark new ideas, and thus increase our impact on girls’ education worldwide.

Author and She’s the First Board member Lindsey Pollak, and then marketing guru Jerry Chu of the Think Cloud, opened our minds with morning presentations. We took a break for a taco lunch donated by Qdoba, and then, we split up into workshopping sessions. We came back together to end the afternoon with guest talks from GIRLS WHO ROCK co-founder Cynthia Hellen and Ajit George, Director of Operations at Shanti Bhavan (our India partner school).

Best part of all, the Summit was live tweeted by our guests, using hash tag #LeadSTF, so you can follow exactly what happened and what we learned! We’ll be sharing excerpts and photos all week long here on the Aspire blog.

To kick it off, here’s the surprise video message we had from our Director Christen Brandt, who was traveling in Guatemala to visit our partner there, Starfish One by One. Alongside our Researcher Maisy Page and photographer Kate Lord, she gave us an icebreaker activity, which we did using a beach ball that looks like a globe…whoever caught the ball introduced themselves, how they got involved in She’s the First, and told us the most interesting place they’ve ever traveled. Try it in your next meeting!

Our whole day was documented on Twitter using #LeadSTF

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