How to Campaign for and Win a Position in College Student Government

If you are interested in having a high ranking position on your university campus, look no further than student government executive board positions. Student executive board positions range from financial to presidential positions. Each position usually has a stipend of several thousand dollars and if you are willing to put in several dozen hours worth of work, then the job may just be right for you. What you will need to do however, if gain popularity and win a school-wide election, something that isn't that easy to do as you will soon find out.

The first thing that you will need to do is organize a ground campaign on your college campus. Think of yourself as a politician. You will need to publicize your campaign and get volunteers to help you out. These volunteers usually will come in the form of your friends. So, there more friends you have, the more volunteers you will have at your disposal. This also adds to your popularity factor. The more friends and volunteers you have, the faster and more efficient that word of mouth can spread about your candidacy for a student government position.

In terms of publicity for your campaign, you will need to utilize viral media in the form of a campaign website, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, and using computer software for eye catching fliers, posters, and handout sheets.

For website design, ask your friends if they are good at web site design creation. You could always ask a favor from a computer science major in your school or help from the school department. There is usually a teacher assistant who is more than willing and able to help you out.

When you campaign for a student elected position, you will also need to follow very strict school campaign regulations. In many schools there are regulations on which locations you can campaign and hand out campaign literature. There might be limitations on which days you can campaign and how far away you will need to be from the ballot polls on the student election day. You should also be mindful of election day procedures. Some regulations in some schools do not allow you to be anywhere near a polling location for fear of intimidating or influencing the election outcome. Prior to the election date, you may also need to get a certain amount of student signatures on your college campus to get your name on the ballot. Most schools do this in order to put a candidates name on the ballot and know who is running for an elected student position. Also, by requiring a minimum number of signatures from students on campus, it whittles down the field of candidates so that only the most serious of student candidates who are willing to work hard and get those signatures are eligible to run for the position.

For your campaign, you will also need to come up with a platform. For example, if you are running for the president of the Student Association organization which oversees all students on campus, you might want to talk about how you will deal with the administration. You might suggest that you will bridge the gap between administrators and students or you might decide to take the opposite view and tell students that you want to fight with the administration more to gain more rights and privileges for students. I strongly suggest that for whatever position you are running for, you come up with new and fresh ideas that will appeal to a wide range of students. Popularity is always an important issue and so is likability. You need to be able to connect with student voters and make them care about the student election. A large majority of students on your college campus will not vote in the election simply because they don't care. Simply put, the student who gets the most amount of people to care about their platform and the policies and changes you want to make for the upcoming year, will be the election winner.