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“This would have been better if it was in person” was the first feedback I received from my student leaders who attended the first virtual conference with the Christian Student Leadership Collective (CSLC). Other comments revealed that the small group participating was less than impressed with their experience. They had written notes during the opening keynote but had not engaged well in workshops or as individual participants in the breakout sessions (they decided to stream the breakout on an overhead projector as a group) – which is not how the sessions were designed to be engaged with. Overall, it seemed like a failed first attempt.
Fast forward three years and feedback from a new group of student leaders changed from “less than impressive” to “I’m so glad I attended!” The change was a refocus on what it meant to “conference.” Obviously, if we could afford to bring our student leadership teams to a national, in-person conference we would. Like many other institutions, department budgets cannot manage that.
But what could we do? Here are some easily implementable practices to make the CSLC virtual conference feel like an in-person conference for your students.
1. Assemble a team.
Create a planning and host committee made up of professionals from different student life (and related) departments at your school. Assign committee roles and make it everyone’s job to hype up the conference to your students.
2. Ready the environment.
We know that environments have positive or negative impacts on individuals (Bronfenbrenner, 2005). Make it a point to set the stage for students to have a positive conference experience by designing where you will host your sessions. The spaces we host our students for the various elements of this virtual conference should be the nicest environments on our campus if we really want to make a splash. You’ll need:
- One large group meeting space for the opening and closing of the conference.
- Four to five classrooms for workshops – assign staff room hosts to these to ensure that all workshops are being streamed appropriately.
- Access to individual workspaces where students can join breakout rooms from their own laptops – it is fine if two students share a laptop.
3. Prepare a “pre-conference” offering.
Our team decided that we wanted to make worship a focus, so we gathered a group of student worship leaders to lead us in a 1-hour worship session before CSLC kicked off. However, your campus likely also has some superstar faculty and staff that would love to share about student leadership – consider a pre-conference speaker. Give yourself 15-20 minutes for students to check in for the opening session if they decide not to come to your pre-conference offering.
4. Create swag bags!
One of the best parts of any conference is the conference swag! We decided to put together some small swag bags for each participant, including some stickers, branded cups, moleskin notebooks, pens, and candy! We also got printed staff host shirts for all our staff to wear so it would feel like the students were at a conference! Email the CSLC team and ask for the official logo, then put it on stuff!
5. See every student as a leader.
It’s common on many of our campuses that staff and students alike think of “student leaders” as limited groups with positional leadership (think RAs and SGA). However, there are so many different students serving in various capacities, or desiring a future in student leadership, that we should be considering CSLC as an opportunity to engage any, and all, students. Market your CSLC experience broadly to the student body. Get excited and sell it with your enthusiasm (or fake it ‘till you make it!). Often, getting students to an event or workshop is the hardest part of the job, but once they are there, they can engage in ways they did not think they would/could.
Our students have had to do a lot of virtual education since 2020, so another virtual opportunity can feel less than ideal to them. However, if we view this as an opportunity to do what we do best, we can craft a truly remarkable experience for our students.
References
Bronfenbrenner, U. (2005). Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development. Sage Publications.
Editors Note: The Christian Student Leadership Collective (CSLC) is a FREE annual conference held virtually for student leaders across the country. The theme for 2024 centers on Romans 15:13, “May the God of hope fill you with all the joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” We invite you and your teams to consider joining us on Tuesday, October 15, for this special opportunity to connect with Christian student leaders for encouragement, ideas, joy, and hope.
