Student Groups Committee (8th December 2016)

• • Benchball – No Show
  • Coppafeel! UBT Southampton – Affiliated to the External Engagement Zone
  • Motor Neurone Disease Society – No Show
  • Southampton RC Flying – Conditional Affiliation to the Creative Industries Zone
    • The committee felt that this should cover all Remote Controlled Vehicles and as such request this become the RC Vehicle Society to avoid a proliferation of groups.
  • Centrist Society – Not Affiliated
    • The committee felt that this would have led to a greater proliferation of groups or could be run as a collective of already affiliated political societies.
    • Geophysics Society – No Show
  • Student Action for Refugees (STAR) – Affiliated to the Sustainability Zone
  • Midwifery Society – Conditional Affiliation
    • The committee were happy to affiliate the group based on the following condition, however have requested that an email is received from NAMSoc to the committee to confirm that they would become Nursing Society
  • Wrestling Club (written application) – Deferred
    • Further questions were asked by committee:
  1. Where else would you train if martial arts room wasn’t available?
  2. How many members do you currently have registered/interested?
  3. Would you take part in local/national competitions?

CM presented an update on the Student Group Review

• This year the review is much bigger than previous years, where everything about student groups is being reviewed

• This year the project is primarily reviewing funding, funding guidelines, how-tos, support packages, introduction of an annual survey, necessary changes to the Groups Hub, improvements to Money Hub, monitoring debts, investigating the implementation of a minimum membership fee, space and storage issues and information, reviewing block booking process

So far

• Consultation in the form of the Student groups survey which will become an annual survey in order to track necessary changes
• Carried out research at other Unions
• Plan to change Support Packages. Proposed changes includes a move away from the coloured ‘support packages’ to ‘development levels’
• This is based on research of other Unions
• The idea is to foster greater development of societies that everyone can keep track of
• The three development levels are so-far named ‘Developing’, ‘Established’, and ‘Plus’
• Plus level criteria will be accessible for every group and will not be limited to just the biggest groups
• Scoped out tech changes to Groups Hub
• Planned improvements to Money Hub to make it appealing to more groups
• Beginning to look into changes to funding guidelines and pots – changing name from ‘Funding’ to ‘Union Grants’ based on the fact that that is how our funding works (i.e. groups apply for grants for certain things).

NE presented some findings of the new Annual Group Survey, this will be used to inform decisions for groups support and to help give some annual indicators to measure against.  The target was 150 replies to the survey, but the total received was 61.  Key findings highlighted:

• Most used service was a table at the Bunfight (85%)
• Least used service was Majordomo mailing lists (2%)
• When asked if they would recommend the Union to other student groups
  • 70% would “yes”
  • 23% were “not sure”
  • 7% would not
• Overall, groups felt that the Union had their best interests at heart

NE highlighted that the breakdown of results shows that groups seem highly polarised in their attitude towards ‘the Union’

The Committee requested a further breakdown of results by zone.  NE to produce.

NE will bring a complete list of groups to be disaffiliated to the next meeting, NE read through the current list of groups who either did not submit committee details or have actively requested to disaffiliate. 

GS raised an issue around some PA groups with some overlap between purpose, aims and outputs.  CM suggested that the CI zone would be the appropriate committee to discuss this at first.