General Interest Meeting

The RoboJackets General Interest Meeting is the primary member onboarding event for the year. At this meeting, new recruits are invited to hear presentations from the President, each Project Manager, the Outreach Chair, the Training Coordinator (or representative from the training leads), and the Vice President. The presentation covers background information about RoboJackets, the high-level goals of each project for the year, logistics for training, and the requirements for being in RoboJackets. At the end of the presentation, the teams participate in a mini-tabling fair where new members formally express a desire to join and have their questions answered by senior members.

Marketing

Marketing the General Interest Meeting is a multi-faceted effort that aims to reach every interested student.

Tabling Events

The core of marketing is at tabling events during the summer and first weeks of school. The complete list of places we table may vary from year to year, but the following events should all be considered:

• Skiles walkway during the first week of school
• Organization fairs during FASET
• CoC organization fair
• Graduate student organization fair

OrgSync & Engage

Engage, previously known as OrgSync, is an official Georgia Tech platform used to advertise events. Members may join the RoboJackets organization, and an email should be sent out to the organization roster advertising general interest. A tutorial for sending out this email can be found at How to Send Emails Through Engage. Additionally, events in Engage may be put in the Weekly Digest and Daily Digest for Georgia Tech.

Departmental Mailing Lists

The Promotions Chair page lists relevant departmental newsletters. In addition to these newsletters, cc-newsandevents and news_ugrads (ECE) lists can be requested with a general interest event email (~2 days before GI). This will be sent directly to the students, so make the subject line and email content as if you are sending the email to the general interest RSVPs.

Social Media

We mostly engage with followers via Facebook and Instagram. There should be a post "campaign" leading up to general interest, with the final two or three posts advertising the event itself. A sample post timeline is proposed here:

1. 1 month before general interest - post about the event and put the RSVP link in our instagram bio.
2. 3 weeks before general interest - begin a post campaign, posting 2-3 times per week. Previous campaigns include posting about each team, but member interviews or project spotlights could also be considered.
3. 1 week before general interest - wrap up the post campaign and post 2-3 more times prior to the event for last-minute RSVPs and event information.
4. 3 days before general interest - post general interest information on GT Facebook groups, Reddit, Discord servers, etc. for last-minute event attendees.

Physical Signage

Physical signage may be posted around campus in outdoor areas and bulletin boards. A list of useful bulletin boards includes, but is not limited to:

• HIVE (post with permission from HIVE PIs)
• Klaus ground floor hallways
• Howey front desk
• Student center (give flyers to front desk)

For information on flyers and other signage around campus, see the Promotions Chair's page.

Virtual General Interest

In Fall 2020, due to COVID-19 restrictions, we held General Interest online. Here is how processes were changed to accommodate this, followed by recommendations for future virtual GIs (if we need to do this again).

Overall Process

• Website and RSVPs: RSVP was done through an apiary link on the website page. The website join page was greatly simplified to encourage people to join. A pop-up about GI was added to the home page to catch people who did not go to the join page. A page was also added for GI infrastructure, like the BlueJeans links for Q&As.
• Advertising: Advertising via social media and any outlets GT provides is crucial to pulling in attendees. Push the RSVP website page in every outlet possible.
• Reaching RSVPs: An email was sent out ~5 days prior to GI day one, as usual. The email was sent through MailChimp and provided a link to the RoboJackets YouTube channel, encouraging people to subscribe and turn on notifications for the premiere.
• Presentation: Each of the PMs, the president, the vice president, the web app owner, and a training representative recorded videos of their presentations with webcam. This was done through OBS. A meeting was held prior to recording to go over the powerpoint and content, as usual. The PR chair edited together the footage in preparation for the event.
• Holding the event: The event was held as a premiere on YouTube two days in a row. After the event was streamed, attendees were redirected to a website page with multiple BlueJeans links for each team to have a Q&A with the team leads. Once the premiere was over, the YouTube link was embedded into the join page to catch any stragglers who missed the presentation.

Recommendations for Future Virtual GIs

Each presenter pre-recording their content along with their webcam saved time, but resulted in an inconsistent and poorly-framed product. If possible, start preparing content ~3 weeks earlier than usual to allow more editing time, and have each presenter film just their own face. Then, the PR chair can more cleanly edit together the facecams and the presentation slides in a professional way. Also, if the editing is finished earlier, a direct link to the premiere can be sent out in the GI email rather than a link to the RoboJackets YouTube channel. This will result in less clicks and less confusion on the part of attendees.