Every semester, the Elon University Student Union Board is responsible for organizing activities and events for students to see, hear and do throughout the week and during the weekends. They bring musicians and comedians to campus, show movies, host game shows and provide Thursday night snacks. While SUB has its staple events the Elon campus has come to expect, the organization has been carefully working to diversify and infuse the new semester with a number of activities.
Some notes on the SUB schedule will be familiar to the Elon community. Movie runs, CramJam, the three-pack weekends of Midnight Meals, SUBLive and SUBCinema – they are all events many have attended before.
But, for Joseph Ziemba, president of SUB, it is important for the organization to expand its content to keep students coming back.
“This year many execs have been focused on upping our variety of events,” Ziemba said. “Since we do the same series of events every week, they run the risk of getting stale if we don’t make an effort to switch it up every so often. To that effect, our SUBLive chairs, Daniela Nava and Kyle Koach, have done an incredible job spicing up their events.”
A sense of creativity is emphasized throughout each event’s planning process. While most of them are considered an Elon tradition and will come back each year, Ziemba has motivated his team to try new things and experiment with what they have.
“We encourage our execs to get creative, both in those prescheduled events and with entirely new ones,” Ziemba said. “Two years ago we developed the Rock the Lawn music festival with Limelight Records, which was a huge hit and will most likely be a recurring event for us as well.”
Another new event is SUBsassin, which Ziemba said was a big success. SUBsassin, a game in which a player tries to eliminate all other competitors on campus until he or she is left standing, was introduced this year, and with its success will be returning for round two in the spring. But whatever the event, Rachaele Andrews, co-director of marketing and public relations, says it all comes back to what the students want.
“Overall, the audience appeal is the biggest thing to keep in mind when planning events for the semester because we want to make sure that we appeal to the Elon student body and provide activities for all types of Elon students,” Andrews said.
The executive members of SUB realized in order to create effective events, they need an effective team, which is why this year’s board implemented an application process for SUB committees. SUB has previously been an open organization, but the initial surge of members waned as the months went on. Now with members who have applied for their positions, James Davies, music director, said he can feel the difference in morale among the group.
“As a result [of the application process], our committee members have been more committed than ever and I feel that each [exec member] can rely on every member in their committee,” he said.
Ziemba realized how busy Facebook pages and email inboxes can get, so he thought of another idea to get the word out about SUB’s major events.
“I designed a new website for SUB that allowed us to have a much more controllable and interactive web presence,” Ziemba said. “At the time, we were struggling with event attendance, so this new site helped us a lot in advertising our events because we could put all the information about every event in an easily accessible site.”
For now, the SUB executive board and all the committees are solidifying the schedule for the spring semester. Some of the high- lights for February include a Spring Show reveal in Alumni Gym and Jay Pharoah, a “Saturday Night Live” comedian.