While it is not necessary to start or be a part of a blockchain club at your school to become a BEN member, it is a great way to bring together your local community to learn and teach each other about blockchain. BEN has helped start and grow blockchain clubs at universities across the world and can provide a lot of guidance in organizing your club.
The mission of any blockchain club should be to educate students and faculty on your campus about blockchain. Your specific goals should be defined beforehand and will determine which direction you take your club into.
Ask yourself:
- How many students do we want to join the club?
- Do we want to produce research reports?
- Do we want to host larger events for the public?
- How often will the club meet? Club meetings should be weld weekly or bi-weekly
- How do we engage with students?
- What exciting activities can we plan besides weekly meetings? Hackathons? Conferences? Career fairs?
Assemble your leadership team.
- Faculty + student leaders.
- The club leaders should be currently enrolled students.
- 2 members as core team, 1 member in training.
- At least one member should be technical
- At least one faculty member to support the club.
The board should consist of a President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary
- Set up a new entity at your university, officially register with your university.
- Follow whatever requirements your university has set for clubs.
- Apply for the club to join BEN at https://blockchainedu.org/join.
- Onboard all of your members as BEN members by having them sign up for the BEN newsletter.
- Keep BEN up to date with your events, goals, plans, and changes in leadership.
- Create a newsletter using a school-provided service or Mailchimp.
- Send an email out through university departments promoting the club and asking interested students to join.
- Host the first meeting soon after you send this email.
- Before the first meeting, ask students to watch “Introduction to Bitcoin” by Andreas Antonopoulos
- At the first meeting, ask who watched the video?
- Those who raised their hands are your early adopters.
- Educate members on blockchain fundamentals.
- Lead lessons using the presenter slides from our Curriculum.
- Encourage students to tackle on activities from the Playbook.
- Aim to throw at least one event for the greater campus community per semester.
0-10 minutes:
- Introductions and small talk as people arrive.
10-15 minutes:
- Person by person introductions, Each person states their:
- Name
- Where they are from
- How they heard of / became involved with blockchain.
- Interests they’d like to pursue in the blockchain world.
- Funny question – “What's your favorite blockchain project?”
45-90 minutes:
- Open floor dialogue
- Members continue to speak of meetup topics as a whole
- Members speak in smaller groups & individually
- Leaders help new members get set up with a Bitcoin wallet and other first timer events
- Set up a booth with flyers about your club.
- Bring a miner! Set it up and be prepared to ask questions about hash fair
- Do a bitcoin airdrop?
- Be prepared for Bitcoin skeptics – have a sheet w/ common questions about bitcoin handy to give out
- There are many best practices to consider when bringing a speaker to your campus.
- Think of your audience and ask the speaker to coordinate how difficult/easy it will be to
- Gauge expected engagement and plan the size of the room accordingly. An event with 10 people in a room that fits 100 looks embarrassing. A room with 10 people that fits 10 works. Not having a lot of people is okay, lying about it is not. If you don’t have many people, set expectations with your speaker that it will be a more intimate event with a few number of people.
- Consider asking the company your speaker represents to cover costs of food for the event.
- Coordinate so food arrives at the END of the talk. People who take food at the beginning might try to eat and run.
- BEN is in contact with tons of speakers across the blockchain space. Reach out to us through Slack learn more.