Vice President

As Vice President, you’re the President’s key partner and a steady force behind the group’s success. You help shape a welcoming, high energy alumni community and ensure leadership continuity by being ready to step into the President’s role when needed. 

• Support the President: Share the workload, offer strategic input, and help keep operations running smoothly. 
• Step In When Needed: Lead meetings, events, or represent the group when the President is unavailable. 
• Lead Committees: Oversee areas like Membership, Communications, or Volunteer Engagement—empowering chairs rather than doing all tasks yourself. 
• Drive New Initiatives: Spot gaps and lead new programs that elevate alumni engagement. 
• Strengthen Internal Operations: Maintain alignment, documentation, and healthy board dynamics. 

Ensure today’s board development actions make long-term organizational health a reality. Look beyond the current event cycle to identify volunteer leadership trends and opportunities that support the future of your group. 

Do not worry about just watching names fill committee slots. Excel in your role by identifying early trends in board engagement or burnout, helping the group stay proactive rather than reactive with volunteer placement. 

Maintain highly organized and clear records of board structures, committee goals, and historical operations using shared organizational tools like Google Drive or Box. Clear documentation allows the entire board to make informed, legacy-driven decisions without ambiguity. 

When presenting leadership trends, engagement updates, or structural changes to the board, simplify the context so other board members can quickly understand the rationale behind assignments, recruitment strategies, or committee realignments. 

Keep your board and committee chairs fully informed by making operational goals, transition timelines, and role expectations completely transparent. Open communication reduces confusion and creates a shared sense of ownership across the entire team. 

View our Vice President Welcome Memo & Leadership Transition Guide.

• Align with the Mission: Every leadership placement, committee expansion, or structural update must directly reinforce the core mission of connecting alumni with each other and back to the university
• Define Measurable Success Metrics: Move past ambiguous definitions of board health. Establish clear targets for volunteer engagement, such as board meeting attendance retention, committee transition completion rates, and new volunteer acquisition
• Identify Structural Hurdles Early: Evaluate your board's operational tempo quarterly. If a committee chair is consistently missing milestones or expressing burnout, intervene proactively to provide support before the initiative stalls. Refer to the Board Position Risk & Capacity Audit for guidance on how to manage situations like these.

• Provide clear frameworks from day one so chairs understand their exact operational boundaries and goals, giving them the confidence to execute projects cleanly 
• Encourage independent ownership by stepping back from micro-management and stepping into a mentorship role, allowing chairs to lead their teams while you clear administrative roadblocks 
• Establish a baseline for volunteer capacity by tracking hours or project weights, ensuring no single board member becomes overwhelmed by unmitigated task creep

View the Board Position Risk & Capacity Audit.

Your relationship with the President is built on a foundation of aligned leadership and shared priorities. You are their trusted advisor, sounding board, and primary operational partner. 

• Strategic Sync: Maintain a regular communication tempo (ideally a bi-weekly touchpoint) separate from general board meetings to align on club direction and upcoming challenges. 
• United Front Protocol: Debate, challenge, and refine strategies with the President in private 1:1 sessions. Once a decision is reached, present a unified leadership front to the rest of the board to maintain trust and clear direction. 
• Ready Deployment: Maintain full situational awareness of the club’s active initiatives, executive decisions, and university relations so you can step in seamlessly to lead meetings or represent the group if the President is unavailable.  
• Utilize the Strategic Leadership Priority Assessment with your President to discuss the division of responsibilities as the main leaders of the organization. 

The VP and Treasurer must constantly collaborate to ensure that the club’s human capital (volunteers) matches its economic runway (budgets). 

• The Capacity Audit: Before proposing a new committee or scaling an existing initiative, consult with the Treasurer to establish a clear budget ceiling and funding metrics.  
• Resource Advocacy: Act as a bridge between committee chairs and the Treasurer. If a committee requires extra funding to clear an operational hurdle, help the chair build a data driven justification to present to the Treasurer. 
• ROI Evaluation: Partner with the Treasurer at year-end to review event financial reports alongside volunteer hours spent, determining if an initiative's impact justifies its operational toll on the board. 
• Review the Cross Functional Project Authorization Framework: This tool clarifies individual board responsibilities and establishes a collaborative approval process, ensuring the entire executive team understands active club initiatives. 

The VP and Secretary partner to manage internal organizational health, healthy board dynamics, and the "single source of truth.” 

• Roster Integrity Check: Work with the Secretary to maintain accurate, up-to-date board rosters, committee assignment logs, and attendance trends to spot early signs of volunteer disengagement.  
• Bylaws and Governance: Collaborate with the Secretary to regularly audit and update the club’s bylaws, ensuring structural changes or newly created committee positions are legally and formally codified. 
• Action-Item Tracker: Following each board meeting, review the Secretary’s minutes to extract concrete action items and deadlines, ensuring executive decisions are funneled directly into your committee check-ins. 

Instead of micro-managing or executing tasks yourself, you serve as the direct mentor and administrative guide to the club’s committee chairs. 

• Empower, Don't Just Do: Guide committee leads through supportive coaching rather than performing their tasks. Your job is to clear administrative roadblocks so they can successfully execute their programs.  
• The "Shadow" Mandate: Mandate that every committee chair identifies an assistant or "Co-Lead". Facilitate these pairings directly to ensure institutional knowledge is shared and the leadership pipeline remains full. 
• The 3-to-1 Affirmation Principle: Maintain volunteer morale by practicing a 3-to-1 praise to critique ratio during your portfolio check ins, connecting their tactical assignments back to the core mission of paying forward their Buckeye pride. 

View the Strategic Leadership Priority Assessment.

Maintain a continuous onboarding packet for incoming officers. New Vice Presidents should feel fully briefed on day one regarding strategic club goals, active board rosters, unfinished governing updates, and pending event calendars because of the quality of your files. 

Keep a transition folder containing historical annual reports, club bylaws, standardized event templates, vendor contact lists, and critical operational timelines. 

Participate actively in year-end transition meetings. Physically sit down with your successor to hand over shared drive access, walk them through your committee reporting systems, and review past annual reports.  

View the Vice President Welcome Memo & Leadership Transition Guide.