RUTGERS ASSOCIATION OF PHILIPPINE STUDENTS (RAPS), BALITA (NEWSLETTER) EDITOR, APRIL 2018-APRIL 2019

MY ROLE

In April 2018, I was elected to the executive board of the Rutgers Association of Philippine Students, known as RAPS for short, as the Balita Editor. The Balita, Tagalog for “news”, is the main source of organization announcements and Filipino current events for the 150+ general body members and countless alumni of RAPS and served as a creative outlet for members. Up until 2017, the publication was designed and printed out every week in print and then distributed to members at weekly meetings. As print became less relevant to college students, this naturally led to a lot of waste and cleanup at the end of every meeting.

Upon my election, I revamped our MailChimp lists and rebranded the Balita to be more modern, with a new logo and an electronic format, and recruited a team of writers and designers from the general body who turned it into the voice of the organization. We phased out the weekly printed Balitas to be completely online in collaboration with the Webmaster and Graphics Coordinator. Printed Balitas are now reserved to be programs for our fall and spring large keynote events. Each week we sent out MailChimp newsletters formatted to be a recap of upcoming events, announcements, and creative submissions. This increased involvement opportunities within RAPS, along with turnout and meeting attendance, allowing us to uphold our mission of being a safe space for Filipino students on campus and bringing awareness to the diasporic Filipino experience.

As a part of my e-board experience, I also assisted the board of 25 people to plan, market, and execute events with turnouts of up to 500 people.