One way to grow the entrepreneurial ecosystem on your campus is to leverage student enthusiasm and serve as a faculty or staff advisor to an entrepreneurship club. The Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization (CEO) exists specifically to support the development of such student-led entities. Assisting a club like this may even open new avenues to university funding for events and programming you would be developing anyway.

However, since working with students on any initiative takes staff time, it is important to do so in the most efficient manner possible. CEO, which provides resources including tools, content, conference, and activities can help achieve this goal. The organization’s biannual impact survey and report provides important insight and benchmarks the success of such efforts.

“CEO’s mission is to inform, support and inspire college students to be more entrepreneurial via new venture creation,” said James Zebrowski, Executive Director of the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization. “The sandbox environment that a CEO chapter cultivates on university and college campuses further encourages the development of new businesses.”

A summary of six questions and answers from the Fall and Spring 2019 surveys follows.

1. Faculty/Staff Advisor-Student Club Leader Meeting Frequency The most common cadence reported in the Fall 2019 survey was weekly, selected by 44% of respondents. Over ⅓ of respondents meet with their advisor monthly and just over 20% meet on a different frequency. (In the Spring 2019 survey, students and faculty/staff met even more often - with 54% meeting weekly and 29% monthly.)
2. Student Club Executive Team Size
   Ensuring participants take sufficient ownership of an entrepreneurial club takes student initiative and leadership - but how many is the right number of volunteers? The Fall 2019 survey found 44% of clubs had 4-6+ student leaders, ⅓ of respondents had 1-3 students, and 18% had 7-9 student leaders.
3. Active Club Members
   Once an entrepreneurial club is up and running, what is the typical number of active members? Obviously, this depends on the size of a school, however, most chapters according to the Fall 2019 survey have 11-30 members. The second-largest percentage are clubs with 10 or fewer members, however, an impressive 15% of clubs reported 31 or more members. (CEO chapters operate at a fairly equally split size of school: 26% with fewer than 5,000 students, 35% with 5,000-15,000, and 39% with more than 15,000.)
4. Club Recruitment Events
   As most would guess, the most common time for recruiting is fall. 83% of clubs reported having recruiting events in that semester. However, it may be surprising that the next most popular season was the Summer - 52% have recruiting events in the summer. Following Spring (47% reported recruiting events), there were also 16% of clubs that hosted recruiting events in the summer.
5. Club-reported Mentor Meetings
   Of course, the impact of mentoring cannot be overstated, and most CEO clubs reported a high level of mentor activity. (CEO defines mentors as, “faculty, speakers, established entrepreneurs, and various volunteers.”) Nearly 60% of clubs reported 5 or more mentor meetings in the Fall 2019 survey. 20% reported 16 or more, and 4% reported more than 36 mentor meetings.
6. Student Government/Activity Funding
   

   Finding financial resources is always top of mind for entrepreneurship center directors, CEO chapter clubs may get access to funds you do not realize. (Anecdotally CEO has seen chapters with as much as a $30,000 activities budget from their school.) In the Fall 2019 survey, 87% of clubs reported being Registered Student Organizations - often the first step in accessing student government/activity funding. (This number was even higher, 92% in the Spring 2019 survey.)

As a result of CEO’s efforts - and that of their 250 chapter clubs and 16,000 student members - the organization reported 875 new ventures created in the Spring 2019 survey and 825 in the Fall 2019 survey. On average, high functioning CEO chapter clubs individually report 16-20 new ventures created per semester - truly remarkable results. To achieve these outcomes, CEO has found several elements, collectively described as “meaningful campus support”, to be critical to chapter clubs’ success. These include:

• Operate from the organization’s proven and prescribed “Success Pillars” and operating a substantial number of events and meetings over the course of a semester (including speaker, social, skills workshops, and recruiting activities).
• A committed student executive team, well connected to the college or university leadership (Dean, Provost, President), student government and its funding options and requirements, and regularly meeting with a faculty/staff advisor.
• Maintain relationships with corporations and local businesses to facilitate opportunities. (CEO maintains a corporate partner list which chapters can leverage for speakers, mentorship, internships, career fairs, etc.)

“Because every campus is unique, we encourage the schools that operate a CEO chapter to utilize our resources or guides in their own way and adaptation,” said James. “Ideally, the development and operation of a CEO chapter is meant to be an entrepreneurial experience in and of itself for the students in the organization.”

To read the entire Spring/Fall 2019 Impact summary report from CEO, please click here.