Is this right for us?
What to confirm before you commit.
Fifteen things, most of them a single email or a short conversation. Working through them now is what keeps anything from surfacing at an awkward moment later.
None of this is complicated, and none of it is about money, because hosting a chapter of the National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS) costs your institution nothing. It is about making sure the people who will be asked a question later get to answer it now.
Most of these belong to colleagues rather than to you. Send them the part they own; that is faster than carrying the whole list yourself, and it brings people along at the same time.
Part 1 of 3
With your own offices
Five conversations, none of them long. Each one closes a question that otherwise surfaces at the worst moment.
- Which pathway your campus uses to recognize a chapter, and who signs off on it. Student activities or student organizations
- Whether anything in your policies limits affiliation with an outside organization, and whether that clause reaches a departmental or academic home too. The office that owns the policy
- Who the advisor will be, and that their supervisor has agreed to roughly 10 to 20 hours a semester. The advisor’s own department
- Whether any student information your campus shares to help with nominations needs a data review first. Data governance or your FERPA owner
- Whether a comparable outside program has been recognized on your campus recently, and who steered it. A colleague who has done it before
Part 2 of 3
For your students
These five exist because a student somewhere planned around a credential that did not mean what they were told it meant.
- What students receive when they complete, in exact words: induction into an accredited honor society, and where credit recommendations do and do not apply. Academic affairs
- What your institution would actually do with a credit recommendation, written down before any student plans around it. Your registrar
- That your own student-facing wording never promises credit, transfer, or acceptance. Whoever publishes it
- How completion will appear on a co-curricular record or transcript notation, if your campus keeps one. The office that owns that policy
- What support exists for a student for whom the one-time enrollment fee is a genuine barrier. Financial aid and access colleagues
Part 3 of 3
Worth asking us
Ask on the first call rather than the fourth. Everything here has an answer, and a few of them are easier to show than to describe.
- To walk the actual student experience end to end, including the fully asynchronous version if you have distance students. Ask for a walkthrough
- What the chapter reports back to you each year, and in what form. Ask your NSLS contact
- Who your named contact is, and how quickly they typically respond. Ask your NSLS contact
- What happens if your advisor leaves mid-year, and who helps you hand the chapter over. Ask your NSLS contact
- What the first semester looks like week by week, so your team can see it against their own calendar. See the implementation timeline
One more thing
Decide what you will look at, and when
Whatever outcome you care about, agree the baseline with your assessment colleague before your first cohort starts. That is the one item on this page you cannot go back for.
Then pick your reporting date and put it in the calendar. Coming back a year later with your own numbers is worth more to your leadership than anything anyone else's campus reported.
Related
If a question on this list opens up
Recognition and policy questions are the ones most likely to need their own conversation, and colleagues are the ones most likely to need bringing in early.
- How a chapter gets recognized on campus: the pathways, and what governs them.
- Bringing your colleagues along: who needs to say yes, and who simply needs to not object.
- Getting it approved: what the approval consists of when there is nothing to fund.
- Questions worth asking us: the wording, and where we have already published an answer.
Talk through your campus goals
Explore the program, responsibilities, and next steps with our partnerships team.
Questions administrators ask us
What should we confirm before we commit to a chapter?
Fifteen things, in three groups. With your own offices: which pathway recognizes a chapter, whether any policy limits affiliation with an outside organization, who the advisor will be and that their supervisor agreed to roughly 10 to 20 hours a semester, whether any student information needs a data review, and whether a comparable program has been recognized recently. For your students: what they receive in exact words, what your registrar would do with a credit recommendation, that your own wording never promises credit or transfer, how completion appears on a co-curricular record, and what support exists where the one-time enrollment fee is a barrier. And from us: a walkthrough of the real student experience, what the chapter reports back each year, who your named contact is, what happens if your advisor leaves mid-year, and what the first semester looks like week by week.
Do we need to worry about cost anywhere on this list?
Not on the institutional side. Hosting a chapter costs your institution nothing. There are no dues and no fees to your campus, because the NSLS is funded by the students who choose to join. The only money on the list is the one-time enrollment fee students pay if they accept their nomination, which belongs on the list as an access question rather than a financial one.
Which of these is genuinely time-sensitive?
Two. Anything you want to measure needs a baseline collected before your first cohort starts, and that one cannot be recovered afterwards, so agree it with your assessment colleague early. And your registrar’s answer on credit recommendations is much easier to act on before students enroll than after, because it sometimes changes the wording you want to publish.
Who should work through each part?
Split it. Your student activities office and the office that owns your recognition policy take the campus questions. Your registrar and academic affairs take anything touching a credential, and your financial aid and access colleagues take the enrollment fee question. Bring the last five to us. Distributing it this way also does most of your consultation for you, since the colleagues who answer these questions are the same ones who should not be hearing about the chapter secondhand.
How much of this can we answer from published material?
Quite a lot. The advisor commitment of roughly 10 to 20 hours per semester, the annually updated curriculum, six speaker broadcasts a year, annual program assessments, delivery in person, virtually and fully asynchronously, executive board training, the five-step member journey of around ten hours in a typical semester, Cognia accreditation with credit recommendations on three courses, and the one-time student enrollment fee are all published, with sources listed on this page. Response times, what a chapter reports back to you, and handover support are worth asking about directly.
Sources. Hosting a chapter costs the institution nothing; the NSLS is funded by students who choose to join. The advisor commitment of roughly 10 to 20 hours per semester, the annually updated curriculum, six speaker broadcasts a year, annual program assessments, and delivery in person, virtually and fully asynchronously: info.nsls.org/our-program. Executive board training: nsls.org/our-program. The five-step member journey of around ten hours in a typical semester and the one-time $95 student enrollment fee for lifetime Members Area access: nsls.org/faq. Cognia accreditation and the credit recommendations on three courses: nsls.org/accreditation-and-recommendation-service-providers. That transferring credit recommendations varies by institution, with students directed to their registrar and no public list of accepting institutions: nsls.org/credit-reciprocity. Credit recommendations are not credit.