Comms

Society Email

When you set up a new society or establish a new committee, your President, Treasurer, and Secretary will be given access to a SOAS email for your society. This is a shared inbox, which you can open by logging into your student email and selecting add/open shared inbox. This email does not have a password and can only be accessed by individuals whose student account the email is linked to. Your society email is how we will contact you and the account to which your room booking log-in and confirmations will be sent.

Website pages 

Your website is one of the main ways that new students will find out more about you. This is where students go to get their membership. Your webpage is easy to update: 

• Select the gear icon 

• Select your society 

• Select admin tools and then scroll down towards the bottom of the page 

• Here you can:

  • Update your icon, email address, and social media links

  • Add a short description of your group and add information about your society 

Automatically listed on your webpage are the committee details provided to the SU. 

You can also do a range of other things via the admin section, including: 

• Viewing your membership 

• Adding ‘news’ 

• Sending emails 

• Add resources 

• View sales reports 

You should not add events via this option 

Events Listing

• Native is our events and ticketing platform. All society events you want to promote widely or have paid tickets for should use Native.  

• Your committee will have access to Native, and you will receive an email to activate your personal emails you registered with the SU.  

• Once you’ve logged in, all you need to do is select ‘create event’ and fill in the relevant fields.  

• This year, groups will be able to add paid tickets.  

• You can add tickets after you have pressed ‘create event’.  

• You’ll see an option for ‘tickets’ along the bar under the event name. Click that and press ‘add ticket’. Fill in all the relevant information. Press ‘save’ and ‘finalise changes’ before exiting the page to ensure your tickets are live. 

• You can create multiple ticket types, including options that mean tickets are only for students; you could price these cheaper than tickets for externals and sell tickets in waves, getting more expensive the closer you get to your event. 

• We will automatically send any funds raised through Native via ticket sales to your society account. 

• All events will be set to draft and approved by the SU 

You can find out more and view the knowledge base here. 

Social Media 

Social media is a great way to promote your group. You should set these up with your group's '@soas.ac.uk' email to make it easier to pass on the login information annually.  

We recommend Instagram and TikTok as the best social media channels to use. 

Things to remember: 

• Social media is a great tool to use to promote your group, post about your events, and keep in the loop with your members and other societies, but it’s important to remember that you need to remain safe and legal.  

• You are responsible for the content that your society posts/ shares via your social media channels, so you must respect the privacy and the feelings of others at all times.  

• The content your club posts via social media is a permanent record which is shared instantaneously with a potentially global audience. Once you have posted something, it is difficult to take it back and can leave you defending legal action taken against you. 

 Any social media content posted should not:  

• Contain discriminatory content, bullying or harassing of any individual, e.g. making offensive or derogatory comments relating to sex, gender, race (including nationality), disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief or age;  

• Contain images of any illegal or explicit content; 

• Breach copyright laws by using content belonging to someone else without seeking permission; 

If you or someone you know is being bullied or harassed by someone through social media, don’t assume there’s nothing you can do about it. Firstly, SU can give support internally. 

Email 

Teams & Societies members can send group emails via the messaging admin.   

• Log into the website 

• Click the gear icon 

• Select your group 

• Select messages

• Select send email 

• Select add recipients  

• Enter subject and message text 

• Press send 

Normally, the email will be sent as regular text, but you can use external applications such as Stripo to create fun emails, which you can export as HTML. You should select ‘source’ in the message text section and paste the content.  

Due to GDPR, you should only send emails via this method and not export emails via your membership list. 

SU Promotion and Support 

We will share and promote the events that you have listed on Native. Events will be posted on: 

• Our weekly ‘What’s on’ on Instagram 

• The weekly SU newsletter 

For a feature on our Instagram stories, we promote events in our "What's on Today" series. For a feature on our Instagram feed, you must fill out our Comms Request Form.

If you would like additional promotion, please contact Safia. This could include getting photography – for special events.