Out There - new vibes

Dear Out There members,

We are writing to share some important updates and to share an invitation.

Before jumping in, as a reminder, we are a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit and an ASU student organization that aims to financially incentivize social wellness (aka, getting out there). Since our establishment in 2023, we’ve realized that two major aspects of our club’s design have not been as effective as we’ve hoped. To date, we’ve attempted to financially incentivize friend groups to spend more time together by offering hosted outings, along with curated local deals and prizes. In doing so, we’ve learned that our members often prefer to attend outings by themselves and that our local deals and prizes don’t provide enough incentive to meaningfully alter our social wellness behaviors.

In short, we’ve been wrong about how to help members (and ourselves) live our best lives.

So, as we start another school year at ASU, we are switching things up. To address our biggest lessons learned, we are offering:

1. new class-style outings (in addition to student leader-hosted outings), and
2. Fortune 100 sponsor solicitations (instead of local deals and prizes).

Of course, these new activities are only our best guesses as to how we might improve our members’ wellness. So, assuming we haven’t got it right quite yet, we invite you to let us know how we might improve as we continue to iterate. To do so, we’ll provide two updates and conclude with a request for your involvement.

First, let us tell you about our new Out There Classes. To address the dual challenges of accommodating single participants (instead of friend groups) and offering worthwhile incentives, we have developed new class-style outings. Many of our members have told us that they’d like to improve their social wellness as part of their broader learning experience at ASU, so we created our new Out There Class offerings primarily for enrolled ASU students. Specifically, we’ll be offering the classes to first year students who live in select Tempe campus residential communities. The classes will be led by Dr. Brent Sebold, our club’s faculty advisor and the director of our nonprofit entity. Brent will be offering this series of non-credit classes, which will culminate in a professor-granted certificate in value creation, approximately twice per month throughout the coming school year.

To learn more and get involved, you may read about our new Out There Class initiative here.

As for our second update, we are writing to let you know that we have launched a new feature on our website and app that allows members to submit sponsorship solicitations to get paid for their outing expenses (if and when sponsors decide to pay). Over the years, we have realized that local deals and prizes do not provide enough incentive to get our members out there as much as we’d like to see. So, after being inspired by Tim Cook, the former CEO of Apple, who said "people should go out and spend [more time] in nature," we have decided to create a mechanism for Tim, and other thoughtful CEOs like him, to put their money where their mouth is.

Read about our new sponsor solicitation feature here.

Finally, as an invitation to get involved and get paid - we have two options:

First, as described in the details about our sponsor solicitation feature, you do not have to attend a club-organized activity in order to log an outing on our website or app. So, we ask that you give the new feature a try by quickly submitting a photo of a recent outing of your own. When you do, you’ll be rewarded with an outing log receipt - potentially payable in the amount of $49.96. You may log up to two outings per week, so if you’re willing to submit two separate recent outing photos this week, you’ll have logged $99.92 in potential sponsor payments with just a few quick clicks.

Second, consider registering for one of our upcoming Out There Class outings. When you do, you’ll be asked if you have an interest in also serving as a volunteer Teaching Assistant (TA) during future outings. Serving as a volunteer TA pre-qualifies you for paid positions within the organization as they become available.

That’s it for now. We appreciate you being on this journey with us.

See you out there,

The Out There Social Club at ASU Leadership Team

Skyy, Sofia, Javier, and Brent