2005 Computerworld Honors Program

	Alpha Tau Omega/CompuServe Partnership Alpha Tau Omega National Fraternity Champaign, IL USA Year: 1995 Status: Laureate Category: Government & Non-Profit Organizations Nominating Company: CompuServe
	Alpha Tau Omega chapters at 157 colleges and universities can access information at national headquarters and fraternize electronically via weekly scheduled national conferences, helping students to develop critical skills and the fraternity to reengineer its organization.
	ATO is the first national Greek Organization to use a dedicated forum through CompuServe for communication with its members. The immediate benefits are three-fold. First, the ATO Forum allows the organization to flatten its structure. Now, any member can log-on, write about a specific issue or concern and know that his entry will be viewed by his peers, the National Fraternity staff as well as National Fraternity officers. Many times, responses will be written by a member of the National Fraternity's board of directors or the chairman. This allows direct access from the undergraduate rank and file to the leadership. The response time is dramatically decreased in both outgoing and incoming information. This allows clear communication regarding "why" questions from undergraduates. "Why are we doing this, why do you do it that way, why can't I get a satisfactory answer?" These are the types of questions whose answers get diluted as they pass through the organizational structure. By the time an answer gets back to the questioner, it resembles something one might expect when playing the childhood game of telephone. The direct communication exposes problems sooner than traditional forms of communication. When a National Fraternity policy is enacted, it could take months before enough feedback from undergraduates, their alumni and advisors is heard to fully understand and appreciate the policy's impact. Now, members are encouraged to provide feedback immediately. It doesn't stretch the imagination too far to understand the speed at which responses come back if a policy is having a negative effect on chapter operations. For example, a year ago, the National Fraternity outsourced the billing for member dues and fees. This was a first for any Greek organization so some rough spots were expected. While there was a general understanding by National Headquarters that undergraduate were having some problems with the new system, it wasn't until ATO went on-line with the Forum that specific concerns were consistently communicated. Now, the direct billing company is on-line in the Forum to make adjustments in their program...as legitimate problems are raised. Second, the ATO Forum promotes "conversations" between members. ATO has 157 chapters nation-wide with more than 8,000 members. There are two different times each year when members from other chapters or regions physically meet to discuss issues, problems and solutions. This information transfer is always beneficial and always in demand by chapter members, especially officers. The ATO Forum allows national, regional or local conferences at any time. In effect, the medium is now available to let an undergraduate chapter president in New York "talk" with his counterparts in Florida, Clifornia, Illinois and Kansas any time he wants to. Each Tuesday night at 10 PM CST a nation-wide conference is held on a specific subject. Issues ranging from member recruitment to continuing education have been conference topics. The Forum not only allows members to take part in the specific issue conference but also "talk" with other members in side conversations on any issue they want to. Many people find it easy to hold two or three conversations at one time. The event is becoming more popular every week because members know that they can get on-line to ask questions and give feedback about the issue at hand as well as touch base with their peers, many of whom they've never met before. The pool of information available to each member is greatly expanded because of the number of participants and chapter operations are made easier because the ideas that work are given a much broader forum to be promoted and discussed. Each time undergraduates sign-on they are encouraged to see who is on-line and take a couple of minutes to start a conversation with one or two other people on-line. Our experience shows this promotes a longer conversation and the beginning of a working relationship. Finally, helping college students develop their "critical skills" is one of the basic functions of a fraternity. The Forum allows a vast amount of information to be stored in the electronic library for use by members. Educational material on a variety of topics including finance, leadership development, resume writing, communication and management can easily be uploaded from a variety of sources. If an undergraduate chapter has an effective publication for continuing membership education, he can simply upload it from his chapter. It is immediately available to all other chapters at no cost to the organization. Alumni are also encouraged to share their expertise by uploading information from the "real world" that would help members develop. The more diversity in information available the better for the individuals and their chapters. Past constraints because of budget considerations are no longer applicable. In addition, information typically printed and mailed from the National Headquarters can now be uploaded. This saves time and money at National Headquarters and helps keep the officers who use the information more organized.
	Undergraduate members can now directly ask questions of and get answers from the National Fraternity's leadership. This flattening of the organizational structure is key in re-engineering Alpha Tau Omega to make it an organization that is developing relationships and communication. Undergraduates can also "talk" to one another across campus or across the country. This allows for an effective information exchange that they would not otherwise receive. Alumni volunteers can "meet" on-line without having to leave their home. This helps solve the problem of alumni involvement. In the past, many alumni did not want to serve because they were not close enough to the chapter and needed to travel to attend meetings. Much of that problem has now been eliminated. What positive impact will your application have beyond its immediate users? Will it change how others live and/or work? How will it impact society? Because we're reaching college students, they will become familiar with on-line services and the communications power of conferences, e-mail and forums. This knowledge will give them an edge in the job market and will benefit the organizations they own or eventually work for.
	Maintaining a continuous flow of information between Alpha Tau Omega National Headquarters and 160 chapters nationwide had become a labored process. Relying on the mail service and phone service to facilitate this flow was imperfect at best. The end result of this problem was that our chapters began to lose touch with what it meant to belong to a national fraternity. They began to think of themselves as isolated entities. By utilizing the services of CompuServe through the creation of our own forum on their service and by making use of personal computers equipped with modems we were able to re-establish contact with our chapters. Using e-mail and forum messages we now have, not only a strong connection between ATO NHQ and each chapter, but a never before realized connection between the chapters themselves. Now when a chapter has a problem that seems unsolvable they can connect with the ATONet and describe the problem to the rest of our undergraduates and alumni. Suddenly this unsolvable problem becomes solvable because chances are there is someone, possibly more than one person, in the fraternity who has had to deal with this problem before and has a solution. In addition, our communications with our volunteers has vastly improved due to the connectivity allowed by the ATONet. By allowing alumni to participate in chapter management efforts from a distance, we are seeing a larger number of alumni who are willing to take part in this responsibility. Finally, by holding Board of Directors conferences and general meetings on the ATONet using the conferencing capability we have been able to reduce the cost of these functions dramatically. The conferencing ability has allowed us to lower our transportation and accommodations costs while maintaining the connectivity needed to manage an organization of this size.
	Alpha Tau Omega is the first fraternity to have its own forum through any on-line service and specifically CompuServe. We are developing applications that are relevant to college students use any technology only if they see the value in using it. One application within the Forum is the Tuesday Night National Conference. Every Tuesday night at 10 PM CST, all ATO subscribers are encouraged to sign-on to "discuss" the night's topic. Depending on the week, we structure it as an open forum conference on a specific topic where the conversation is free flowing with the help of a moderator. Other weeks we invite a guest to answer questions about a specific topic. Guests have included representatives from outside vendors to take questions on services being used by undergraduates, National Fraternity officers who have a chance to hear directly from the undergraduates and staff members who can explain a particular policy and get feedback on the impact of that policy. ATO is in the midst of an organizational overhaul. The old culture was very structured with information being protected and lines of communication strictly enforced. With ATO's evolution, it is vital to connect the undergraduates and chapter advisors directly to the staff and national officers. The Tuesday Night National Conference is one way in which we do this. Interestingly, the conference allows undergraduates to engage in side conversations with their peers while on-line. This promotes new relationships and a transfer of information from chapter to chapter. The hope, which is already seeing some fruit, is that undergraduates and advisors will utilize the conference application of the Forum to conduct discussions without prompting from National Headquarters. The more of these conversations the better. Communication and stronger relationships will make the transformation of ATO successful. Witout ongoing and vibrant communicating between all parties, the status quo will overtake the momentum.
	Alpha Tau Omega is utilizing CompuServe and ATONet to increase communications between the National Fraternity and the general membership. It has already done that through the ATONet. The Forum offers our membership a place to talk with each other, pose questions, and seek out and offer advice from other undergraduates and alumni. We are currently deep in the process of hitting our goals. Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity has only been on-line since October 1994. Since then, we have in excess of 250 users. Our ATONet users include undergraduates, alumni, National staff members, and our volunteers. We are in hopes to have over 1000 on-line subscribers by the end of 1995. We are not fully operational at this time, but are quickly approaching that phase. We are making leaps and bounds in creating a variety of forums and programs to increase communication and educate our members about the vast array of opportunities available through CompuServe. Within the next year, Alpha Tau Omega will use CompuServe as a key resource to communicate to our undergraduate members as well as increase the involvement of our alumni. We are doing this by having educational programs, a place for alumni to post available employment positions, direct contact with National officers, and, of course, a place for social gatherings with others across the continent. We hope that someday to do away with all of the paper communication trails throughout the organization. Instead, our members will receive a CompuServe ID with their initiation number.
	Even though ATO focuses most of its time and resources on students at college campuses, the lack of computers owned by members was an initial problem. Many chapters had members with computers, few chapters had official chapter computers. Without a computer or access to one, on-line services don't make much sense. The ATO Foundation helped solve the problem by dedicating substantial monies to a grant process in which chapters could apply for the money needed to buy and computer and modem. The grant process was streamlined in order to get people on-line quickly. Chapters that did have access to computers were encouraged to use those computers as opposed to applying for grant money. Another problem was getting the right software in the right hands to facilitate getting members on-lne. Initially, a questionnaire was sent to all chapters asking what kind of computer they were going to use and what software specifications that computer required. A one-time shipment went to all chapters with software. Follow-up telephone conversations were frequent after it became apparent that just having software didn't mean motivation to load it or get on-line. In-person explanations of the Forum and its benefits were made at 13 regional conferences attended by undergraduates across the country. Cost became another factor. Because we knew that chapters would hesitate to spend nearly $150 a year for a subscription to the untested Forum, the ATO Foundation agreed to pay for a one-year subscription for each chapter. The expectation was that at least one other member within a chapter would subscribe. This and the computer grant program raised expectations that all chapters would be on-line. There were no valid excuses for not logging on. Getting alumni to sign-on was an even more perplexing challenge. Communicating the benefits of the Forum to them was much different than to the undergraduates. Mass marketing was initially used though the ATO magazine and then follow-up calls were made to volunteers who kept in most frequent contact with the National Fraternity. Local volunteer Boards of Trustees were strongly encouraged to subscribe. Their participation would allow them to hold on-line meetings without having to travel to campus or other cities. By this date, more than half of the first year's goal has been met.