Your club or society should provide a quality experience for its members. If your club or society does not run any events or activities for its members or does not do what it set out in its aims, your members may be entitled to have their membership fee refunded.

While only the President and Treasurer roles are compulsory, you can also have additional committee members such as:

• Social Media Officer
• Events Officer
• Social Secretary
• Campaigns Officer

In the next few questions, please let us know if you would like any of these additional roles, or an entirely different one.

When we talk about societies being affiliated with the Students’ Union, this means that the group has followed the relevant guidelines for becoming a society and will be recognised as an official society within the Students’ Union.

Without affiliation, the group is not recognised as a society within the Students’ Union and so cannot access benefits given to Union-affiliated societies, e.g., room bookings, grants funding and a free stall at the Welcome Fair. 

Societies are not automatically affiliated with the Students’ Union when they first complete this form.

A proposed society can be denied affiliation by the relevant staff member responsible for Clubs and Societies if the following criteria is not met:

1. The group's aims must be lawful
2. The group's activities must be able to be covered by the Union's insurance policies
3. The group's aims, objectives and/or activities do not contravene the Articles of the Union or our Equal Opportunities Policy
4. The proposed group does not overlap through its aims or activities that of a similar society that already exists
5. The group must be run by current ARU students

As a committee member for a proposed society, we request that you read our club and society byelaw, Bye-Law 5. This outlines our policies and procedures which include but is not limited to:

• Terms of Affiliation for clubs and societies
• Membership
• Finances
• Elections and Handover

By submitting this start-up form, you confirm that you have read and agreed to the Clubs and Societies terms listed within Bye-Law 5, which is available to read on our Committee Hub.