Program Board, a registered student organization that coordinates various entertainment programs on campus, brought DNCE to Central Michigan University last year and collaborated with other organizations and departments on campus to bring Laverne Cox to CMU.

"We love when people come to events then are like, ‘wow, this is cool, I want to be a part of this,'" said senior Marissa Mattioli, president of Program Board.

The organization will release its fall lineup this Saturday at MainStage.

Students can get involved by attending Program Board meetings on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. in the Bovee University Center Mackinaw Room and following Program Board on social media.

Central Michigan Life sat down with Mattioli to discuss Program Board's plans for this year.

What are your plans for Program Board this year?

We are working on a tighter budget, which is perfectly fine. A lot of what we're focusing on this year is member recruitment and member retention. In terms of executive board and programming, I think it’s to give more of a wide variety of programming. We’re really focusing on heritage months, stuff like that, and bringing more collaborations (with other organizations and departments) to campus. We’re really excited for all of that.

You said you want to focus on more of a wide variety of programming. What do you think that will look like?

In our budget, we actually have set aside collaboration money, which is really nice. We did do a few collaborations but we kind of want to focus on getting other offices involved since we do have a little bit more money than other offices do on campus. When you bring two different organizations together, they kind of learn how to intermingle with each other. So if we did an event with (The Office of) LGBTQ Services, maybe one of our members is interested in doing some of their events too so it’s kind of like that networking piece as well.

Have you planned your fall programs?

Our lineup is going to be coming out at MainStage. Our programmers worked really hard this summer to get all of our fall programming together so that is going to be all out on Saturday. We’re really excited.

Then programming for the spring semester is going to start at the start of the school year.

Why did you become president of Program Board?

I started last year and I did special events for executive board. I saw a lot of potential in Program Board. I grew a lot as a person doing that position and I was like, ‘you know what? I think I’m going to take a leap and be the president.’ I think it’s a different set of challenges for me and I wanted to take that challenge. I’m an event management major so it’s really right up my alley.

What can students expect from this year’s programs?

Definitely more variety. I guess we’re going to have to wait and see what happens. Like how we do meetings every Wednesday, we’re starting to have more constant events. (Through this) people are going to learn more about Program Board and see us have way more of a presence.

Before it was kind of like, ‘OK, we have a concert here, we have a lecture here, we have a comedian here,’ but now we’re going to do more reoccurring events.

What were some of your most successful programs last year?

I think our DNCE concert was well marketed. We use that now as kind of a marketing strategy.

I’m thinking of last fall, we did a comedy jam right at the beginning of the year, which was very successful. In terms of smaller events, trivia night was really popular. We did ThinkFast trivia (an interactive trivia game) and now that’s becoming a little more prevalent on campus. They just had it for IMPACT because I think everyone really liked it so much. We did a collaboration for the Laverne Cox lecture so that was really cool.