What better way to draw students into campus life than connecting them with like-minded peers? Use the campus app to bring students together with Organizations.
Together, we will use Campus Cloud to add five organizations to the campus app. They will appear in the list of organizations. Students can interact with those organizations in many ways, bringing life and energy to the framework we will lay out here.
There will be no shortage of organizations and groups to add, so let's start with a short list. What are the organizations no student can live without? Let's start by creating five (5) organizations.
When you're done, why not delegate ownership for managing the organizations to the organization owners? You can free yourself to build up other pieces of the campus app.
Here's how you bring the campus app to life with organizations:
- Create the organizations
- Post a welcome message to the community
- [Optional] Put people on the member list
- See the results!
- Delegate ownership
TIME REQUIRED: 1-2 hours for five organizations
1. Create the Organizations
Creating an organization is as easy as typing in the information. You'll need the name and contact info for each organziation, and images to represent them in the app. If there are short descriptions of the organizations (like on their web pages), copy the text into a document and save it to use later. Be sure to save the web addresses too.
For each organization you want to create, follow the steps in this FAQ:
You'll use Campus Cloud to upload the image and type the club name for each organization. You'll paste in the organization description and put in the contact information.
What about membership? If you turn this on, the organization will have a wall where students can post messages. And, students can join the organization so their names appear in the member list (if they enable this in their privacy settings). Read more about organization membership here:
When you're done, click "Create Organization." Your organization appears in Campus Cloud in the list of organizations.
Do this for each organization in your list. After a few short minutes, you will have created five organizations that will appear in the campus app, and done your students a valuable service.
2. Post a welcome message to the club wall
Who's first in the pool? Encourage students to dip their toes in by posting a welcome message and inviting others to do the same.
Posts with images get the best response. Is there a photo or an image that could draw students into the conversation? Think about including up to four images with your welcome message.
Then follow the steps in this FAQ:
If desired, you can restrict the campus wall so only designated people can post. This is done with the member list, which we'll set up in step 3.
3. [Optional] Put people on the member list
You may want the names of certain people to appear on the organization member list. For example, each organization may need to have a faculty advisor. You might want to set out the president and council members. Or you might want to simply add the names of the people you'll be delegating to in step 5.
Follow the steps in this FAQ:
You'll need the names you want to add, and each person's position within the organization. These people do not need to have Campus Cloud accounts, but they do need campus app accounts. If they don't, see the article footnote.
Students can join an organization for themselves, but only you can add executives.
If you want to restrict the community channel to executives only, follow the steps in this FAQ:
4. See the Results!
To see the results, open the campus app, go to the campus guide, and tap the Organizations tile. The organizations you created are listed there for students to discover. You can tap each one to learn more.
If you posted a welcome message to the community, you'll find it here, as it appears to students. This is where students will respond and share messages of their own.
5. Delegate Ownership
There are many advantages to delegating ownership for the organizations you just created. Organization owners can create events that appear automatically in the campus app -- saving you from having to do it yourself. You can encourage an organization to use the campus app's Assessment feature. This makes it easy for students to give their feedback about the organization, to learn together and improve.
Most importantly, delegating ownership for managing organization helps the campus app come to life. Let your students build the campus app for themselves by giving them ownership for their organizations.
To delegate ownership of the organizations you just created, you'll need the email addresses of each person you want to delegate to.
Follow the steps in this FAQ: Invite a Colleague to Help Administer an Organization
BEST PRACTICE: You'll get the best results if you
- Delegate ownership.
- Send training materials (link below).
- Encourage organization executives to post messages like we did in this example.
- In a couple weeks' time, use the campus app to check activity in the community, and follow up if there is none.
TRAINING MATERIALS for can be found in the Product Knowledge Database, specifically in the Organizations section.
FOOTNOTE: If you need someone to have an app account (so you can make them a club executive), follow the instructions here:
If you have comments or feedback about this "how-to" document, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks for reading!