Background

Le Moyne College is a Jesuit 4-year institution with 2,500 full-time undergraduate and graduate students, based in Syracuse, New York. 1,600 students live on campus, and 900 commute. The Campus Life & Activities department at Le Moyne have been using CampusGroups for six years.

Mission

Student engagement is at the core of the Office of Campus Life's mission at Le Moyne College. And it is well known that a higher campus engagement leads to greater overall retention. To ensure the highest level of student engagement possible, Campus Life needs the ability to:

Maximize participation in campus activities;
Identify students who are the most and least engaged in Campus Life activities;
Identify which student groups are the most and least active on campus; and
Offer easy ways for students and groups to send feedback, and set up meetings with Campus Life administrators.

“A higher student engagement leads to greater retention overall.”

Challenges

Le Moyne's Campus Life organizes a large number of activities each week, providing a vibrant student experience on campus. To maximize the success of myriad events, opportunities and resources, enhancing and ensuring student awareness is crucial. Centralization of events, communications and resources is paramount to addressing these obstacles.

One problem, though, is that students often say that they were not aware of some of the events organized on campus, events that they would have been interested in attending if they had known or been reminded.
The second problem is that a lot of the student groups organize events which are not entered into a central calendar where students can browse all events.
The third problem is that clubs communicate with their members via channels that are not centralized, thus Campus Life administrators can't oversee. This prevents them from identifying student groups who are not successfully engaging their members.
Campus Life administrators constantly need to know which programs are the most and least successful from the point of view of students, but they do not have this data, or at best, have very minimal feedback.
Students are not always aware that they are welcome to meet with a Campus Life administrator.

“Students often decide to attend an event one to four hours before it starts.”

The CampusGroups Solution in 10 points

1. Mobile App: CampusGroups offers a dedicated Campus Mobile App in which all upcoming events can be found upon opening the app. The App is branded with the college's colors and logo, making it the go-to app when you become a student at Le Moyne. Students can explore and filter events based on their preferences, RSVP to an event, or simply download an event into their calendar (then show up at the event).

“Sending reminders to students an hour or so before an event makes a big difference.”

— John Haley, Director of Campus Life & Leadership

2. School-Branded Emails: Event organizers can also reach out to students via email. School-branded emails can be written to all students or to a subset of them.

3. Push Notifications: Additionally, administrators can send push notifications to all students who have installed the mobile app. "Sending reminders to students an hour or so before an event makes a big difference," says John Haley, Director of Campus Life & Leadership at Le Moyne College. Students often decide to attend an event one to four hours before it starts.

“Help make the entire campus more aware of great opportunities that the college offers.”

4. Dashboard: To help maximize the power of push notifications, Campus Life needs to maximize the number of installations. To achieve this, CampusGroups offers a dashboard which displays the percentage of installs campus-wide, and the number of active students weekly (students who have opened the app at least once a week). Administrators can then reach out to students who have not installed the app, to remind them of the benefits of it.

5. Activity Feed: The Activity Feed is a great way to make the app even more successful among students. During events, event attendees can post & like comments and photos which will then appear in the feed. This helps make the entire campus more aware of great opportunities that the college offers.

6. Recognize leadership: To ensure that the feed is always active, event organizers and campus life administrators should systematically post when events happen, and also identify the students who are more likely to share with others. Awarding them for being more active on the app is a great and easy way to increase activity. This can be achieved thanks to CampusGroups' Badges and Leaderboard feature.

7. Track attendance: The CampusGroups Mobile app allows event organizers to track attendance at the door of events, allowing them to collect the data necessary to assess individual student engagement levels, group activity levels, and overall campus engagement levels.

There are three main ways to track attendance:

Scan QR codes.
Card-swiping on your computer, tablet or phone.
Manual check-in on your computer, tablet or mobile phone.

Across all groups and events, CampusGroups allows administrators to know how many events one particular student attended. This leads to the ability to identify students who never or rarely come to events, and therefore could be categorized as not engaged on campus.

8. Identify the most active groups: Similarly, administrators can see how many events and emails were created by each group over the past 12 months. These statistics can help the Campus Life identify the most and least active student organizations.

9. Collect feedback: Tracking attendance gives you the ability to poll the students who actually attended your events. Once the attendance data is collected, CampusGroups can automatically send a Feedback Request to all students who attended the event. This gives event attendees an opportunity to rate an event and to write up comments, only for the event organizer(s) to see. About 40% of the students rate events on average, leading to a significant number of ratings and greater accuracy.

10. Facilitate one-on-one meetings. The Mentoring/Advising feature of CampusGroups allows Student Life departments to list advisors and tutors (including available meeting time slots) on the website and the mobile app. This helps maximize awareness among students, and allows them to book meetings with ease.

Conclusion

CampusGroups' end-to-end technology allows Le Moyne College to centralize the most crucial tools and information all in one place, for easy access by the entire campus community. The college can now track, assess and increase student engagement, leading to greater retention. Finally, data being at the center of all CampusGroups features, high-level strategic reports can be used to prove and illustrate the college's successful strategy.

For more information, please do not hesitate to contact us or set up a demo. We'd love to hear from you!

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