Communications and Community with COVID-19

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus has created challenges at universities around the globe. Whether your campus has closed, moved to a virtual model, or are still monitoring the situation in your area, we would like to share some ideas on how to use the CampusGroups platform to communicate with your community:

1. Use our Email Builder and Push Notifications to send important updates out to the community. Use the Resend Email button to resend your emails to those who have not opened your emails.

2. Utilize the Home Customization feature to add a banner or an announcement at the top of the page with news regarding COVID-19

3. Create a Feed Topic for “COVID-19 Updates” and use the campus feed to post updates. Pin important COVID-19 Updates on top of the feed, for everyone to see first.

4. Create a new Group dedicated to your campus-wide communication around COVID-19. Automatically add all students to this group under Dashboard > Settings > Advanced by activating the Collect feature. Collect all students, either within a program or campus-wide.  With this group, you can post important updates, send emails to all members, publish videos, and let students connect with you and each other by posting on the feed.

5. Use the Chat feature to establish a direct line of communication between each students and your campus. Answer questions from students and reduce the volume of calls/emails from students. Create an automated message in the chat function. Configure the automated chat message to come from an account linked to your office (or create a new one just for this purpose) and assign staff members to shifts to handle responses.

6. Create a campus-wide Group Chat and allow anyone to ask questions for the entire community to see. Please contact our Support Team us to setup this group chat.

7. Configure your external facing Home page under Admin > Settings > Home Website. Add a photo and a link to an important FAQs page regarding COVID-19.

8. Need to issue refunds for cancelled events? Use the new mass-cancellation feature developed last week: select all event attendees and click on the Refund button (this feature is only available for administrators).

9. Turn paper forms into electronic forms on CampusGroups. Eliminate handouts by adding documents as attachments to events

10. Add links to virtual meetings instead of room locations for events

Many of these tips came directly from other users, so if you want to share what you’re doing, please log on to the CampusGroups User Community and post in the comments on this entry!