How To Increase Connectivity with a Multi-Hub Campus Portal: Johns Hopkins University Campus Spotlight
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We are proud to feature Johns Hopkins University (JHU), in this week’s blog post!
In July 2020, America's first research university launched CampusGroups at its Homewood and Peabody campuses. Homewood is the university’s main campus and home to two major undergraduate schools.
A year after, it rolled out the community platform university wide. Spread over nine campuses and three continents, JHU has over 30,000 students, including over 20,000 graduate students.
Due to the university’s structure, JHU implemented the CampusGroups Portal feature (“Hopkins Groups”) with multiple Community Hubs. One for each campus. This has enabled each campus to have a custom landing page and menu, creating a personalized experience for students and administrators.
Benefits of a Campus Portal with Multiple Community Hubs
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Calvin Smith, JHU’s Director of Student Leadership and Involvement. In our discussion, he outlined how this rollout increased connectivity across JHU campuses.
According to Calvin, the biggest windfalls are:
Increased student engagement.
A better user experience.
More granular involvement stats.
This article lays out the benefits of a Campus Portal with multiple Community Hubs. Please read on to see how this setup could help drive student success on your campus.
Increased Student Engagement
Since launching Hopkins Groups, students are more connected and engaged. According to Calvin, “the Campus Portal has created more synergy and a broader sense of belonging university wide”.
As the first and largest campus to transition to CampusGroups, Homewood served as the lead, helping other campuses setup and use key features. This has helped create more synergies and collaboration among campuses.
Through the portal, students are now connected across campuses. Access to a centralized calendar and news feed are key features. “This means that students now have visibility into and can take part in co-curricular activities and events they didn’t know about before”, said Calvin.
For example, in the 2020 academic year, approximately 7,000 events were promoted on the Homewood feed. Since the start of the 2021 academic year, over 22,000 events have been promoted on Hopkins Groups, and therefore open to all students.
According to Calvin, “this increase can mostly be attributed to graduate students’ events”.
The cross-fertilization however goes both ways, as undergrads are now also attending graduate events, they didn’t have visibility into before.”
Prior to launching Campus Groups, JHU had multiple instances of the same student involvement platform on each campus. However, each of the systems were separate. There was no visibility or easy way to communicate across them.
According to Calvin, “Under the previous set-up things were very siloed. Since transitioning to a system of multiple hubs connected through a central portal, the whole ecosystem has changed. New communications channels are being created.”
Better User Experience
Transitioning to CampusGroups has also created a better user experience for both administrators and students. “We have a very complicated technological environment. There is a need to integrate with different schools and systems. CG has allowed us to do this, which was not the case with our previous system” Calvin said.
The system of Community Hubs has enabled each of the nine campuses to create a custom homepage. Each campus can therefore establish their own unique brand and send targeted communications to students. This has further nurtured a sense of belonging among students. It has also fostered higher and better-quality engagement.
“Having so many features in one place has been a game changer. CampusGroups truly is a one-stop-shop for co-curricular life”, said Calvin. The university has also been able to sunset providers for website creation, events, and budgeting, resulting in cost savings.
The platform also includes fun features such as live streaming of events, which have helped liven things up during Covid. Over the last year, JHU has livestreamed several events on the Community Hubs feed. These include a live concert for Octoberfest, a Springfair and the lighting of the quads celebration, complete with fireworks.
According to Calvin, “posting dynamic content on the homepage has helped with platform adoption and engagement. It gives people a reason to come and keep coming back to the system.”
More Granular Involvement Stats
“From a visibility or statistical standpoint, the new platform has also been transformational”, said Calvin. For instance, every two weeks we pull a report together that looks at several factors. These include:
Number of people engaging with the platform.
Event check-in and check-out.
Covid 19 monitoring.
Email communication readership.
Budgeting updates.
Unique user logins.
Website traffic.
Tracking and reporting features enable us to analyze overall platform use. They also allow us to pull stats for each individual hub. Our previous system did not enable us to do this. We had no way to track what was happening on other JHU campuses and did not have easy to pull university-wide stats.
For instance, if we analyze group membership, we can in just a few clicks see that there are currently 34,000 group members. We also know that membership is up 41.6% from 24,000 last year. The figures also show that in the month of September alone, there were 54,000 unique logins via the Hopkins Groups website and 19,000 mobile logins.
The stats can also get a lot more granular than this, and over time there will be more data to slice and dice. These figures help monitor and assess how student engagement has evolved since launching CampusGroups and the Hopkins Groups Portal. They also help narrow in on what is going well or not so well and adjust things accordingly.
According to Calvin, “in terms of platform rollout and adoption university wide, we are in a good place”. Homewood served as the lead and now other schools or community hubs are replicating the process. “The trickle-down strategy has been pretty effective for us”, he added.
Six Community Hubs have customized their homepages and the remaining three are in the process of doing their branding. Reportedly, the next step in the implementation is to have quarterly meetings between hubs and targeted training.
“We wanted an engagement platform that could grow as we grow and did not expect adoption to happen overnight. We are fine doing things one step at a time”, Calvin said.
JHU created its own training course for administrators. CampusGroups University, the platform’s official training course, will also soon be rolled out campus wide.
To stimulate further platform adoption, “we are in the process of making small videos on specific features for students. These include surveys, forms, and elections. The principal aim is to demonstrate how CampusGroups can truly serve as their one-stop-shop” Calvin said.
So far, the feedback on the platform has reportedly been overwhelmingly positive. “The system does everything students need it to do and so they are in it a lot” Calvin said. “We recently held a couple of surveys and 80% of respondents said they were happy with the system and functionality”, he added.
