Our mission at CampusGroups (CG) is to help campuses achieve more through our all in-one campus portal. Our goal is to build technology solutions that help students connect, engage, and succeed!

We pride ourselves on offering powerful and customizable solutions for the entire student life cycle. Further, we strongly believe in the importance of bringing people together and activating our collective potential. This comes through in how we approach product development.

By working with our partner campuses and analyzing market trends, our team is continually looking to expand, refine, and innovate with our product.

2021 was no exception and an exciting year for the CG team and its partners. Between June and November of last year we launched six new modules.

New CG Modules

The following six modules were developed in response to:

Customer demand.
Market trend analysis.
Homegrown innovation.

1. Report Builder

We want to make sure that our partner campuses have the data they want at their fingertips. Therefore, report customization is key!

Released in September, our new report builder feature allows users to build and save personalized reports. Users can, in one click, select the specific fields they want to appear in the report.

Columns can easily be reordered and filters can be added and edited, creating a fully customizable report for different data sets including:

Users.
Events.
Event Attendance.
Groups.
Members.
Officers.
Involvement Badges.

Developed based on customer demand (thank you George Mason University for helping us in the beta testing!), the new report builder is available to all campuses that have the Reporting & Data Analytics feature.

2. iOS Mobile App Redesign

A campus mobile app is among the most important digital assets to reach students, connect them to co-curricular opportunities and help them meet engagement goals.

Released in July, our new app provides the campus community of our partner schools with a branded, interactive, and customizable mobile experience.

The redesign, which was developed based on our customers’ needs, includes the following features and enhancements:

“Discover” page and filtering, for a personalized experience (including recommended connections and events) based on prior activity and popular events on campus.
Improved groups listing, discovery and filtering options.
New group page and sub-pages.
Events listing, calendar, filtering and “My Events” view.
Revamped event registration page.
New directory, “My Connections” view, and suggested connections section.
New profile page.
Mobile user Onboarding.
Campus Safety page.

3. Custom Left Menu & Community Hubs

At CampusGroups we want to enable our clients to customize the content navigation for every user based on their persona.

As of May, this includes the ability to create a “Custom Left Menu” on the landing page of the campus portal and to provide different sets of users with distinct content by creating “Community Hubs”.

These features, reflected on both the web and mobile platforms, give administrators the opportunity to provide their campuses with:

A unified Mobile App and Desktop experience.
A Customized Left Menu from the Hub Builder.
The possibility to have multiple Community Hubs.
The ability to limit the content for a given Community Hub.

We would like to extend special thanks to our IE University partners who drove the innovation behind the Community Hubs feature! This feature was developed to meet their desire to create separate experiences for their students, faculty, and alumni.

To learn more about how a Campus Portal with multiple Community Hubs could help drive student success on your campus, please read our campus spotlight on Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Launching a Community Hub for each of its nine campuses has reportedly resulted in:

Increased student engagement.
A better user experience.
More granular involvement stats.

4. Custom Home Pages

Did I mention that we love to provide our clients with the ability to customize their user experience and content? :)

Personalization is a growing market trend. It also meshes well with our mission of helping campuses achieve more through powerful and customizable solutions. To this end, we released the Custom Home Pages module in June.

This feature gives our partner campuses the ability to tailor the content of the home page to meet their needs specifically, reflecting their branding and culture. Customization is achieved through:

Content widgets.
Images.
Buttons.
Videos.
Links.
JavaScript embeds.
Other sliders.

All our schools benefited from this new capability in the "Standard" version. Many campuses also chose to implement the "Advanced" version, which includes:

An unlimited number of widgets.
The ability to privatize certain parts of the portal home page, making certain areas only available to certain groups (for example faculty, students, etc.)

For instance, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) home page “Campus Connect” regularly switches out photos and buttons. Their homepage is updated based on the time of year and what’s happening on campus. Recently it featured a button to register for the COVID vaccine and an awesome fish cam.

5. Branded User Onboarding

Along the same lines of the personalization trend, in June, we launched the Branded User Onboarding module.

This module provides a welcoming entry point into the CG platform for new members of the campus community. It also helps builds engagement and connection from day one.

Key features include:

Branded onboarding experience for new and existing students and staff.
Step-by-step series of questions for a custom user experience.
Creation of custom fields and ability to collect associated data (e.g., pronouns, dietary preferences, t-shirt size, career interests).
Ability to have multiple User Onboardings and give customized experiences to different groups of users.

We would like to give a special thank you to IE University for helping us define the specific advancements of our User Onboarding. This has brought the level of customization available through our platform to new heights.

6. Virtual Spaces

We are very excited about one of our latest and homegrown engagement modules- Virtual Spaces.

Launched in June, it offers a 24/7 virtual meeting space that is completely integrated to the CG platform. Virtual Spaces can be configured with multiple spaces of different sizes to facilitate one-on-one meetings as well as larger group settings.

People can jump in, hop around, and join different conversations (over live video and chat) to share ideas and discuss specific topics at a variety of tables. This enables both students and staff to meet spontaneously, offering the energy and buzz of in-person networking.

The feature can be used to host a variety of events including:

Networking sessions.
Conferences.
Breakouts.
Study groups.
Coffee chats.
Office hours.
Mentoring touch-points.
Casual hangouts.

Each space can easily be configured based on the number of seats to mirror existing campus real estate or create new spaces online.

In March, we launched Virtual Spaces at “Rendez-Vous”, our first virtual conference. Bringing together over 200 attendees from seven countries and 90 of our campus partners, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Internally, we have been using this feature a lot for team meetings and touch-points, including most recently our company wide virtual Christmas party!

CG is proud to support and collaborate with the world’s best universities and colleges. It is through these partnerships that we continue to push the boundaries of our product and innovate.

Thank you to all the attendees of our Summer Launch Preview Webinar for all the great suggestions and feedback. You help our product reach new heights.

Stay tuned for 2022, as we have some exciting new things in the pipeline!

Request a demo

Featured