26 Tips for Hosting a Successful & Engaging Virtual Student Orientation
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Connect Your Virtual Community! Whether campus life will be in-person, virtual or blended this fall, administrators in charge of welcoming their newest students are charged with a unique challenge in adapting in-person programming and resources into an engaging online format. The stakes are high, too. Welcome Week is typically the first opportunity to build relationships and introduce new students to the culture and traditions of your campus.
With this new challenge, though, comes an enormous opportunity to elevate your orientation programming with virtual components that are accessible, engaging and sustainable over the entire onboarding process. With some creativity, innovation and helpful technologies, your virtual orientation can become a truly immersive and enriching experience for your campus community!
Inspired by lessons learned from a challenging year, we welcome you to check out our list of fun, interactive and helpful virtual orientation ideas to warmly welcome your incoming students and guide them along as they begin their college career!
1. Introduce Faculty and Departmental Figures
Providing a strong introduction and promoting access to key faculty members helps acclimate virtual learners into their online community and support network. Film warm, welcome videos to share in your email outreach, orientation website, and guided checklists, and set up departmental meet & greets to show students that their professors are approachable and caring. Encouraging students to engage with faculty will help them feel comfortable when they need to reach out for help or take advantage of office hours.
create a one stop shop: Set up a warm, welcoming and engaging virtual orientation and transition experience for your students, with everything they need in one place
2. Design Your Orientation Website
To ensure a great onboarding experience, make sure all program information is available in one centralized, accessible location. Share key orientation details at a glance, a welcome video, campus tour, FAQs, and list programs and schedules in your orientation agenda. Sharing the agenda beforehand allows students to know exactly what they can expect during their orientation experience and creates a welcoming, supportive environment for students who may be feeling anxious as they enter college in uncertain times.
With CampusGroups, Your student orientation mobile app allows you to create a curated, customizable welcome experience, online or on campus
3. Create Your Orientation Mobile App
Most students are savvy with the latest tech and are never without their smartphones. Design an orientation mobile app for attendees to access the agenda, directory, videos, register to events online, access forms, campus maps, COVID information and other key resources on the go. Send regular and personalized notifications to all or a subset of your new students to improve engagement in your virtual orientation app.
Utilize interactive tools such as surveys, live polls, chat, activity feed for admitted and incoming students to communicate and ask questions, guided tracks & checklists, web views linking to other campus technologies, and more! With virtual engagement tools like CampusGroups, you can also personalize learning for specific populations and track student progress, with all of your engagement data tracked and accessible in real-time.
One of the best attributes of a virtual platform is that when you need to change something (e.g., move a checklist, change a time or place or zoom link), you can do this very quickly. Lisa Brandes, Asst. Dean for Graduate Student Affairs & Director, McDougal Graduate Student Life, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Yale University, advises that with the flexibility of CampusGroups’ virtual orientation tool, “you could do this really easily, and then you could focus on interactions with students and not on the logistics, which was really relieving to anyone overseeing an orientation.”
“CampusGroups Virtual Orientation app was really exciting and different for us, and it was an amazing way to really be able to engage students from afar and still expose them to Mercy College and all that Mercy has to offer, all of the resources and the connections they can make.”
4. Centralize Resources for Easy Access
Incoming students have loads of questions! Help them to access information on advising, housing, financial aid, dining, parking, academic policies, procedures and other campus resources. The amount of content can be overwhelming, so centralizing this critical information allows students and their families to review at their convenience and as many times as needed.
Offering recorded sessions, outline requirements, FAQs, tips and checklists also replaces the need for staff to share the same information over and over at multiple sessions. Advisors and staff are able to engage in meaningful conversations during info sessions instead of repeating themselves, and with an online orientation tool like CampusGroups, you are able to customize the experience and share specific information at designated times when students need it.
5. Start Engaging & Onboarding Early
Rather than limiting orientation to a few days, moving to or supplementing with a virtual orientation allows you to facilitate a sustainable engagement tool for the entire onboarding process, not just for orientation week.
Seamlessly bring in newly admitted students into an an admitted student group (where they can start getting information, getting connected, finding roommates), continue to engage those who commited to your university and various schools/programs and as they transition into onboarding, orientation and beyond. You are able to start engaging as soon as a student is admitted and stretch out your programming and outreach efforts over many months.
“You can use CampusGroups in admissions and post-admit virtual visit time, for new student and transition processes, to build community and connections, you can use in that pre-arrival (welcome week model). You can use it during all these different parts of your transition process and onboarding.”
6. Measure Success, Satisfaction and Needs
Tracking how students feel about your orientation programming and being in this virtual world is a critical need and opportunity to adjust and optimize on the fly. Send out surveys after every event and learn whether students enjoyed and felt welcome and included. Make sure to track needs by asking students what they felt was missing from the virtual orientation experience or what didn’t go well in their opinion. Their experience and ideas may inspire exciting enhancements for your future programming!
7. Offer a Mix of Live and On-Demand Programming
Build your event schedule and determine which sessions will be in-person, virtual or hybrid to accommodate both your Roomies and Zoomies, as well as which events should be mandatory. If your orientation includes on-campus programming, hosting small, in-person events can be a safe and more interactive alternative to the traditional large 400-500 person auditorium model.
Live virtual sessions create an exciting and shared experience. Students can comment live in the chat and respond to each other, ask questions, and feel connected to their classmates from afar. You can also measure program effectiveness by tracking attendance at all your orientation events, sessions and programs and allowing students to self check-in to virtual events and trainings, follow up with automatic feedback requests, and incentivize attendance or checklist requirements. You can track engagement by seeing who is coming to your events and finding out what they thought of them.
On the other hand, on-demand programming is far more flexible and convenient for students to self-pace and fit into their schedules or go back and review as many times as needed. It’s a good idea to offer a mix of both!
Have your orientation leaders work events, whether it’s learning about aspects of student life or hosting a trivia night. Sharing their input and insights at different live session topics provides an important student perspective to which new students can relate.
8. Share Short Welcome Videos from Different Perspectives
Your virtual orientation should be all about welcoming students, and a great way for university leaders to address new students is via pre-recorded welcome videos or live broadcast videos - ideally a combination of both. Film and share lively video content from student life, library, res life, academic advising, orientation leaders, faculty members, offices of accessibility, inclusion, recreation and more, and create lively content that mirrors the excitement and energy of an in-person welcome!
Utilize technology to make viewing specific videos required, holding students accountable by tracking all of your digital content - are students accessing files they are instructed to read, links, or brochures, in addition to videos? Software such as CampusGroups Tracks and Checklists are very effective tools to track who completed mandatory tasks such as watching a video completely and follow up with a quiz or reflection piece to assess students’ knowledge and learning outcomes. This is also a great way to reward students who complete all requirements!
Accessing your online orientation metrics in real time also means you can adjust your programming when something is working well, or optimize areas in need of improvement at any time during the orientation process.
Guide your incoming students through to-do lists and pathways to provide a more intentional engagement and learning experience
9. Guide Students on a Pre-Arrival Path
Provide new students with tools and guidance well before they set foot on campus! Create an onboarding checklist of requirements of tasks they need to complete such as asynchronous training, videos, and attending or checking into live events. Create a pre-orientation survey for different student populations to hear student perceptions and needs, and follow up with a post-orientation feedback survey to see how the group has shifted.
Do they feel prepared to do X? Did they feel welcome, that they belonged? Did they feel they had the tools they need to succeed? Did they enjoy speakers at events or find a particular office engaging? You want to get that feedback! See the shift in their level of information, satisfaction and engagement as a group.
10. Create a Guided Engagement Program
Guide students along customizable, fun and self-paced paths without overwhelming them: Create a checklist of requirements and methods of accountability (such as quizzes, reflections or other pre-work). Set tasks: attend the president’s welcome event, register for specific advising blocks and sessions, fill out a form, watch a video (make it trackable to see who did or didn’t watch it), or access required presentations and documentation.
Tracks & Checklists are a great way to track engagement and learning and ensure that students are accessing and acquiring all of the information and resources they need during online orientation. Students can follow their progress and meet key milestones, and administrators are able to identify and follow up with students who don’t complete all of their set tasks, or reward students who do.
11. Host a Resource Fair
Leverage technology to design an interactive virtual campus resources fair to help acquaint your new students with critical university and community information. Invite different departments to host virtual booths or tables, allowing students to browse and discover all about how each resource serves them: transit, dining, parking, registrar, campus ministry, career center, local tourism and shopping and more.
12. Gamify Learning & Networking
Make knowledge acquisition more fun by gamifying onboarding tasks! As all orientation leaders know, some aspects of orientation can be a little less exciting than others, but gamification can turn required learning (such as reading about academic expectations or rules of conduct in a dry checklist) into fun and engaging activities to make learning about campus life exciting and motivating for incoming students to become active participants! Introduce digital incentives for participation by allowing students to earn points and badges to level up on an activity leaderboard.
Students (and staff) will engage more with a task if it’s interactive and entertaining. Make it a competition to add a sense of urgency: The first 20 students to complete an assigned checklist of tasks wins a $20 Amazon gift card! For an added social component, host Summer Trivia Nights, where students gather together for a fun game in which all trivia questions relate to information students learned about in their checklists of requirements. Prizes for the winners ensure your incoming students will play to win!
13. Gather Valuable Feedback at Every Step
Request participant feedback throughout orientation to assess your program outcomes with digital tools like surveys, polls, reflections and forms. Collect insightful feedback by asking students about their experiences during orientation, add a poll question to your mobile app menu, or set up a quick survey or online form to collect quantitative feedback after every event to hear what worked and what didn’t, what they’re thinking and doing. Virtual platforms like CampusGroups can be enabled to automatically collect comprehensive data and gather direct feedback from event participants.
14. Foster Social Connections
Orientation should offer new students myriad opportunities to start building connections and forming friendships, even in a virtual setting. For admitted students, set up a gathertown virtual reality game, randomly assign small group lunch chats or pair students based on academic, personal interests, or geography. Host meet & greets, welcome mixers (and make them mandatory) and offer a space for students to ask questions.
Create time for students to chat with orientation leaders outside of structured programming. Another fun way to help students get to know each other in a casual setting is to offer Friday Night Hangouts on Zoom or your virtual lounge to replicate in-person peer to peer mentoring - a great way to facilitate new connections without staff in the “room”. Be sure to encourage student leaders to reach out to quiet students who will appreciate being included, too!
Making sure your orientation leaders and staff become confident utilizing your online orientation tools is key to successfully engaging incoming students, whether in-person or remote
15. Provide Training for Your Frontline Staff, Faculty & Student Leaders
Offer early and ongoing instruction on how to engage with and utilize virtual programming to ensure everyone feels comfortable using your online orientation tools. Provide your faculty, staff and student leaders with the training they need to manage technology solutions before their sessions. To help them get acquainted with orientation tools, record tutorial videos on facilitating virtual sessions, conduct online trainings, and provide educational content and documentation they can reference any time. Develop a knowledge base to be able to answer any questions that arise, and make it easily accessible to staff and student leaders.
16. Develop Opportunities for Student Leaders to Connect with Their Assigned Orientation Groups Virtually
Start with small groups. When creating remote groups, consider asking for time zones of where students will be during the program (which may not be their current home address) to help assign groups for orientation sessions. Keeping sessions short, simple and to the point, but also packed with engagement, is key! (Hot tip: With CampusGroups, you can pre-create group chats based on cohorts, geography, interests or other categories for students to easily meet and connect with their peers!)
Leverage your Current Students! Your orientation leaders are filled with life and energy and very excited to engage with incoming students, so including them is crucial to the success of completing the orientation online and enhancing the overall liveliness of your virtual onboarding experience! Develop opportunities for your orientation leaders to connect with their group virtually over the summer, to say hello, answer questions and start making connections with some knowledgeable and welcoming faces they will know when they arrive on campus.
If you have a virtual Feed to facilitate conversations, have orientation leaders go into your platform and check daily what’s being posted, responding to students and engaging them purposefully so no one feels alone, and everyone feels heard. (Fact: Incoming students feel more comfortable asking lots of questions to current students that they may not ask a staff or faculty member.)
Pair fun activities such as hosting an online icebreaker along with an ice cream social or pizza night, and invite attendees to bring their favorite frozen treat or pie, separate into breakout groups and have your orientation leaders start conversations with icebreaker questions. For larger groups, virtual team trivia can accommodate hundreds of participants and utilize customizable topics to personalize the experience for your unique population.
Engage incoming students virtually with a virtual lounge space to relax and hang out in a casual, unstructured setting
17. Host a Virtual Lounge to Encourage Communication
Beyond formal events and structured discussions, sometimes students just need a break, so creating opportunities to simply connect with each other is a great idea! Set up a Virtual Lounge to facilitate casual communication among your campus community members. Encourage students to connect with staff, orientation leaders, and other new students, by offering a place for students to hang out, talk to each other, and ask questions of staff and upperclassmen who are eager to share their knowledge with new students.
Carving out time for students to chat with orientation leaders outside of standard welcome week events mimics some of the most beneficial in-person encounters of traditional orientation. The more interactive your orientation programming is, the more students will engage and participate actively!
CampusGroups Virtual Lounge offers your community a virtual room with the energy and buzz of an in-person networking experience, where people can jump in and join different conversations to share ideas and discuss specific topics at a variety of tables.
There is a such thing as too much videoconferencing, and Chat is a great alternative tool! Offer an ongoing chat hosted by staff (be sure to include their faces!) Any interactivity you can encourage to help students get to know each other and ask questions in a safe and secure environment will help them to feel included and supported!
18. Consider Ways to Engage Families
Parents are a very important part of the campus community and an individual student’s success. Whether your institution will be completely virtual or blended this fall, many students and their families will benefit from guidance on how to support their students in virtual settings. Families may be very actively involved in their loved ones’ transition to campus life, academically, emotionally, and also with practical needs such as technology.
Ensure that video content and program materials are accessible and inclusive for families, and share information about mental health counseling, tutoring, academic advising and other services offered by your institution to help students adjust to life on campus. Consider offering webinars on online learning, at-home study habits, and identifying and intervening when a student shows signs of struggling academically, mentally, or socially.
19. Adapt Traditions to Engaging Digital Format
A virtual orientation doesn’t mean sacrificing the unique traditions that make new students feel welcome and excited to become part of the campus community. Build camaraderie and help students become familiar with the history, architecture and culture of your institution by getting creative and innovative in adapting your traditions to an engaging format! Does your school host an annual bonfire? How about a virtual campfire event where students make s’mores together, sing along to live music, and hear stories about your campus from staff and student leaders?
20. Help Students Discover Ways to Get Involved
Introduce the various student communities, clubs, and organizations on campus and instruct students on the importance of co-curricular involvement to their success, academically and professionally. Teach students how to browse, discover and join a student organization, and encourage them to explore and get involved! (Pick One! campaigns challenge new students to find and join at least one organization on campus.)
A great way to help students discover and join groups, even remotely, is hosting a virtual involvement fair. Student groups and campus departments can host their own customizable booths for attendees to actively learn more about their organization!
Be sure to connect students with your university’s campus-wide calendar and social media channels to acquaint them with campus-wide activities, too.
21. Send a Weekly Email
Incoming students have lots of questions, from virtual registration for classes to navigating financial aid to accessing advising. To help ensure that new students and their families receive crucial information throughout the summer, develop a personalized email outreach plan to help key campus departments connect early with new students and communicate important details regularly, such as latest updates, news, deadline reminders, clickable links to mandatory forms or surveys, videos, and event sign-ups. In these unprecedented times, things can change quickly, but with robust email marketing tools, your students will always have access to the very latest information.
Consistency and cohesiveness are key. With CampusGroups, you can create a reusable email template for all departmental communications to utilize and customize with messaging highlighting their services, events, mandatory forms, deadlines and other news to inform students.
Offering both pre-recorded and live campus tours in your virtual student orientation programming ensures access to everyone
22. Orient Students with Recorded and Live Campus Tours
Campus tours are a staple of in-person orientation and serve as a big part of helping students orient themselves on campus as they learn about the functions and locations of important places such as the library, cafeteria, student center, rec center, and academic and other buildings where they will spend much of their time. Help students get a taste for life on campus and explore the grounds from their laptops through a virtual campus tour! Whether recording a video or facilitating a real time virtual tour, energetic & charismatic student leaders and staff make wonderful guides for incoming students! Stop by key locations and important offices they will utilize when they’re on campus to show students where to access resources, and chat with departmental heads and advisors to answer some FAQs of incoming students. Be sure to include a tour of online resources and platforms that will be key to students’ academic success and overall engagement, too!
Fun ideas: Play Hide the Mascot in your pre-recorded campus tour and offer a prize to students who find every sighting, make it interactive with a virtual scavenger hunt, or share a drone’s eye view of campus and footage from all seasons!
23. Connect Your Res Hall Staff and Communities
Help students meet your staff! Host virtual resident hall or floor gatherings before students move in to start making new friends before arriving, ask questions, and learn more about what life on campus will be like for them. These early connections go a long way in turning anxiety and uncertainty into anticipation and inspiration for move-in day!
24. Send Welcome Packages
Who doesn’t love swag?! Put a smile on students’ faces and make them feel welcome and excited about the start of the new school year by sending them a care package in the mail! Include fun and useful items such as campus-branded t-shirts, masks, stickers, water bottles, notepads, pens, snacks, and coupons and samples from local businesses. Be sure to let them know how to connect to your campus student store for easy access to purchase additional campus-branded merchandise online!
25. Offer Asynchronous Orientation Programming
Not all students are able to join orientation live, so it’s a great idea to enable asynchronous orientation programming and recorded sessions that students can watch later, to increase access for students and their families.
To help meet the needs of all learners and create an inclusive experience that is welcoming to everyone, make presentations, captioned videos, contact lists, documentation and resources from across campus available for download. Everyone should be able to access concise viewable information. A CampusGroups online orientation platform serves a multitude of audiences - students, parents, academic advisors and more - and keeps students engaged prior to arriving on campus.
26. Host a Kick Off Event!
Engage incoming students and orientation leaders virtually with a fun, festive chance to meet fellow classmates and make some new connections with the people with whom they’ll be spending the next four years! Get started with a short welcome from administrators and then utilize breakout rooms to mimic small groups or tables hosted by orientation leaders. Play icebreakers and get to know classmates before bringing everyone back together for food, fun, music and movement! Encourage everyone to wear school colors or their favorite campus gear!
Ready to get started customizing your curated welcome experience? Designing an effective online orientation strategy will help your students build relationships with their peers before the fall or spring semester starts, learn all about campus services and academic expectations, and develop a strong bond with their new home and community! While there’s no replacing the in-person orientation experience, many institutions will continue to benefit enormously from the complementary and long-term programming of a virtual orientation.
Did we miss a great virtual orientation idea or tip? We invite you to share in the comments what has worked well for you on your campus!
Interested in learning more about CampusGroups? Please contact us for a demo to see how our solution can help keep your community connected and engaged!
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