There are two events that are rights of passage for every college student, Orientation and Welcome Week. Entire departments and local businesses spend hours preparing information to give to students so they can start off college empowered and informed. With all the hours being put into this prep, how do you even know if students are getting the message? Yale and Oklahoma University recognized this as a problem and set out to find a way to capture the data.
What They Found
The solution, a Virtual Event Bag! What’s a Virtual Event Bag? I’m glad you asked. Let me explain why these schools chose it and why you should be a pioneer with them!
It is the ideal way to connect students to information, before, during and after your event, whether it be Fall orientation or Welcome Week. Why is that so great? When students gain access, every interaction is tracked for your benefit and the benefit of any business or department involved.
It’s Simple
Why is it simple? It’s a turn-key solution to measuring and understanding what information students are viewing. Information such as a discount for the local coffee shop or where to buy/return books for the school year. With a virtual bag, you will know what they consider relevant, and what they don’t want to waste their time on.
And Easy
We realize that as an institution there are a lot of moving parts to put something like this together and at first all the variables might seem daunting, I assure you it’s not.
Creating the Bag (The Before)
You invite, they build. Departments, local businesses, or student organizations create their placements in four easy steps, reducing your responsibility rate by about 70%, phew.
Getting Students to it (The During)
Email, social media, and website. Every New student has to activate their .edu account at some point, have a nice little invitation waiting in their inbox. You can also post a link to the bag via social media and post it to your website, could we make it any more accessible for millennials?
Knowledge is Power (The After)
It’s all about the data. Anyone who built a placement in your bag will not only get a report on overall bag performance, but they will know what students specifically interacted with them!
Already using an App?
So you were smart, got with the times and have already been using an app for student orientation. We salute you! Did you know that you can include a virtual event bag in your app? It’s incredibly easy.
Move Forward
So consider what you are doing now for orientation. Do you make it easy for departments to have access to new students with insightful reporting? Is it a turn-key solution? Chances are you never realized that missing out on tracking information was truly a problem, but it is, and we can help. Whether you are using an app or handing out stacks of paper like the good ole days, move your students forward this year and use a Virtual Event Bag.
To schedule a time to learn more click here.
Want to learn more about Yale’s experience? Click here.
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