Your campus culture is an imperative part of ensuring the best possible student experience. Creating an enriching campus community fosters emotional and intellectual growth, leading to the best possible student success rates (and ultimately, increased retention rates for your school.) While students should naturally keep their studies their primary focus, it’s also incredibly important for them to develop relationships with other students and have memorable, valuable social experiences to supplement their academic learning.
When hosting events for students, your school needs to accomplish two things: curating a wide array of events that will get various groups of students excited, and making sure the students who’d want to go to each event actually find out about them.
The first part can be tricky, because you need to achieve a balance between purely fun events and events that offer some type of educational value. It’s safe to say that a Beyonce concert in your campus’ stadium will have a higher turnout than a discussion of Russian literature. That being said, there are some students who would be absolutely thrilled to participate in a seminar about Nabokov and Dostoyevsky - the key is just to reach them.
Make sure you’re promoting your school’s events effectively (particularly the more niche ones) by targeting the specific groups of students who would care the most about them.
While some administrator intervention is needed at times, students should be given the independence to run as many of their group’s operations as possible. Allowing students to manage their own groups and clubs not only allows them to grow as leaders and develop critical skills for working on a team later on in life, but saves time for the staff who would otherwise have to be involved on a heavier level.
In order for students to be able to effectively manage their organizations, they need a simple way of doing so using up-to-date technology. When considering how much communication is done online among today’s generation of students, it’s clear that they need some way to conduct their organization’s ‘business’ from a shared online space.
Social media is an incredible tool for keeping students informed and involved with your campus’ happenings, as well as connected to each other. Make sure that your school is staying active on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Use these channels both to spread information and to create an online environment where students can get to know each other. Many times, friendships sparked online quickly evolve into students meeting in real life and becoming great friends in person.
Community by Symplicity is a tool that enables you to do all of the above. You can use it to promote events to targeted groups of students, and students can use it to manage their own organizations and engage in online social networking. Learn more here.