redrover » Admin Discussion Oct 8

Dear Red Rover Administrators,

Slowing down from the fall craziness yet? We've spent the last couple of weeks going through data from late August and September, trying to learn as much as possible. We wanted to share our thoughts with you and get your thoughts.

I made a little video for you, because I thought it would be easier with visuals.

Red Rover Video Update to Admins from Kevin Prentiss on Vimeo.

In the video, I referenced the new filter bar feature. If you haven't seen that, check out the quick tour here.

Quick Summary of the Video:

We believe that the focus on joining groups somewhat limited the adoption of the application (to around 10-20% of total enrollment, our goal was 30%). Our current improvement efforts are focused on making the sign up faster and focusing on comparison with others in residence hall, major, etc.

We also feel that "free" keeps the institutional commitment level relatively low, which was fine for the pilot. The application is intended as a engagement pipeline, delivering what's needed at each stage of engagement to help the student increase their connectedness, interest and involvement. To get the students at the lowest stage of engagement will require other departments on campus - specifically Orientation and the First Year Experience.

Red Rover must also become self-sustaining, so we would like to work with you to determine what set of services /features would make a compelling package. What would your institution buy?

Please take a moment to read through the outline below, provided as starting place for the conversation. Then just click the "edit this page" button up top and leave your thoughts for everyone to read at the bottom of this page. As with everything Red Rover, the conversation is out in the open so that everyone can learn.

Package One

Overall Goals: Increase Engagement and Community by increasing connections between students in student groups, major, year, and classes. Provide assessment dashboard for Student Affairs showing student activity (group affiliation, action on site) including list of under engaged students to focus support services. Create a public student identity profile that various departments can use to increase the relevancy of their communications.

Goal: 50% Enrollment in Red Rover System by class starting in Fall 2009.

Methods:

Orientation process. Embedding into online orientation. Ambassador Encouragement. Use of Facebook group to create one large School group with Red Rover links embedded.

First Year Experience. 6-8 hours of curriculum delivered with explanation videos for instructors. Included in this will be signing up for Red Rover and perhaps Path101 for career services.

Signing up Student Leaders (By activities department or student affairs). They will recruit the other 4-5's on campus.

Goal: Provide live assessment of community joining, grouping, and where possible, interaction. See who is involved and who is not - providing student segmentation along the lines of the 0-5 engagement pipeline.

Method:Red Rover admin will have an advanced dashboard showing involvement statistics (likely benchmarked against performance numbers from similar institution.) First year students will be given blogs to write and these will imported where possible.

Goal: Increase effectiveness of communication.

Method: Departments will be able to filter students by tag, major or year. Then they can click on students and send a Facebook message (rather than email). By making it easy to sort students, relevancy of communication will increase.

Goal: Support Stakeholders at the institution in implementing Red Rover.

Method: Schools will have a dedicated support phone number as well as web based video tutorials on all necessary actions.

Price:

We would deliver the above package for

If enrollment is less than 5,000: $4,000 annually ($500 of which would be spent on Facebook ads)

If enrollment is 5,00- 15,000: $6,000 annually ($800 of which would be spent on Facebook ads)

If enrollment is more than 15,000: $8,000 annually ($1500 of which would be spent on Facebook ads)

Optional Additional Possibilities. (If any of these are exciting to you, we can work to price these out as well.)

In person training. If you think a campus visit is necessary to train ambassadors, orientation folk, or FYE people, a Swift Kick trainer could spend the day for a substantially reduced fee, approximately 40% off.

Advising Dashboard. Individual Advisors would have their own dashboard. They would login, see all of their advisees on a list with green, yellow, or red, based on their involvement. Advisors can help get more data in Red Rover and facilitate introductions to other similar students (based on major, interests, year, etc.) Advisors can choose to connect or communicate in Facebook directly (skipping email which is generally ineffective.)

Text Messaging. Students can add a tag to themselves by texting a word to Red Rover. Student groups could use Red Rover to text message their groups.

Mentoring Connections. This might have to wait for a year of data to accumulate, but the idea would be for the system to automatically recommend mentors based on classes experience or current job. The advisor would facilitate the introduction.

Please Leave Your Comments Below.

With your first name attached, so we can ask follow up questions. Anything goes, honesty is key.

A couple of primer questions to get started:

Is Connectedness, Engagement, with Assessment compelling as a place to start?

We think Student Affairs makes the most sense to head up this initiative. Does that sound right to you?

If you were us, what would you do differently?