You heard about Red Rover and want to give it a go. This wiki is here to help.

A quick recap: Red Rover adds capability to your orientation for free. It does not replace what you are currently doing, it makes your efforts better. Red Rover acts as an always on virtual group fair, giving customized group recommendations to incoming (or current) students. Students express interest in groups and the individual group leaders take it from there. The goal is to meet students online, where they hang out, months before school starts and connect them around positive topics. Research shows connecting and involving students is a good idea.

Red Rover is designed to be simple for everyone to use. Setting up your school takes approximately 2 hours total, broken up into a few 20 minute chunks of time.

Red Rover is a public system that contains description words of the students and the groups that they have joined on campus. The only personal information Red Rover contains is an email and telephone number for each student. Only the school's Red Rover admin and the group leaders of joined groups can see the email and phone number of the student.

In the future, Red Rover will do even more to help increase engagement in education through social integration, matching, filtered communication, and recommendation.

To set up your institution on Red Rover, start here:

Question Number 1.

You get it. You are excited. Do you need to get anyone else to agree to add this system to your orientation?

If Yes, head on over to our explaining Red Rover to Stakeholders section here.

If No, let's get started with three easy steps:

STEP 1 - SET UP YOUR PERSONAL ACCOUNT

a) Find Your School's Web Address

There's a 90% chance your school is already set up with a network and ready to go. To find it, type in your school website address and add ".redroverhq.com" in place of ".edu" and drop the "www." at the beginning.

For example, If your institutions web address is www.ecu.edu, then your Red Rover site is probably at http://ecu.redroverhq.com just waiting for you.

If your school is part of a network of schools, i.e. CUNY or SUNY, and your web address is something like http://qc.cuny.edu, then you would drop the extra period and your Red Rover web address would be http://qccuny.redroverhq.com.

If it says "no institution" at your web address, send us an e-mail and we will set you up right away.

b) Sign up your profile and fill in basic institution information

Sign yourself up as the admin. (Admin, throughout this wiki, means the person capable of editing/managing Red Rover for your school. There can be more than one admin - empowering others is a good idea.) The first person to sign up for an institution within Red Rover becomes the admin automatically. If the wrong person is currently an admin at your school, just email us, and we'll fix it.

STEP 2 - INVITE GROUP LEADERS

Once you've set up your personal profile, the next step is to import the official student groups that exist on your campus into Red Rover. Here's a quick video explaining the process and then below is a step-by-step guide.

Red Rover Admin Setup Step 2 - Excel Upload from Swift Kick on Vimeo.

To start, you need to use a CSV Excel file. You can download the template .csv file here. Or you can find it by clicking on "Admin" and then the "Imports" tab.

IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT IMPORTING:

When you upload your groups, you will get a report of your upload and an invite email will automatically go out to the group leaders.

REPORT:

GROUP LEADER INVITE EMAIL:

To keep it simple, all group leaders and advisors have the same privileges and the same starting title "group leader". Once in, a user can change his/her title to "Advisor" or "President", "Grand Poobah" whatever.

When adding multiple people to the same group as leaders, simply add their name and email as separate columns along the same row. The "Group Description" column is optional and you can leave it blank. So it looks like this:

You can upload as many times as you want. So feel free to upload in multiple batches. If you use the same group name, it will not create a double listing but rather it will attach new leaders to the current groups.

Once you upload all of your groups, you will want to send out a personal email explaining Red Rover and why they are getting an invitation to join. It's also great to follow up with the group leaders 2 days later and 1 week later to make sure you get as many group leaders in as possible. Here are some sample texts for you to use.

RIGHT AWAY - Send an email to all the group leaders that were uploaded in the excel doc. Explain to them what Red Rover is and how they will benefit from setting up their groups page.

Sample Text for RIGHT AWAY -

I wanted to give everyone a heads up that we are using a new tool called Red Rover to help us make our orientation more effective and to help your job of recruiting new members automatic and efficient. Red Rover also integrates with Facebook as a Facebook application that places a badge on your profile to show off the school logo and the clubs/organizations you are a part of on campus.

The sign up is really easy and fast. First you should shortly be getting an invite email from me via Red Rover very soon. If you don't get the invite email, just email me back and let me know. In the email, click on the link to go to your sign up page. Then fill out your personal information. Then fill out your group information. That's it, you're done!

Once we have at least 70% of the group pages filled out, we will start inviting in regular students to fill out their profiles. As they fill out their profiles, they will be recommended groups such as yours. You will then be notified and have the chance to follow up with them via email, phone, or Facebook/Myspace.

Again the idea is to make your hard work of recruiting automatic so you can focus on the other parts of your club/organization. So look for the invite email.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. Thanks!

2 DAYS LATER - Check the admin stats dashboard to see which group leaders and groups are still pending and click "Send Reminder Email to Pending Leaders" under Admin > Users. The link will automatically grab all the pending group leaders in the system and open you your email client (Outlook etc) and give you a template email to send out.

Sample Text for 2 DAYS LATER -

Two days ago you should have received an invite email for a new tool we are using called Red Rover. Red Rover helps us make our orientation more effective and to help your job of recruiting new members automatic and efficient. Red Rover also integrates with Facebook as a Facebook application that places a badge on your profile to show off the school logo and the clubs/organizations you are a part of on campus.

I noticed you have yet had the chance to fill out your profile. It only takes about 10 minutes to set up so here is a quick friendly reminder.

If you didn't receive the invite email, go to (ENTER SCHOOL RED ROVER URL) and sign up. It will recognized you as a group leader.

We are excited to start using Red Rover, so the sooner you can fill out your profile, the better.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. Thanks!

1 WEEK LATER - Check the stats and send out one more email, or call the remaining group leaders needed to get above the 60% completion mark.

Sample Text for 1 WEEK LATER -

One week ago you should have received an invite email for a new tool we are using called Red Rover. Red Rover helps us make our orientation more effective and to help your job of recruiting new members automatic and efficient. Red Rover also integrates with Facebook as a Facebook application that places a badge on your profile to show off the school logo and the clubs/organizations you are a part of on campus.

I noticed you have yet had the chance to fill out your profile. It only takes about 10 minutes to set up so here is a quick friendly reminder.

If you didn't receive the invite email, go to (ENTER SCHOOL RED ROVER URL) and sign up. It will recognized you as a group leader.

This is your last chance to get in before we start inviting regular students to fill out their profiles. If your group page is not filled out, then it can't be recommended to any students. So obviously Red Rover will be a big benefit to your group. Take a quick 10 minutes now to fill out your profile.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. Thanks!

STEP 3 - INVITE REGULAR STUDENTS

Getting students to fill out the Red Rover profile.

Once at least 70% of the groups have tags attached to them (either from the leaders, or from being matched with similar groups at other schools) it is time to bring in the regular students. This can happen at any point, but it's good to start the process when the students are excited.

In short, use multiple methods. Most of these are free. We've listed a few ideas to get you started and we will share other ideas schools come up with.

VIA FACEBOOK -

Almost every college has a "XYZ College Class of 2012" group on Facebook.

These groups are a powerful and effective way to connect with your incoming students through a communication channel they prefer. A challenge is that most of the groups are managed by fellow incoming classmates and have no official relationship with the institution.

Here is a step by step guide on how to best connect with these groups:

1) Find your school's class of 2012 on Facebook. ( video help )
2) Locate the group's Admin. ( picture help )
3) Send them a Facebook message empowering them to help you with orientation.

Sample Message:

Thanks for setting up this group! It's a great way to help people meet each other and you helped make it happen : )

The challenge with the Facebook groups is that wall postings are a hard way to find people that have the same interest. To make this easier, will you help us announce a [insert school name] application that works with Facebook to help people find people like them here at school? Just use the group It will help find student groups, and individuals with shared interests.

Could you please let people know that it's a cool app to help "find your people" and it's way more useful than Pirates vs. Ninjas. You can find it by going here http:[yoururl].redroverhq.com

Thanks so much! And, if you are interested in being a student leader, send me a message! We would love to have more leaders that can use the tools to help build our community!

IMPORTANT NOTE: The group administrator can only message the whole 2012 group if there are less than 1200 people in that group. If there are more than 1200 the best that can be done with the group is posting of the video and putting up the link on the message board.

VIA EMAIL -

If you have access to the students' email, now is a great time. Freshmen still check their email early on.

An example email:

Dear Incoming Student,

One of the most exciting parts of coming to college is meeting new people. We want to help make it easy.

We found a simple website called Red Rover (with a Facebook application if you like) that allows you to describe yourself. The site then recommends groups here on campus and shows you what you have in common with people in your major or your Residence Hall.

You can sign up in a couple of minutes at:

http:[YOURSCHOOL].redroverhq.com

If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

I look forward to meeting you!

P.S. This website extends Facebook and makes it easy to find groups and people in ways that Facebook does not. This website is not controlled by the school, we are letting you know about it because we think it will be fun and helpful.

VIA HANDOUT -

Doing an in person orientation? How 'bout an old school hand out?

We have one for you, just click here to download the .pdf.

Here's what it looks like:

RRpic.001.jpg