redrover » Find Your People

"Find Your People" is the slogan for Red Rover 1.0.

Getting connected is the hope and promise of college orientation. Getting connected socially - feeling like you are not alone - is a first and very important step to college success. Research supports this assertion. Red Rover is orientation software.

"Find Your People" is the Red Rover promise to the user. After investing a small amount of time tagging themselves, Red Rover will show the student what groups their people hang out in.

Why groups? What about individuals?
Recently someone tried to friend me on Facebook. I didn't recognize the name so I asked how we knew each other. He replied, "Well, we don't, but we seem to be a part of some of the same groups on Facebook. I am a humanist and I like to work out." I thought this was a very strange approach. Strange enough so that I hit "Deny". Making new friends one on one is almost always situational and, unfortunately, "Let's be friends" gets weird after third grade. Red Rover can easily show a student other individuals who are similar, but if the student were to act on that info, they would be in the weird position of my humanist. That's not helpful.

Instead, we recommend existing groups and their members. If they don't find matches there, we give them the ability to create their own groups. It is less awkward socially to say to someone, "I saw that you liked soccer so I'm inviting you to be a part of the pick up soccer game group and join us on Saturday afternoons." than to say "I saw that you liked soccer, let's hang out and kick the ball around." Perhaps users will choose this second option, and perhaps it will work for them, but Red Rover will emphasize the easier clumping nature of socializing.

As an adult, imagine moving to a new city, say New York. You would want to make friends. Work would be a start, and then you want to branch out. You would want to "meet your people". If you could go to a site that showed you where your people hung out, what clubs, restaurants, bookstores, bars, etc. this would be really useful and you would probably go give a few of these a try. If, instead, the website gave you 15 names out of the phone book that matched you, you might be a little intimidated to make a move.

Prime Use Case for 1.0:
1. User clicks on their school link.
2. User is promised "Meet Your People" on the first page they see, they get excited
3. User fills out profile and tags self
4. User is recommended groups matching their tags.
5. User checks out a few groups, sees the info, sees smiling faces who have joined
6. User then joins a few groups
7. User clicks on their own tags, i.e. "ping-pong" sees there are many people who have ping-pong, but no groups
8. User creates ping pong group.
9. Other "ping-pong" tagged folks are notified of the new group, and can join.
10. They all see their fellow ping pongers and can coordinate times via facebook
11. User can also go to their schools tag cloud, see a new tag that they didn't think to put on their profile and add the tag and repeat steps 7-10.