redrover » Pitching Red Rover

Red Rover can gain adoption in a college without official college endorsement, but help from above does make things easier. When pitching Red Rover to your college, here are some important suggestions:

Start with the story behind Red Rover and what problem it is solving:
- Countless students drop out of college or stay completely uninvolved throughout their entire 4 years.
- Connecting with others students can change their entire college experience and make it more meaningful, relevant, and effective.
- Right now students who share the same interests have to rely primarily on chance to find one another and the opportunities out there.
- Red Rover makes it easy to find and connect with students and student groups on campus.

Explain what Red Rover is:
- Red Rover is a web tool that uses a tagging system to enable students to:

Get recommendations for campus groups that match their interests.
See who shares their interests in their majors, grade levels, dorms, and classes.
Start a campus group and recruit interested students through an automatic recommendation system.

- Red Rover allows Student Activities and Student Advisement professionals to:

Ass the engagement of students and student groups on campus using a simple statistics tool.
Provide instant access to opportunities and connections to first year students.
Customize the kinds of groups and tags that will be allowed on the institution's Red Rover account to reflect its unique set of values.

Explain what is needed from the institution (the more components the school takes on, the more effective RR will be):
- Select a Red Rover administrator or multiple administrators (preferably a student and a Student Activities coordinator).
- Send out two emails, one to student leaders and one to regular students (Red Rover can provide these).
- Use Red Rover in conjunction with Freshman Orientation and your First Year Experience program.
- Include student/faculty/staff/alumni representatives in project planning and implementation to continue increasing user adoption.

If there's time, do a demonstration:
- Show the video: http://www.vimeo.com/1395086
- The student side of Red Rover (no need to show the Leader side since it's pretty much identical to a regular Student Account).
- Admin side of Red Rover.

Additional benefits:
- Targeted marketing for events: a feature will soon be added that will allow users to send a message to all individuals who have a particular tag or tags (e.g. an invitation to the school team's basketball game sent to all student with the tag "basketball.")
- Target resources on most popular interests: by seeing which tags are most popular, an institution can determine where the students' interests lie and offer resources to meet those interests.
- Year long orientation: students can start using Red Rover at any time and can continuously discover opportunities and connections on campus.
- RR integrates with Facebook: so it is easier for students to use and access, tends to spread virally, and will soon to enable targeted messaging through Facebook.

Responses to common concerns:
- The current features and all upgrades of Red Rover will be free. Additional features may be at an additional charge.
- The system is a free hosted solution and does not contain sensitive information.
- Participation of faculty and students is voluntary.
- Red Rover does not sell students email information.
- Red Rover is effective with only half or quarter registration of Students.
- Red Rover is designed for redundant responsibility. A group officer or advisor can edit the group page. Administrators can also edit group pages. If a few student leaders don’t register, their group can still be represented.
- Administrators have access to a recruitment dashboard to quickly see and assist students who need help registering.
- Red Rover provides all technical support free of charge, and the system is very simple to use and requires little to no training.
(Please see the FAQ page for more common information).