A fun and vibrant campus is at the heart of a memorable college experience. One way to ensure that your students feel connected with the campus community is by organizing a plethora of interesting campus events.
The student affairs team has its task cut out juggling between freshers’ orientation, convocation, alumni meets, workshops, job fairs among other events. The core of every successful campus event is enjoyable student interactions and diligent management of vendors. Thankfully, a little help from technology can not only make lives easier for the event handling committee but also improve the standard of campus events. Without further ado, here are five tech-friendly tips that will raise the bar of campus events:
1. Planning through visuals
In order to ensure that every aspect of the event is executed smoothly on the D-day, the event committee must embrace visual planning. The benefit of using visuals to plan is that it leaves little room for unexpected surprises and misinterpretations of information. There are a plethora of online tools that will help design the map of your event so that you can virtually visualize where every activity/vendor stall will be placed before the event commences at the actual venue.
2. Connecting effectively with vendors
A campus event needs to cater to the different needs of every student. Thus, a variety of vendors ranging from food caterers to retail sellers and service providers are generally a part of any event. Managing the vendors effectively with a clear line of communication is necessary. This can be achieved by using a CRM platform that collects information from the vendors, tracks delivery, generates follow-up reports and establishes an interactive dialogue between the vendors and the organizers.
3. Creating a buzz online
One key parameter for a successful event is great student participation and getting maximum registrations is the first step to ensuring this. Given that today’s generation is always online, the organizing team needs to invest time promoting the event through online channels like the college website, social media & the university’s campus app. Moreover, with tech-advanced apps that leverage smart data integration systems, you can target the event to a select, relevant audience and ensure maximum student involvement. Selling event merchandise like t-shirts, jackets, phone covers, laptop decals, etc. is another great way to build excitement & promote the event.
4. Online registration
The simplest way to make your event eco-friendly and accessible to students is by ditching paper and implementing online registration forms. These registration forms can be easily embedded in the Facebook page or better, the campus app itself. It makes it simpler for the online generation to participate in your event with just a few clicks. The data gathered from these online forms can be fed to smart data management systems to figure out logistics like the number of participants, the interest of participants, their expectations from the event, etc. This data analysis will not only help you to organize the event better by implementing data-driven actions but also help in hosting future events based on the success of its predecessors.
5. Personalized communication with students about future events
At the start of every semester, the student affairs team chalks out most of the events that would take place on the campus. While it is important to inform the students about the campus events in store, there is a need for establishing personalized communication with specific student cohorts to ensure maximum engagement. By integrating the university app with smart data analysis systems, one can send customized and targeted event recommendation alerts to select students on campus.
The incorporation of technology not just ensures scrupulous research, smooth planning and hassle-free execution of campus events, but also enhances the learning experiences and growth opportunities for students by connecting them with the campus community.
