Swift Kick Central

2008 Swift Kick Program Calendar

As we close the door on 2008, here's a look back at who we worked with:

01/02/08 APCA Advisors Institute
01/03/08 APCA Advisors Institute
01/04/08 APCA Advisors Institute
01/04/08 Shepherd U
01/19/08 Potsdam U
01/30/08 Emporia State
02/01/08 U. Of Alaska
02/08/08 Western State College
02/10/08 Wesley College
02/12/08 Boise State
02/15/08 27th Annual FYE Conference
02/16/08 27th Annual FYE Conference
02/17/08 27th Annual FYE Conference
02/18/08 27th Annual FYE Conference
02/19/08 27th Annual FYE Conference
02/23/08 SUNY Cobleskill
02/26/08 U. of Missouri
02/26/08 Lake Forest College
02/27/08 Darton College
02/28/08 Bossier Parish
02/29/08 Baker U.
03/11/08 SUNY Rockland
03/12/08 Hudson Valley CC
03/12/08 APCA Nationals
03/13/08 APCA Nationals
03/14/08 APCA Nationals
03/15/08 APCA Nationals
03/26/08 U of San Diego
03/28/08 APCA Northeast
03/29/08 APCA Northeast
03/30/08 APCA Northeast
04/05/08 SUNY Cobleskill
04/15/08 Everett CC
04/16/08 East Carolina U
04/17/08 U of Washington Tacoma
04/18/08 Big Bend CC
05/02/08 San Antonio College
05/06/08 Snow College
05/07/08 Snow College
05/08/08 Snow College
05/12/08 Texas State San Marcos
05/13/08 Texas State San Marcos
05/14/08 Texas State San Marcos
05/15/08 Texas A&M International
06/03/08 ICCSAA Conference
06/04/08 Dakota Association For College Admissions Conference
06/06/08 Norfolk Navy Base
08/08/08 Army Boss Conference
08/12/08 Xavier University
08/13/08 Weber State University
08/18/08 UW Madison
08/19/08 University of Akron Ohio
08/20/08 San Antonio College
08/21/08 Penn State Lehigh
08/22/08 Utah Valley State
08/23/08 Penn State Erie
08/24/08 Schreiner University
08/28/08 University of Mary
08/30/08 Bridgewater
08/31/08 Graceland University
08/31/08 Rivier College
09/06/08 Shepherd College
09/08/08 Johnson and Wales - Denver
09/10/08 US Navy Norfolk
09/11/08 US Navy Norfolk
09/12/08 Winthrop University
09/13/08 Winthrop University
09/14/08 Winthrop University
09/16/08 Southeastern Louisiana
09/17/08 Georgia Southwestern State
09/19/08 Weber State University
09/20/08 Darton College
09/24/08 Clarkson College
09/25/08 ASGA National Conference
09/26/08 Howard Community College
09/26/08 Fulton-Montgomery
10/02/08 Parkland College
10/03/08 Rock Valley College
10/04/08 Coastal Georgia College
10/07/08 Palm Beach Community College
10/07/08 Reading Area
10/08/08 Lynn University
10/10/08 San Antonio College
10/15/08 Mohawk Valley
10/21/08 Pasco-Hernando Community College
10/25/08 ASGA Chicago Conference
11/08/08 Houston Community College
11/10/08 APCA Iowa Conference
11/11/08 APCA Iowa Conference
11/12/08 APCA Iowa Conference
11/14/08 Lord Fairfax Community College
11/15/08 Lord Fairfax Community College
11/17/08 APCA Verona Conference
11/18/08 APCA Verona Conference
11/19/08 APCA Verona Conference
12/04/08 Baton Rouge Community College


Check out our 2007 Program Calendar
Check out our 2006 Program Calendar

Join Our Team - Hiring an Account Manager for Red Rover

Red Rover is a free online tool for schools to use that improves education by increasing the engagement, effectiveness and relevancy. We are out to change education for the better and looking for someone, maybe you, to join our team.

As Red Rover continually expands to more and more schools, we want to hire a part time Account Manager to be the direct link to the school admins and help schools through the entire setup process. Please review the information below and if it excites you, send us an email to ( tom at redroverhq dot com ). Feel free to forward this message on to anyone else who might be interested.

THIS JOB IS FOR YOU IF:

- You are passionate about improving education
- You have experience with student activities and/or student clubs and orgs
- You know about, or have experience with, student affairs
- You are technically literate with the internet
- You quickly grasp new software
- You are available for 3-4 hours of daily work M-F 9-6
- You are familiar with Facebook
- You have a bigger left hand than right...
- You are personable on the phone and in person
- You quickly solve problems
- You work in an area that allows quiet and uninterrupted phone calls
- You might have customer support experience

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Reviewing the Red Rover adoption pipeline for friction with schools
- Working with schools to overcome friction points in setup process
- Reporting on adoption pipeline to RR team
- Suggesting RR enhancements to improve pipeline effectiveness
- Testing development tickets and coordinating with Program Team
- Cleaning out old development tickets and posting new tickets
- Trouble shooting RR issues with admins / regular users
- Following up on RR Facebook Page issues
- Following up on UserSuggest issues

DETAILS:

You will initially be hired as an independent contractor on a per hour wage or per month stipend. Wage/Stipend will be discussed individually and based on experience and excitement for the job.

Blown Mind

I just watched a Google presentation that seemingly took place in the woods but was streaming live from Scobleizer's cell phone. I, and 20k other people on Twitter, were invited by Scobleizer to watch the presentation live. While it happened I chatted online with a couple hundred folks about the future of the software codes, Ruby on Rails vs. Python, as seen by Google.

Google wants to host Python based applications for free. This is exciting as hosting is not cheap and we budgeted a pile of cash for hosting Red Rover. The problem is we didn't use Python to build Red Rover. It was all done on Ruby, so we are crossing our fingers that Google will work with Ruby next.

I'm done watching for now, but it looks like it's going to go on for a bit more. Everything about the last 10 minutes in front of my lap top is mind blowing.

College Speaker of The Year - 2008

Each year student activities departments from around the country vote for their favorite speaker of the year. Last week, in Atlanta, we were honored as the 2008 College Speaker of the Year. To add to the honor, it's our second year in a row winning the award.

Last year we spoke at 60 schools, went to 15 conferences, and spent around 210 days on the road. In short, we work hard and it's nice to be recognized for the work we do. Thank you to all the advisors, students, schools, staff, administrators, educators, and other folk who supported us in 2007. Stay tuned as we have lots planned for 2008 and it's your input, support, and feedback that allows us to do what we do.

On a few of the Same Pages with HASTAC

Wish I would have read this post before I wrote my last post on Mac DML. (Cathy - RSS feeds would really help.)

Cathy writes:

"Over the next several weeks, we will be posting several overviews or suggestions. Just as we wrote four postings on what we learned from reading all the applications, we have some ideas, in general, about applying for this or any competition. We might also see if any of the judges might wish to share a few insights. And we're talking around about tools where people, if they wish, can upload their own applications and put them out there for the public to respond to and give feedback on. If you have suggestions, send them along and we'll consider them."

I am happy to give the HASTAC bunch the benefit of time and look forward to more thoughts. Even more so to more collaboration.

If they can follow through with some sort of public community / entrant process I will certainly play.

As for tools - Why not just a wiki with links to any project page I want? (Play if you want, tag yourself / your project, HASTAC acts like a node and gets out of the way) Why make it complicated?

Reviewing our 2007 Goals - Looking Forward to 2008

At the beginning of 2007 we created company goals for the coming year.

In 2005 and 2006 we did a similar exercise.  This last year we wanted to create more specific, measurable goals that we could follow up on. 
 

At our company retreat last month, we reviewed the 07 goals. Below is a list of each goal with our one year assessment.

The overall mission of Swift Kick is to increase student engagement. All of our goals work toward that mission.

When we created our 2007 goals, a year ago, we mapped out what we thought was the best route. As the year went on, and new ideas and information came to us, we shifted our strategy and goals accordingly.

One mistake we made was not revisiting the goals list every quarter.  This left us with a bunch of "dead" goals at the end of the year.  These are things we didn't necessarily fail at, we simply decided they were not the right step for us at the time.

The goals process - as it creates a roadmap and focus - is hugely important.  It's also never urgent.  This makes it easy to put off, as we naturally focus on the deadline driven tasks first. 

A big goal for 2008 is to get better at focusing our energy on the right things.  This is a natural progression for any reflective business and much of it is simply trying things and learning about our own strengths and weaknesses.  With that in mind, our review of our 2007 goals:

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

GOAL	REVIEW
SALES:
Training / Speeches:  60 engagements, Avg. Revenue $2600 = $156,000	We were spot on with this goal. We ended up with just over $160K for the year, our actual # of speaking gigs was more like 58 but that is not counting the multi-day trainings. From our initial conversations with successful, established, independent speakers, we were told to expect 5 speeches our first year, 20 our second, and 40 our third.  To hit nearly 60 in our second is a good start.
Technology: 3 Major College Conferences = $40,000	This was a strategic turn.  Working with APCA was a wonderful way for us to explore technology driven community and the implementation of our x+1 relevancy/ engagement ideas. We felt that there was a huge opportunity for conferences to increase their effectiveness using these ideas and tools and APCA agreed and paid us a small amount of money to explore it with them. In Jan of 2007, we thought we could provide a good system and talk to other college conferences (outside of programing, i.e. CFYE and others) and make the same deal.  This would give us the cash flow we needed to build the software connectors between our various systems and automate everything with the hopes of delivering the same solutions to schools. We found out there were many challenges working with conferences, not the least of which was that the more we were genuinely innovative, the greater the strain on the conference.  We tried to implement too much new thinking and methodology all at once.  While the technology worked technically (for the most part), it did not work as well procedurally and the solution was hampered by human integration / comfort zone / change challenges that we did not (silly, I know) expect. One hugely important realization that came out of the APCA work was that email did not work very well for advisors - we never got above a 58% response rate to a survey.  Our goal was the students and they checked email less and less every day. We needed another data collection channel and strategy.  Students preferred Facebook as their communication channel and they had already put much of the relevancy data we needed on their profiles.  So in March, we dropped the idea of working with other conferences (to avoid the change friction) and we began work on Red Rover - the new, straight to schools, x+1 survey, segment, and deliver strategy.
Sponsorships: 2 Sponsors = $25,000	As part of the customized newsletter product that was part of the APCA solution, we felt that an old line news company would appreciate being able to deliver relevant news feeds to taste makers on campuses. We were talking with the USA Today Education division as a possible partner for Swift Kick.  Part of the challenge with committing to relevancy is that we need to have access to content all down the long tail.  A content partner could help with this.  When we dropped the email newsletter as our delivery method, we lost the immediate need for lots of content.   We just let the USA Today partnership conversation slide away. We may kick these conversations back up with the next version of Red Rover, as we get into delivering relevancy filtered RSS feeds.
Info Products: 2 Books = $10,000 in sales	We've been working on a Dance Floor Theory book for a long time.  It's a normal "speaker" thing to write a book and sell it with a speech.  This one was a strategic focus decision.  Red Rover would do what Dance Floor Theory training taught - automatically.  In this case, the software looked more powerful than the book.  So we chose to put off the book.
PRODUCTS:
Deliver a compelling conference product to APCA for nationals in March.	The word 'compelling' is too vague to define if we completed this or not.  This is a good example of a goal that shows we didn't have enough definition of the project.  Our goal should have been to have a better goal.  This definitely would have helped the partnership. The 07 APCA Nationals was the first time we implemented the survey, segment, deliver idea into APCA as part of our year long partnership.   We did some neat things that had never been done before at a programming conference. It was a start, we got better, and in the end finished with a full outline.
Complete 2 book sized information products (hard copy, just to be old skool)	Same as above with the info products
Present Center for the First Year product.	We were accepted to present Red Rover at the 08 conference in San Francisco. The conference was a big success for Red Rover. The presentation was not specifically for the Center, but for the whole conference. At the moment, our plan is to work on adoption and data modeling with Red Rover and then approach the Center itself, perhaps this spring, about our road map moving forward. After the conference experience, we're even more excited about this partnership.  The Center is very high caliber - and great people are involved nationwide.  It will be a joy to work with them.
Deliver a relevant RSS feed newsletter.	We paid 8k for Exact Target as our main tech component in this. We sent out a few newsletters. Exact Target promised the integration with our database would work automatically.  It sort of worked but in a round about, time intensive way.  The combination of low response rates and clunky technology killed this effort. If email worked better as a delivery method (for students too) we would have invested the time and money to make the technology work smoothly.    As it was, it was a complicated solution to a problem that was better served with existing technology that was simply underutilized. It would have been better to spend the 8k to fly to each school and set up an RSS reader for each advisor in person. Because of the chunk of cash spent trying it, this one hurt.  It was an important lesson.
Launch a college activities point system with mesh up presentation layer.	Red Rover 1.0 is the first step.
Launch collaboration workspace where volunteers can organize and work on projects.	We tried several different ways to make this happen. Groups, docs, ghub etc. In testing, we continue to get better. Our solutions right now are our wiki page, The Student Affairs Blog, and soon to be Student Leader Blog.
Camp preparation to launch in 2008	We talked about camps, but no action. We both really want to do this because it's just so dang fun.  It may end up being part of the integrated solution for schools, in which case we just might see a camp like experience in 2008.
1000 Swift Kick generated blogs (4 per week)	Very ambitious of us, especially since we were newbies to the blogging world. We wrote about 150 blogs in 07. That is between the SA and SK blog. We want to step this up. We are getting faster at writing.
FINANCIAL:
Outsource Financial Responsibilities (Taxes, Ledgers, Reports)	Minus the ledgers, majority of the financial work the taxes this year are being done by our fantastic logistics guru, Emma. We are of course not absent from the process, but a lot less time compared to last year.
Company financial reports distributed timely	We did send out the 2006 company financials. But they were sent in June. Having them done faster and more quarterly would be nice. We have the system to do it, which is 70% of the challenge.
Sync all financial tools (Quickbooks, SF)	Still using the same system as last year. Just better at it.
MARKETING:
Establish baseline gig acquisition costs from 2006 reduce acquisition cost by 30%.	We do have a lot of reports through our CRM and through the financials we created for 06 - but this is not one of the reports we generated, so we can't measure year over year how we are doing. The good news is that this information is in our systems, it just needs someone to focus on it for a day or two to generate the right reports.
Create and implement conference process by nationals.	This is another ill defined goal.  How do we know when we have a good process?  This needs to be rewritten in 2008 if it's to mean anything.
Increase total contacts in database to more than 10,000	We stopped collecting student contact info in Fall of 07, so the database grew much slower than expected. The collection process didn't make sense because we were unable to deliver on the community / relevant info experience we wanted.  The wikis and the soon to be launched Student Leader Blog should help to deliver a great follow up experience.  Then we can start collecting contact information at conferences and speeches again.
Avg. click through rate on newsletter of 10% per month by Q2	N/A - We stopped the newsletter
Launch a revamped swiftkickonline.com by end of Q1	We did complete this on time and have done many changes to the site since then.
Create an online logistics page for our trainings	We created marketing sites for both MSFB and DFT. They could grow much more and will probably be transferred over to our wiki pages soon. We didn't finish this project until the end of the year though.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT:
20 active and productive interns.	We had 3 interns for the year. 20 seems like way to many at this point.  When we say interns, we really mean experiential learning. It's a higher level of the student community pyramid. As we continue to grow every segment of the pyramid, and continue to figure out tools to enable students to easily increase their participation, this number will grow. Hopefully, we can create another level to the pyramid so that unpaid interns can move to freelance pirate status and build businesses of their own.
1000 student generated blogs	We never started the Student Blog - it is on the radar for early 2008
100,000 blog views in network	Our total blog views for the year were around 12,500. So we were off by just a few :) We were overly ambitious newbies. Both the Swift Kick and Student Affairs blogs are growing every month, so that is a good sign.
3 conferences with ambassador programs	The goal here was to segue the community that we built online into a real world experience at a conference.  So that we would be running a "camp" in parallel with an established conference.  The students participating would have special sessions, experiences, and benefits.  They would act as Swift Kick community ambassadors and recruit others into the experience.  It's still a good idea, we have not tried it yet.
750 Basecamp completed tasks by Q1, 3,000 completed by end of the year	We had well over 750 task complete within Basecamp for the year. The problem is, we still are not very good at using Basecamp on a daily basis, but it's vital for effective project management.
400 messages on social networking sites by Q1, 1,600 per year	At the time we didn't think we would be doing a lot of our communication on SNS, but now we fully use SNS and often times have booked trainings via Facebook. So it's silly to track the number of messages we create. The next step is for even better integration of Facebook into our other Lego pieces
OPERATIONS:
Complete Salesforce sales flow between all tabs	We are closer - but our Salesforce account needs a good clean out and overhaul. There are lots of pieces we still don't use, and there are lots of fields that are collecting dust because they're old.
Salesforce integration with current and new tools	We did some more with this - but the push is going to come from other developers and not so much from us making the new tools. All of our focus is on getting Red Rover to the next stage. We'll come back to tie our various tech systems together.
Create and plan for company logistics (Insurance, S-Corp, Payroll)	We filed as an S-corp, didn't looking into insurance, didn't work on a payroll structure, didn't look at company health care (all of which we need to take care of asap)

Turned Down by the MacArthur DML Competition - Staying Sustainable

The Conference on the First Year Experience was a fantastic event for us because Red Rover was very popular. The attendees were a mix of student advisors, deans, faculty, and librarians. Each group had a slightly different curiosity for Red Rover, but they all had one question in common and it was probably the most popular question we received:

"So if Red Rover is free for any school to use, what's in it for you or how do you make money?"

Great question, and I am sure many of our readers are probably wondering the same thing. To keep Red Rover sustainable we have several options:

Option A - Apply for grants such as the MacArthur DML Competition. There are many grants out there, but the DML was our first attempt. We knew it was our lottery ticket strategy and that turned out to be true as the winners were announced today and didn't include Red Rover :( We'll do some more thinking on why that was, and post our thoughts here. We need a little time to go through who did win and do the comparison. Either way, it brings us to . . .

Option B - Adding paid extension features like surveymoney does. In addition to the always free core Red Rover tool, there will be a menu for schools to pick extra paid features if interested. (Expected to be released toward the end of the year)

Option C - Develop the free platform then offer paid integrated support similar to Red Hat. We already offer a technology integrated solution for a select number of schools.

Option D - Raise capital. We've talked about this option a lot as it wouldn't be hard for us to raise capital. Our two sticky points are that it would distract us from the development and marketing for about two months and secondly we are not sure how investors would feel about us being in education and vice versa.

Option E,F,G,H... - If we need to, we can go here.

On our list of motivations for starting Swift Kick, financial gain is listed as the 4th or 5th reason. We are much more interested in changing education, helping students, and challenging our current skill set. In the theme of working in the open, we do plan to post more of our partnership charter on here. But at the end of the day we can't eat Ramon noodles forever.

In 2007 was grossed about $165,000 from speaking. A big piece went to pay for the development of Red Rover. This year we are already grossing $100,000 for the first quarter. It sounds impressive, however we are still using most that money to pay for Red Rover and the other members of the Swift Kick crew. Many times, as the founders, Kevin and I haven't taken a monthly salary to make sure everyone else is paid. It can hurt.

We are committed to Red Rover because we believe in the impact it will have, and we receive validation for our belief from the many schools we talk to and tell us they are excited to use it. So onward we march!

Bosie State Newspaper Article About Swift Kick Training

It's nice for us to connect with school newspaper reporters during our on site trainings. It allows the message of the training to go out beyond just those who attended.

Colby Stream of the Boise State Arbiter, wrote a follow up to our Myspace/Facebook training at their school. Colby did a great job in capturing many of the main points. We often forget to mention these articles, so here's a full reprint. Thanks Colby!

It's all about harnessing the power of the Internet. More specifically, the networking capabilities of the Internet.

Tom Krieglstein, co-founder of Swift Kick, gave a lecture last Tuesday sponsored by the Boise State Student Programs Board (SPB), which discussed how students can use MySpace, Facebook and other online resources to make job-seeking and money-making an easier task.

According to Krieglstein, the Internet creates a megaphone effect. This means that everything a person does on the Internet can be potentially spread everywhere, all over the world.

Krieglstein describes it as living in a glass house.

"Everyone's looking in to see what you're doing," he said.

This can be good or bad, depending on what you're showing the world.

Krieglstein pointed out that 60 percent of employers now search the Internet to find out more information about potential job candidates. Pictures, comments and blogs are up for grabs for these employers to see.

One mission of Swift Kick is to help students portray the image these people find desirable.

"The good behavior is what you want amplified out," Krieglstein said.

The company was co-founded about four years ago by Krieglstein and his partner, Kevin Prentiss. They were both in business at the time and felt like the businesses they were with only wanted to make money. After meeting each other, Krieglstein and Prentiss decided to start Swift Kick.

Today the company is totally virtual; it has no physical location. The team doesn't even live together. They are spread all over the United States in places like Chicago and San Francisco.

But why target college students?

"The strength of America depends on its educational system," Krieglstein said.

The mission of the company is not just to help students portray a positive image. It's also to help students increase their engagement on and off campus.

"College is the one time in your life when you should try as much as possible," Krieglstein said. Only then can a student fail and still have safeguards, he explained.

Krieglstein is the perfect model of an ambitious student. In college, he set up a text book selling business which generated around $1.5 million in sales in a single year. He also won a speaking competition, which opened up his eyes to the money-making opportunities in speaking.

Today, he travels all over the United States giving lectures. At other times, he goes to conferences for student leaders. It is at these conferences that schools hire the company.

One such conference is where Boise State SPB got wind of the company.

"We get a nice little taste of what they're about," Jill Krenecki, director of Student Programs Board, said about the conference.

SPB hoped that the lecture would help to "solve the problem of student apathy," Krenecki said.

The Myspace/Facebook lecture is just one of many events SPB brings to the Boise State campus. Other events include movies, shown every Thursday night at 7 p.m. in the Student Union Building, and the Rock Star 101 concerts. But SPB doesn't want to make up all the events by itself.

"We're always open for suggestions," Krenecki said, stressing that student involvement is critical to the success of SPB events.

Any students who wish to submit ideas can visit SPB's Myspace page by searching "BSU SPB."

Working Out in the Open and Eating our own Dog Food

In an earlier post Tom mentioned that one of our goals for 2008 was to work out in the open.

We often recommend this in Dance Floor Theory leadership sessions - telling students to hold their meetings in the commons every once in a while, with a flip board showing what they are doing. It piques interest. It shows movement. It builds credibility.

We also recommend wikis. Especially for student government, though activities can be equally as powerful an application. It's a way to show interested students how much work goes into planing. It's a way to involve others in that planning.

Eating your own dog food is always a good idea. Especially with web 2.0 tech. I've been the victim of technolust so many times - something seems like it will be really cool, but for whatever reason it just isn't that useful and falls out of my workflow. (DevonThink, is a recent example among many.)

Today we're proud to announce the opening up of the Swift Kick (wiki) kitchen. It's not done, of course, but it's a good start. The goal is for this to be our workspace. So that advisors and students who are interested can come play and learn.

We're using this space for case studies - where each school gets a page for their program flow (trying to figure out how to embed follow up surveys now . . .) and for all the content that Swift Kick has created so far.

"Giving your content away" (it's under CC 3.0 noncommercial) is a horrifying idea to a number of established speakers. They work hard to "protect" their intellectual property. We completely understand that position and have decided to test the other side.

We're using this space to elicit feedback on marketing and initiatives (and boy do we appreciate all the input from all of you!)

Red Rover, of course, is up here too, with its own space providing live feeds from the development environment and new user interface discussions.

So come on in to the kitchen, find something that looks good to you, hang out, talk, and cook up something tasty with us.

APML and Education

A pretty little video:

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

At the moment this is a highly fringe technology conversation - solving a problem of only the most involved and finicky mobile networkers.

The idea of data-portability is great - though the current challenge is two fold: you can't get your data out, and if you did, you can't plug it in.

The hope is that all this will change.

We will be adopting OpenID, APML and open social with the 1.1 release of Red Rover coming out in May. We will be doing our part to encourage portability, playing nice, context control, and plug and playing for education.

Plus APML is a pretty cool concept and direction. It's still a chicken and egg problem, if we build the profile for students, they need some place to plug it in, but we have to start somewhere.

I'm very excited to apply attention profiling to education and the relationship / relevancy challenge.