Swift Kick Central

State of the (Red Rover) Union

Red Rover is an experiment with many layers. It's a big vision made of many small steps.

Here's where we are at: what's working, what's an issue, what's a real challenge, and our plans moving forward.

What's Working:

The tag cloud / folksonomy architecture. Students can tag themselves. Many don't know what "tags" are, but the interface is getting them to put 20 or so tags on themselves anyway. This is plenty to get started and make for useful and interesting comparisons.

The tag match recommendation. Students are finding groups on their campus and joining them. I've heard, "Wow, I've been on campus for three years and didn't know [x group] existed." That's perfect - local discovery= increased engagement. Perfect. While there is very little baseline data available for comparison, what's there suggests Red Rover is 2 - 4x more effective at connecting students to groups than the old methods.

Joining Groups. In our user survey 63% of students found 2-4 groups that interested them, 58% spent time looking at recommended groups, 34% looked for more groups, and most importantly 64% of students joined one or more groups.

The social experience. Students like it. 81% said that they would recommend it to their friends despite the fact the interface and messaging both need work (see challenges below.)

The face to face conversation with schools and students. We are unique in that we are visiting many schools with Swift Kick training. We are actually talking to student affairs folk and student leaders constantly. We get their feedback, challenges, and hopes directly. The relationship matters, now (at startup when we are far from perfect) more than ever.

The Student Leader and Student Affairs Blogs due completely to the great people involved. Special thanks go to Tania Dudina and Debra Sanborn for leading the charge. We're excited to spread the content and conversations via Red Rover.

What's an Issue:

The interface. Simplicity and functionality are difficult to balance. To be successful it has to feel easy. Red Rover scores a C on this right now (down from a C+ when we had fewer features). 53% of respondents said sign up was easy, 30% said it was simple but long and 17% said they were confused. It's also too "plain" according to the surveys. Students using Facebook and Google have come to expect / demand the best. We need to focus on this to get better numbers. We're interviewing new team members to address this specifically.

Communicating the Value to students. We're adding an additional context layer in between social (which the students want to do) and school (which they have to do - think Blackboard). Red Rover needs to start far more on the want side. We have cool personal comparison features (e.g. one click, whole school, interest comparison) but it's not enough of a video game feel to register as entertainment. This is part interface and part message clarity. Either way, it's a pressing challenge. Students will spread "kind of cool," but not nearly as fast as "really cool". Which brings us to:

Adoption. Our fall goal was 30% enrollment leading heavily towards freshmen at thirty schools. Three weeks into school we're almost half way there with about 7 schools, with many more in the 2-10% of enrollment range. I think the interface / clarity above will help, as will new invite / email features that just came out. With adoption, group density is paramount. Meaning that it's almost pointless to talk about 300k installs, what matters is % of a single school or even % of a single class/year at a school. It's the density that creates the "everyone is doing it" feeling and creates a good full dance floor feeling in groups - student groups or classes. No one seems to have cracked this yet. Not Courses 2.0, Course Feed or even Blackboard. Our strategy was to try different adoption methods at different schools and disseminate best practices back to the schools - we're still early with this.

What's a Real Challenge:

Focus. Knowing we would be crossing a chasm with a free product, keeping our costs low was critical. (Meaning if we staffed up and free adoption took 2 years, we would have either needed to raise a decent amount or we would have run out of money.) This left us with not enough staff to maintain aggressive development speed and school support while traveling and training at the same time. It's frustrating for us. There are more schools that would be farther along had we done a better job of proactively communicating about bugs and plans. We should have hired on contract for the July to November window. Not doing so was a mistake. We're trying to hire for this spot now.

Free equals "if I have time" and very few have time. Student affairs folks get slammed on day one of school. Because Red Rover is free, I suspect the project fits into a muddy "would be nice" category - the same category as say, going home at a reasonable time (which also rarely happens). We're working with great people in a tough position. We looked at charging for a joint experiment where charging would increase follow through and compared it to open, at will, collaboration where our project might get put off. Most tech vendors choose option A. A few of these vendors have told us we would find Option B didn't work in higher ed. We went with option B any way. I do not believe this decision was a mistake. It allows for the student led effort which will ultimately be the key. At this phase of the project, however, being lower on the list of priorities for our stake holders presents a challenge. Especially when we are not doing a good job of proactively communicating.

Plans Moving Forward

1. Focus on communicating with our stakeholders. We know so many amazing people - staff, faculty, student leaders, and students. The user survey was listening, now we need to make it a conversation. We need to get our folks the info they need to participate. Specifics: more blogs here, increase phone call check ins, new student leader newsletter, including application news in all newsletters.

2. Focus for 2 months on the user experience. We are slowing down new features development and focusing on making what we have easy, fun, and pretty. Specifics: hiring a user experience designer, 80% of time improving what is there, additional focus groups of students.

3. Hiring a support person. We are doing something very new. It's understandable there would be hesitation and questions. Having a person dedicated to these questions will help.

4. Finish first year experience curriculum. Scott Silverman, Coordinator, First Year Programs, UC - Riverside is heading up this project. It will embed identity development, college connectedness and tech into the curriculum. Including Red Rover and Path101 for career planning. I'll post more on this later. This is a solution to the adoption challenges.

5. Spread student government case studies. Tiq Chapa is launching Red Rover at Stanford as part of his student government responsibilities. This is an exciting direction. We will be telling this story, and the other launches by students, at the ASGA conference coming up shortly (Tom is keynoting).

On The Avoidance of Naked Lawsuits

On CNN.com today, there's a front page article announcing that the "Naked Cowboy" has been given the green light to pursue a lawsuit against Mars candy, the makers of M & Ms, for trademark infringement. 

Funny enough, a CNN analyst thinks he has a case and could win a tidy sum.

At Swift Kick, we go way back with Mr. Cowboy, aka Robert Burk.  We found him in some small town after a NACA conference and couldn't pass up the opportunity to get a little video of him with a "Free Hugs" sign.  (Free Hugs is a metaphor / case study for social networking in our leadership and tech training.)

Here's the clip. Pay special attention to the end.  We, unlike Mars candy, covered our legal bases : )

Naked Free Hugs from kevin prentiss on Vimeo.

Joking aside, the Naked Cowboy clearly understands the value of open content.  He's obviously done that little end bit once or twice before.

Whether or not he read The Long Tail, he's built his brand and fame on millions of FREE tourist style impressions just like ours. He's done it by being out there (well, right) and open (ahem . . . naked). You can connect the dots to our typical blog themes on your own.   

I'm sure if Mars had asked nicely, Robert would have been happy to participate for substantially less than the 6 Million he stands to win in the lawsuit.

Either way, god bless America.

An Open Letter to Umair Haque, Applying for Revolutionary Status

Dear Umair,

Your Open Challenge was intriguing. Your manifesto required action.

We would like to apply for "revolutionary" status under your definition. If you have not yet found your five projects to advise, we humbly submit ours for consideration.

We are a start up determined to organize the world's education.

The data model of education needs to be turned upside down.

Currently, a student's information is trapped and chopped up into little pieces in the various departments of the institution. This information is encumbered by old thinking, systems and lawyers. The result is an expensive, top heavy and too often irrelevant model of education.

We give control of education data to the students, where they are free to be public. Leaving education footprints in the open allows us to provide recommendations, peer modeling, and peer mentoring. "People like you were successful when they took x class, joined y group, got z job and click here to see their path or ask them a question." The result is better education at a fraction of the cost.

We have invested all of our revenue in developing our web application. Quite literally putting our money where our mouth is - our revenue is from speaking in higher education. This experience has given us initial capital and more importantly a deep understanding and appreciation for the challenges. It has also given us 40+ schools signed up to use our system. We have made solid progress towards our vision.

Student apathy is a massive untapped resource. We want to free that resource by connecting and galvanizing individuals with common paths and common futures.

Our path to this vision is steep, but achievable. We have clear strategic milestones and reasonable acuity in the market - evident in our early success.

A big vision is a big risk. Your help would be invaluable. With your help we will continue to avoid the mundane and explode a truly renewable human resource.

I'm available on the phone or in person to discuss the project further. Thank you for your voice, it's inspiring.

My Best,

Kevin Prentiss
Founder, Red Rover

Disruptive Change in Higher Education, Video Lecture, Part 1

Disruptive Chage in Higher Educatoin from Swift Kick on Vimeo.

It Will Be Amazing, If People Use It . . .

I got a very straightforward question on Facebook today from a staff person at a very large school:

About your software: do you have evidence that students will use it? How do you suggest schools get students to do that? (Just wondering if students would see this as one more "hoop" to jump through and simply ignore it.)

I wrote up an answer that was probably inappropriately long for her question, so I'm making double use of it by sharing here:

--------

That's exactly the right question.  How can we make it not just a hoop?

We have evidence that student leaders like it. They too are very worried about "one more thing" but really Red Rover is designed so that they don't have to go there and upkeep. Most of it will be pushed to their cell phone, this is just a matter of proving to them that it really does add a benefit without much work on their part.

As for your regular incoming first year student, "adoption" is an important conversation.

If students use it, all these great things occur (assessment, recommendation, etc.) Adoption is always the problem with college led initiatives - and technology of any kind.  It's especially a problem when the software is useful / important to the school, but not important to the student, i.e. emergency text messaging. 

In the test runs so far we have reason to be optimistic.

There are three important parts on our side:

1) Solving a real pain. Students want to meet each other over the summer, at the beginning of school, and during every new semester. Identity management and grouping are huge needs and have been common themes (compare your friends!) in successful applications on Facebook. I give us an 7/10 on this one. (We need to do a better job of communicating to the students how to think about Red Rover before and after they have signed up.)

2) Making it incredibly easy. It needs to feel as nice (simple / fast) as Facebook. I give us a 6.5/10 on this. Though it gets better all the time. For comparison, I give Blackboard a 3/10.

3) Building a community. (This will convert the 10% adoption to the 30% adoption which gets into "most of my friends are doing it" territory.) With student leaders, that looks like peer created blog (http://www.theslblog.org/) and then building community from group to group. I.e. hooking up the members of Latino clubs from nearby campuses. We've just begun this process and should be in full swing late summer.  With incoming first years, that means

From the school side, there are few things we recommend for getting the link in front of students to get to the initial 10-20%.

1) Use the FB group. (See instructions here: http://redrover.swiftkick.wikispaces.net/Adoption )

2) Send an email telling the students that this is a Facebook application to help them "Find their people." Find in their dorm, or major who share things in common.

3) Use the student ambassadors to encourage students to sign up before and during the orientation process.

We expect that we will be able to get to 40% of the freshmen class with these methods (much higher % at smaller schools) and 1/4 to 1/2 will actually sign up.

That is enough adoption to make the system fun to use. Then it's a matter of 1) using cell phones for registration and 2) providing real value so students tell other students. (And it goes back to building community and growing adoption over the year.)

So that was a long answer : )

The short version is that we are focused on this question, have a good strategy and will be publishing what we learn.

Because of the design of the system (we see live data from each school and can do benchmark comparisons) we will have 15 different approaches tested shortly. We can see what works best, and immediately tell the other schools what strategies work best. We can even parse the live data by same sized school (so you could compare to UW Madison, for instance).

Unless we've completely missed on the student motivation part, the test and learn with marketing should get us there this summer.

The testing part is free : ) and the potential benefit is huge.

Please let me know your thoughts on this, I know it's a common concern and I would love to discuss it with you.

-----

As we come near to marketing to first year students (we are still working on setting up leaders and groups with most of our schools) this adoption conversation will come front and center.

There are so many technology vendors who will sell a college a "solution" that very few students will use.  The college takes the risk, the vendor gets the money.

While the college's marketing may be part of the problem, usually the root of the problem is a little deeper.  It's the motivation of the school (and the vendor's supplication).  Is the benefit to the student clear to the student?  Does it matter to the student?

Why is it that students like Facebook and use it like crazy but often complain about Blackboard?

Who understands / listens to students better, Facebook or Higher Education Tech Vendors and colleges?  It just seems strange, Facebook provides the service for free.

So we are taking on the adoption risk by offering our software for free and publicizing our approach.  We're partnering with schools, with the intent of listening better. 

 

Don't Market. Build Well. And Then Community Content.

Found this over at Logic + Emotion - for us and every other entrepreneur out there, it's essential.

| View | Upload your own

There's a little caveat in this theory when it comes to innovation within your target segment.

When, for example, your target market needs education to understand why your product is useful. Let's just say your product relies on Facebook App viral dynamics, uses tags and meta data, and will be the center of a filtered RSS feed ecosystem in education, well then you have to do a fair amount of education. It's not really marketing per se, it's just scaffolding. Building a foundation of understanding so that folks can appreciate.

Red Rover Milestones

Downloadable as a pretty .pdf here.

Or as a small picture:

The order of things might change. When we need money depends partially on how fast we develop, on how much we speak, or timing of key employees. We might decide it makes more sense to have a paid feature extension before we go open source.

In whatever order they get done, having these milestones helps us keep our focus on the right thing at the right time - which is the most important thing when your resources are limited.

Video Blog From Baker University

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.

Red Rover and Tom on the Radio

Tom was interviewed by WGN of Chicago about winning the Ideablob.com contest recently. 

It was a funny conversation before hand, where we were reviewing the important things to mention (knowing that he was dealing in sound bites).  We came up with:

1) What: Orientation software that integrates with Myspace and Facebook (The shortest "What is Red Rover?" answer we have.)

2) Benefits: Involvement / Retention / Engagement

3) Surprising bit: Software is FREE

Take a listen by clicking here and marvel at how Tom just knocks 'em down in order. 

And Tom and I are going to do all of our speeches in Radio Announcer voice from now on.