With an amazing 2010 coming to a close for us at Red Rover and 2011 already looking like a landmark year, we're expanding the team and looking to recruit some amazing new people. Below are two roles we're hiring for in the next couple weeks. For both roles, they'd start off as trial contractual positions and if all goes well, move into full time positions within Red Rover within the first couple months of the new year. If interested, let us know, but know that creativity in submissions counts...
TITLE: Marketing / Sales Manager
OVERVIEW: The Marketing / Sales Manager populates and manages leads through the sales funnel to contract signed and payment received as well as renewing partners.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Lead Generation Setup / Logistics (Pre/Dur/Post) (Conf, Meetups, Mailings, etc)
Most student club advisors will tell you that club engagement goes through waves; some years are rockstars and others are duds. Almost every club starts the year with aspirations of rockstardom, but within a couple weeks, the excitement and motivation of the leadership team fades, and thus, the entire club activity withers. In pondering this problem, I've been talking more and more about an idea called engagement-based leadership (EBL), meaning that leadership is not a one-time elected thing, but rather an ongoing, ever-changing position rewarded based on engagement. Before I talk more about EBL, first let's dissect the problem of why student leaders fade within a month of being elected.
Several years ago, I walked the second day of a 2-Day Avon Walk For Breast Cancer with my wife and some friends. Anyone who's ever done the walk knows how grueling it is. Blisters alone are painful, but the average Avon walker can expect to endure multiple layers of blisters building up until his or her entire foot becomes one big blister. It's disgusting and painful and makes the second day of the walk intense. The organizers know that completion of the walk is extremely difficult without a continuous onslaught of support from spectators and volunteers. That's why for every walker, they commit to line the entire path with at least five cheerers. On the last leg of the walk, my feet blistered up and shot a pain through my body with each step. Mentally and physically I was ready to quit. My motivation was gone. But then, as we turned the corner, there was a smiling old lady sitting in a wheel chair, wearing a cap to cover her bald head and holding a sign that read, "I'm why you're walking, Thank you." Like a bolt of electricity, my whole body reenergized and plowed toward the finish line. Imagine if the only rewards for walking the race were in the beginning when they pumped us up, and at the end when we crossed the finish line? The attrition rates would be horrendous!
Like the Avon walk, student leaders begin the year excited and motivated about the idea of the journey they're about to start. They might have just attended an award ceremony where the outgoing leaders were showered in praise for the hard work they did throughout the year, which further motivates the incoming leaders. So much support. So much praise. And then, let's say within a month or so, reality sets in. The real work starts, and the "blisters" of being a leader build up. But unlike the Avon walk, with a motivational checkpoint waiting for you at every street corner, the next motivational checkpoint for student leaders most likely won't be for another six months, during their outgoing ceremony when they are praised for all the hard work they did throughout the year. Thus, within the first couple months of being a leader, the excitement and motivation fade and the attrition rates go up.It should be noted that some leaders drop off for other reasons, such as class overload, work overload, or personal issues.
What's a solution look like?
As the advisor, you could make sure to set up a collection of individual checkpoints for your leaders throughout the year, so you make sure they stay excited and motivated. At bare minimum, let's say you create checkpoints that happen once per week for ten minutes where you praise them for the work they are doing and remind them of the bigger picture of student engagement. Just one leader multiplied out for eight months, that's just under five hours of your time. Now expand that to 50-300 leaders. If you don't think you have a life now...
Enter EBL. The goal is still the same, keep the leaders motivated on an ongoing basis so they can survive through the typical student leader burnout, but in EBL, the tactics change. In EBL, you are moving the motivational checkpoints away from you as the admin/advisor and pushing it to the students. EBL builds in a peer-to-peer motivational system that is ongoing and ever present. Now it doesn't matter if you have 50 or 5000 student leaders. Actually, the more leaders you have, the better.
How does it work?
It's no secret I'm a fan of Whole Foods (also known as Whole Paycheck). Because there's a WF on my way home from work, I tend to frequently stop in and grab a few items. Over time, I realized that WF is one of the top five places I visit the most every week, which makes me a pretty darn engaged customer. In fact, WF should probably be rewarding me for being so engaged. Enter FourSquare, Yelp, and SCVNGR. For those unfamiliar with these three sites, they are, simply stated, mobile check-in tools. I can be anywhere in NY and check in that I am there via my mobile phone. Nothing special yet, until you start to receive prizes, titles, and recognition for checking in more often. For a while, I was crowned the Mayor of our WF because I was the most engaged customer. But then my speaking travel schedule picked up and for several months I disappeared and rightfully so, someone else took over as Mayor.
EBL rewards students based on their engagement. The more engagement "points" you score, the more rewards, titles, and recognition you receive. To repeat from above, leadership is not a one-time yearly elected thing, but rather an ongoing, ever-changing position that is rewarded based on engagement.
There certainly is much more to debate and discuss here, but consider this post only a surface-level introduction to the idea. I'm not interested in getting into the weeds just yet, so I purposefully left out many of the operational details.
The Value of EBL?
Admin/Advisor - Student Leader attrition rates will drop, which means student leaders will stick around longer and be more active in their clubs. The increased activity will make clubs more successful throughout the year. The admin/advisor also won't have to do as much individual student leader motivational check-ins.
Student Leaders - Like a video game, the rewards and benefits built into EBL will keep the student leaders motivated throughout the entire year on an ongoing basis. They are going to have more fun because their clubs are more active and engaged. They also won't feel as much guilt about dropping off the map and letting the club die due to some personal issues they didn't plan for ahead of time. A new leader with the most engagement points is ready to step up to Mayorship.
Students - They will have a larger group of active clubs to join. After joining they don't have to rely on a disengaged elected leader to keep the group going. Leadership is open to anyone who wants it and is willing to work for it.
Wrap Up
EBL is a blend of game theory and student engagement theory. Every student affairs professional knows the pains of deadbeat leaders and thus dead groups. EBL is a new paradigm in thinking about leadership. If we want to break out of the normal student engagement levels of 16-40%, we have to think differently. The ideas, tactics, and tech tools we use have to embody this new way of thinking. It's not just about making paperwork more efficient, that's just extracting more energy from the resources you already know exists. It's about exploring new potential energy that is sitting dormant in the 60-84% of the rest of your student body, that's a massive untapped pool of energy.
Kevin and I started The Student Affairs Collaborative in 2005 to test our hypothesis that a decentralized, open system of peer-to-peer learning built around shared interests would increase engagement and retention.
We wanted to create a community in which everyone was a teacher at some level, and everyone supported each other to become more involved.
In the beginning, 100% of the content was written by me, Kevin, and our speaker friend Del Suggs. We then bribed our student affairs friends with cookies to help us write content, and slowly, over time, the site gained a readership.The SA Collaborative started to become the go-to place online for student affairs professionals to receive and share knowledge from their peers. The growth remained steady, and then Twitter came along...
In 2009, over drinks at Panera Bread Co with Debra Sanborn, I pitched the idea of a weekly chat via Twitter for student affairs professionals, which would mimic the already established #EDchat (for teachers) and #JourChat (for journalist). She nodded excitedly at the idea, and a couple weeks later, on Oct 8th, 2009, we attempted our first #SAchat.
I remember telling my wife how nervous I was that it was just going to be me and Debra tweeting back and forth for an hour, and it would never take off because there were no student affairs people on Twitter. I kept a shot of vodka close by to calm my nerves just in case :-).
The chat started extremely slow, but within 15 minutes a couple of people joined us from out of nowhere. Twitter hasn't opened up its history past Feb 2010, so the data can't be verified yet, but I remember the hour generating around 100 tweets and 10 people participating. 80% of those tweets came from me and Debra though :-/.
This week marks the one year anniversary of #SAchat, and the community has exploded in celebration. Last week, I jokingly declared that the SA Collaborative editors were bringing fireworks to the party, and fireworks they did bring! I've personally received tweets, emails, phone calls, faxes, and even postcards in celebration.
Where We Are Now
The last seven days of #SAchat'ter generated 2,500 tweets with 300 people participating! The hashtag #SAchat is the go-to place on Twitter for student affairs. Many people have the hashtag saved as a favorite search and keep it open all day on their 3rd party clients, which further solidifies its validity.
The SA Collaborative is now five years old, and has around 700 subscribed readers, 3,900 Twitter followers, 17 content contributors, and is the #1 ranking Google search for "Student Affairs Blog."
As expected, lots of additional niche student affairs chats are popping up with varying success. Most are initiated by the community, but some of the established organizations in the industry are launching their own chats. I say, the more the merrier! It makes sense that as the all-purpose #SAchat grows, sub chats with a more narrow focus will emerge. Once you've found the music fans, now you want to find the old-time-bluegrass-with-a-fiddle-in-the-band music fans because that is what you are really into.
A large percentage of the community only knows my name because of the generous outpouring of gratitude I've received over the past week. I tend not to overly participate in the weekly chats or blog. It's not that I don't care or have time, it's that you all will learn far more from your peers, who walk in your shoes 24/7, than from me being an outside supporter of student affairs. So I'll happily continue on from behind the scenes helping the community grow by facilitating as many relationships as possible, so we all continue to stay on the dance floor dancing together.
Why This Community Continues To Grow
Every community is comprised of champions, participants, and lurkers. This is also called the 90-9-1 rule in which 1% of a community will be the champions, 9% will participate, and 90% will simply lurk. Wikipedia is the most famous example of the 90-9-1 rule. The challenge of community organizers is to provide the right incentives to the right people so they stay engaged in the community. Champions want an audience to help and support, like they received when they were just starting off. Participants want an easy way to engage with people like them around relevant topics and to learn from the champions. Lurkers want a way to watch the activity between the champions and participants, and when ready, a way to easily test the temperature of the water.
I continuously work with the editorial team to make sure we are moving the community in the right direction. For the champions, that means making it easier for them to share their amazing knowledge to an increasingly larger audience. For participants, that means providing quality content, a fun atmosphere, and peers like them they can connect with. For lurkers, that means keeping the community as open as possible and providing baby steps of engagement like the TuesTally.
What's Next
We're only a couple of weeks away from launching a directory for the #SAchat community that will further facilitate relationships and learning communities around shared interests. I want to help the student affairs graduate students find, participate, and learn from the #SAGrad community. I want to help women who work in housing find, participate, and learn from the #wihsng community. I want to help first year experience people find, participate, and learn from the #FYEchat community. I want to help the #RLchat (Res Life people) community grow, the #SAASS (assessment people) community grow, etc, etc, etc. The new directory will make all of this possible, and I predict it will challenge the established student affairs organizations to rethink how they engage their community. Heck, the #SAchat community has already turned some heads!
Three Challenges
Challenge #1 - If you don't already have a blog, start one and add it to our student affairs blog directory. Write about your experiences at work so we can then share them with others who can learn from you. You're already a teacher to someone, they just haven't met you yet.
Challenge #2 - Help the community grow. Bring one new colleague to the next #SAchat. Email the SA Collaborative link to five new people. This party has just begun.
Challenge #3 - Think about how the lessons of this community relate back to your campus in terms of student engagement. How can you move away from being the gatekeepers of engagement and more toward being the facilitators of relationships around shared interests? How can you apply the 90-9-1 rule? How can you support more peer-to-peer learning among students? How can you help your students find old-time-bluegrass-with-a-fiddle-in-the-band music lovers like them? If it’s worked for you here in this community, there’s a strong possibility it will work for students on your campus.
And Lastly
My excitement for this community is overflowing. I believe we are pushing not just student affairs forward, but the entire educational field. We’re working our tails off over here at Red Rover to duplicate the successes of this community with the students on your campus. Wait till we launch the #SAchat directory, then you’ll really see what I’m talking about.
I’m writing this post from my perspective, but really it’s a culmination of countless conversations between the editorial team that are well deserving of endless praise, so extra cheers and digital cookies to Debra Sanborn, Cindy Kane, Ed Cabellon, Liz Van Lysal, Stacy Oliver, and Kevin Prentiss.
Here’s to another 365 sunrises and sunsets on our great community! Queue the fireworks.
The deck below was created to frame the conversation around how Red Rover can support alumni departments with their goals. The slide show can also be viewed, downloaded, and embedded here.
College of Coastal Georgia recently transitioned to a four-year residential institution. Among the many changes, the campus will soon include residence halls and a director of residence life. Dave Leenhouts, director of CCGA's student life, heads the committee to hire their director of residence life.
In a conversation with Dave over the weekend, he talked about how the big buzz word on the committee is affinity housing. In other words, pre-matching roommates ahead of time based on similar traits to ensure higher retention rates.
The impact of first year roommates on an individual is huge and can have lasting life time effects from grades, to weight, to drinking habits. The NY Times recently posted an article on the science of roommates.
First-year roommates matter. Though they may go their separate ways sophomore year, their reach can ripple throughout the college years and after.
The researchers aren't entirely clear on why one student has such an impact over another in their first year, but it sounds like a hybrid of the proximity effect of the Framingham Heart Study and the emotional gap felt by first year students.
CCGA is currently using Red Rover as their campus directory to socially connect first year students to similar students and campus clubs. Dave wants to go further and use the directory to roommate students based on similar interests, activities, and background.
An affinity housing dashboard is already within the scope of Red Rover. And because so much of Red Rover is data driven it will be interesting to study the results of matching roommates who are 100% identical verses those who are intellectually, socially, spiritually, etc opposites as a way to promote diversity.
In a recent post, 37signals showcased what it means for a company to know where it stands. Their example was the NYC bike maker Francesco Bertelli.
Bertelli is a great example of a company that knows where it stands. The best way to know where you stand is to figure out what you won’t do. What will you say no to? Francesco puts his no’s right out in front. It makes the experience better for everyone.
And it's true, Bertelli makes beautiful bikes.
Software and bikes are very similar in this regard. Too many software tools on the college market fight feature for feature and use words like robust, comprehensive, and all-in-one.
We're happy to let them continue to out feature each other. May the company with the longest list of features win. With every new feature comes complexity and distancing from the core values and the schools find it harder and harder to gain adoption.
There's beauty in simplicity. There's also usability in simplicity.
If you're curious about where we stand, check out our previously posted guiding principles: Part 1, 2, and 3
John Jay College of Criminal Justice was reviewing a number of different social tools, trying to figure out where they wanted to invest their time and money. They asked me to help clarify how they fit together.
I did it with a little video and I though it came out pretty well - if just a wee bit long winded - so I wanted to share.
Click here for the slides of the Junco / Heiberger (2009, March) You can use Facebook for that? Research-supported strategies to engage your students. NACPA Presentation
Correction: At one point I said "Mr. Junco" but I obviously meant "DR. Junco."
The goal of our project is to build a tool that all schools can use to create learning networks for all students.
We're working with schools of all shapes and sizes; all across the spectrum of technological savviness.
The system connects students using tags, or keywords. Tags which will eventually be created organically from web 2.0 tools that the students attach to their profile.
Now that we're getting into attaching blogs, twitter, delicious, etc. to the student profile, the simple question comes up: what blogging platform should we recommend to the schools that don't currently have one?
There are two main questions for me at this stage. The first is philosophical, the second is pragmatic:
1) Should colleges host their students' blogs?
2) Regardless of who hosts it, what should the criteria be for the blog recommendation?
I love this direction and I applaud all of the schools that are exploring, especially those using the blogs as universal e-portfolios.
These schools show innovation is possible. They show the way.
But . . . is this just like email? Once email wasn't just a school thing, they became an identifier, like a phone number, that stayed with the individual.
It's fine to have your school or company give you an email to use professionally, but is that the model schools want to pursue with blogs? Should a "blog as e-portfolio" only be "professional" and attached to college? Shouldn't blogs from their 6-12 years in school (where they exist) be passed through to college? Shouldn't the blog continue with the graduate to help them maintain all of that 21st Century learning networking that we taught them?
What happens when a student transfers schools and all of their work is in the Word Press Multi-user install of their old school? (Can this be switched easily? I've never migrated a WP blog.)
Getting into these details is new for me, so I'm hoping some of the folks that have been thinking about this issue longer can shed some light on the process and their decision.
What I've read is something along the lines of "we really don't know if we're signing on to host a student's blog forever, but it's not as expensive at it used to be, and we'll figure that out later." I'm fine with that answer, I would just like to be clear on the issues.
What are the criteria for a blog recommendation?
I'm down to either Word Press or Tumblr. If there is another platform that we should consider, do tell. To make the conversation more specific
Simplicity vs. Flexibility
I'm a huge fan of Simplicity.
Here's the main screen for Word Press:
Here the main screen for Tumblr:
Which interface is going to get people blogging faster? Which one is clear and makes you want to click?
Comment system
I'm currently obsessed with using Disqus, because we can aggregate the comments of a student in their e-portfolio. Using the Disqus API, we can import "likes" and rankings of comments.
Disqus will work with both. Bonus points to the platform that has the quickest integration.
Open Source vs. Private
I'm not religious about this issue, but I am a bit of anarchist / idealist and open source fits nicely into this predilection.
If, however, a private and closed, even slightly evil, company provides a better experience of simplicity and quality (see: Apple) I will bow down.
IT involvement
It's nice if any excited individual at the university can experiment. Not using IT seems to rule out Word Press Multi User installs.
Also, it's important to note, one of the tenets of our projects is allowing student and faculty member choice. They should be allowed and encouraged to use whatever works for them. (We're betting that the majority of their choices will produce an RSS feed we can work with, someday Facebook might even share outside of the API.)
This is just me trying to parse the various issues in public for when I'm asked my opinion.
San Antonio College was the first school to launch Red Rover in '09 with the new involvement dashboard.
Oh my is it fun.
Talk about doing more with less in times of tight budgets:
Two hours after they ran their orientation, Tyler Archer was able to go into the involvement dashboard and see what actually happened.
We've talked about this for ever. The "Data Don't Drive" paper from the Lumina Foundation bemoans research and data gathering that is never used and advocates for "data-based decision-making." They simply want more data that actually empowers members of the academic community to be agents of change.
Tyler gets a live "involvement dashboard." Her data is Real Time. (No 18 month delays on compiling the self reported engagement metrics here!) And she, as the practitioner, can act on that immediately. That's powerful. That's just the way it should be.
Here's how it works:
Tyler goes to her Red Rover involvement dashboard and sees a simple pie chart.
The chart tells her: Who joined how many campus groups?
She can then click on any segment. She can focus on students that haven't joined any groups yet, or she can focus on the smaller percentage of hyper engaged students.
Let's say she starts with not yet involved students, looking to get them connected to at least one group.
1) She clicks on "View all Who Joined 0 Groups"
2) She can click the gray arrow on each name, revealing the student's keywords, their year, major, residence hall (if applicable) and a link to their social network or any other links (a blog, etc.)
This gets to some exciting new areas. What we're seeing is a correlation between the number of words students put into their profile (the depth to which they describe themselves) and their involvement on campus. This is a new area of exploration, but we think the measure of digital identity development in the educational context will become a key metric.
What is exciting about the Folksonomy at the heart of Red Rover is that even when a new student puts in only a little bit of information, it's still wonderfully useful.
Let's say Tyler is going through her list, clicking around, looking to connect students to groups, clubs, or orgs.
She comes to David here:
[By the way: David has been told that all of his info on Red Rover is public, so he's made the conscious choice to put this info in the open. No FERPA issues and no problems with using the collective language / activity for research. By linking his Facebook, he's simply confirming his identity and giving people options for getting a hold of him, his info is still behind Facebook's privacy filters.]
David has not joined any groups and he only put in three words, which is approximately 1/4 of the average number of words we are seeing.
3) Tyler clicks on "basketball" and can see two hugely important bits of information:
a) there are 58 other people in her small spring orientation that like basketball.
b) there are currently no groups/clubs/orgs that have anything do with basketball.
What she does with the info is up to her as the practitioner.
4) In two clicks she can email or Facebook message David and let him know that there are 58 other basketball players in his year - does he want to be the one of the leaders of a new club?
5) Or she can click on the number in that window and get a list of all the new students (or existing students) who like basketball. She can message them all with a time to meet on the courts.
She could easily look for established leaders of one group, who may be older, who also have "basketball" as a keyword, and may want to take on another group.
In less than 5 minutes she can meet David's needs. She can make him (and 58 other brand new students) feel like the school listens, cares and is there to help. How much does this group cost the school? Nothing. It's just a few clicks.
Now, critically, the students have all of this information and ability too. They are empowered to be leaders. They are empowered to connect on their own and take care of themselves.
Tyler isn't required for it to work, but she'll play with it and help where she can. Because she's not in student life to do the paperwork. She's in it because she loves helping students. This new dashboard just makes it incredibly fast and easy.
6) She can go back to that pie chart and watch it move.
7) If anyone above her asks "Just what does student life / activities do anyway?" she can tell David's story. Or better, she can send them David's blog.
We've launched a new feature to make the Red Rover directory even more useful!
One point of clarification - every school has its own network, so when I'm showing users who are matched, that means I am matching with everyone at the school. If I want to filter by the small groups of Major, Year, or Residence hall, I just click the other boxes.
College of Coastal Georgia recently transitioned to a four-year residential institution. Among the many changes, the campus will soon include residence halls and a director of residence life. Dave Leenhouts, director of CCGA's student life, heads the committee to hire their director of residence life.
