Swift Kick Central

Twitter As A Free Campus, Group Text Messaging Provider (Updated)

In May 2009 I wrote a post on how to turn Twitter into a free SMS alert system for your campus. Back then, the major hang up was people had to have a Twitter account for it to work. With student adoption of Twitter hovering pretty low at colleges, this was a problem.

Last week Twitter recognized the issue and introduced an updated tool called Fast Follow.

"The mobile team here at Twitter has rolled out a new feature called Fast Follow, and its genius lies in its simplicity: text “follow [account]” to 40404 (Twitter’s U.S. shortcode) and you’ll immediately start getting that account’s tweets via SMS—without ever signing up for Twitter."

Eric Stoller, writer for Inside Higher Ed, reported on Fast Follow and how it could be integrated into the campus culture.

"You could place your school's admissions Twitter account name and the Twitter SMS number on your marketing collateral. A school could even have multiple Twitter accounts that could then be included on strategic mailings or promotional microsites. Campaign tracking would be a snap! Prospective students do not have to be on Twitter to use Fast Follow."

Enterprise SMS tools will have a hard time justifying large price tags when competing against...free. I suspect an advantage they will have is back end assessment data. Though, knowing Twitter's history of openness, might be provided by a third party tool soon.

Curious to know if anyone has tried mass, or even departmental adoption of Fast Follow at their campus?

Increased Engagement Through Bizarre College Clubs

Yesterday, USA Today reported on how student participation in co-curricular (outside the classroom) activities leads to higher GPAs and a more satisfied social life. 

"College experts say students who participate in extracurricular activities are more engaged in the college experience, and benefits can be seen both in and outside the classroom."

The article's focus wasn't about participation in standard clubs such as German and Chess, but rather in more obscure clubs such as Michigan's Squirrel Club or Harvard's College Cube Club. In other words, the long tail of student interests.

But ask any student activities department how they would feel about a 50% increase in registered campus clubs and you'd experience a face of joyous panic.

Supporting the long tail means the position of student activities also has to shift from gate keeper to facilitator. Instead of registering, formalizing, and monitoring every organization, support a platform that allows students to self-organize around an infinite number of interests and act as the facilitator to introduce like minded students together. 

"Seth have you met Randy, you both like White Water Canoeing" 

Allowing bizarre peer-to-peer learning communities to form through the long tail will not only increase engagement, but also will lead to longer lasting friendships because the commonality of "we're the only ones who love XYZ" is already established. As John Gardner, president of the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education said in the USA Today article:

"Friendship formation is task No. 1 for most students. If you don't make friends, you're lonely, you're anxious, you feel sort of adrift."

New tools are supporting schools as they shift towards a more decentralized peer-to-peer engagement model.

Through the schools using our Red Rover campus directory tool, we can actually visualize, and for the first time quantify, what the long tail of engagement looks like. 

Students Helping Students

Kansas State University's "Students Helping Students" campaign has the potential to be a national theme for peer-to-peer learning. For those who've had us on campus working with your student leaders, you should recognize the Blender Events and Flash Mobs throughout the video. Enjoy!

What If We DO Succeed in Increasing Student Engagement?

Over the weekend, I was talking with a group of students and advisors from Kutztown University about student engagement. In Swift Kick, we use dance floors to describe how student leaders are the ones in the center of the dance (fully engaged), and the rest of the student body (60-84% according to NSSE) are against the wall, not participating. It looks like this:

  

If the above image represents an oil reserve, the outside area represents the largest pool of potential energy at an institution.

Lots of tools are great at helping student affairs departments better extract 2% more energy from the, already involved, student leaders by automating paperwork etc, but what about the rest of the oil reserve?

The goal should be to unleash more of the potential energy, or in other words, get more students engaged, but what happens if we actually DO succeed? Image tomorrow, 20% more of your campus shows up at your office and wants to get involved...

When I told this to the Kutztown people, there was a look of joyous panic on their faces. Joyous because they succeeded at solving student apathy, panic because they knew they couldn't support a 20% increase in engagement with their current resources. Think about it....

• 20% more office space requests for their group
• 20% more room reservations for events 
• 20% more marketing material needing approved
• 20% more paperwork to fill out
• 20% more groups to monitor
• 20% more people needing an advisor to listen to their love spats
  

With school budgets already hurting, and student affairs budgets pulled as far as they can go, it's NOT possible to support much more engagement on campus with our current model.

If the vision is to see 90%,70% or even 50% of an institution engaged, the ONLY way to do this is to decentralize engagement by building systems that automatically facilitate peer-to-peer connections. It's about rethinking the role of student affairs from the gate keepers of engagement to the facilitators of peer-to-peer introductions.

7 Steps to Awesome: The Tech of a Leadership Conference

I promised the good student affairs folk of the Penn State system that I would write up a draft outline of a tech plan for a state wide student leadership event. I delayed a bit, so that we could finish up this new sachat platform - I think it's an important example of the goal.

This will be a picture of what is possible, and the benefits, complete with notes. While I will aim at "reasonable and doable," the degree of difficulty will vary by campus. This certainly isn't THE way to do this, it is a draft plan to pick apart and play with.

This plan isn't about just getting something up or what can be done in an hour, this plan is about creating a cost effective community that will help your leaders be successful.

Goals:

1) Build a statewide community of student leaders. Use the in person experience as a catalyst for building an always-available community online.

Notes: Many leadership conferences focus on skills. "Sit in a Educational Session and learn what you need to know, then go do it." While skills matter, engagement is more important. Community leads to engagement, conversation, and retention.

Student leaders often face frustration on their own campus. Most of their peer students just don't care as much. Giving them easy access to peer student leaders, who do care as much, will help them maintain their own motivation while building their skills.

2) Teach and encourage student leaders to share their model of high education involvement and education via social media and the internet.

Notes: Sharing models of engagement is good for the school (great content for the web, first year experience, etc.) and for the student - they have a positive digital identity that will help them find a job.

The Plan and Steps:

1) Use a public collaboration space to plan the events of the conference. I recommend wikispaces.com Start with the free version.

Here's a great template from an education technology conference happening next weekend.

Notes:

- The point of using a wiki without a password vs. google docs is that you are modeling for the students how to plan in the open. If they begin to plan their events on campus in the open, they will, in turn, be modeling the various stages of involvement for other students around campus. This is a very good thing.

- Wikis are not magic work solvers. While they do open up the possibility of community members contributing some effort, don't count on it. It will likely be the same 3 people that always to 90% of the work, plus one surprise over achiever that will come out of no where and be very helpful.

- Wikis will make it easier for the planning group, and early interested students, to get on the same page. Compare it to sending lots of emails, where the information is in small pieces spread everywhere. Wikis bring it together.

- Click on the "Notify Me" tab on the top of the page to get change notices to your email. This makes it easy to stay up on things.

2) Set up a Facebook Group (not a fan page), put a link to it on the wiki.

Notes:

- I feel conflicted about this step. Facebook Groups don't last, as a general rule. Even with student groups, most get set up and forgotten. The goal here is to establish a longer term platform. If Facebook groups typically die, does that mean any lines of connection or artifacts (pictures) burried within the Facebook groups are taking away from energy that could have gone into something else? I'm not sure. It's close, but I think not. I think it's worth trying both and seeing where the energy goes. It might just be both. Facebook has changed the design now, to be more stream oriented, and the message boards now allow threaded messages and replies in emails. All of this adds up to: maybe Facebook groups are worth another shot.

- At the very least, it's worth including in the organization process to give students a place to post their pictures. Pictures are one of the most important artifacts of community. Profile pictures, pictures of fun, pictures of people - it's one of the best online reinforcement of feelings that we have.

3) Set up a twitter account specifically for penn state leaders. Something like twitter.com/pennslead

4) Spend 30 minutes learning Mailchimp by watching their howto videos.

Notes:

- Reach out to the attendees as soon as you have a list. Make it a goal of having a preliminary list as quickly as possible. The first email should be very short "We're excited for the conference! Sign up for the facebook group here or follow us on twitter."

- If you just want to use Mailchimp for the run up to the conference, it will be free. If you fall in love and want to use all the features over a longer period (to send lots of emails), it's $30 a month. The tracking alone is worth it.

- Mailchimp will allow you to see who opens the email, and who clicks on the email. Send a follow up email with a different subject line within two days to everyone that didn't open the first email (Mailchimp makes this easy.)

- Mailchimp will be one of three communication methods you will use. You will also use Facebook and Twitter (depending on how many students follow- I would expect 10% or so.) Twitter will get you to the cellphones if the student wants it, now you have Email, Facebook, and Text Messaging covered. This makes you awesome.

5) Now look at the students that have joined the Facebook group and how many have followed on twitter. These are your leaders among leaders. They are your biggest enthusiasts. Send them a personal email asking them to get involved in planning the conference. Send them to the wiki with a specific task and see who follows through.

Notes:

- Again, two things are happening here simultaneously - you are getting the work done, but you are also teaching. Think of this process as an ed session in and of itself. If this sounds like a lot of time - and it's a couple of hours - ask yourself how much time you would spend prepping and delivering an ed session for the purposes of educating the students. Why not teach them online? And doing the work with be teaching yourself as well.

6) With the help of the students, fingers crossed you'll find some techies, build a collaborative place online to put content up from the conference when it is happening. The goal is to generate a lot of content at the conference and then keep it going afterwards. Whatever method you decide on below, you will use the mailchimp interface to notify students about it before the conference and after the conference.

There are two main options for pulling on the content together in one public place:

A) A posterous blog, where lots of people can email pictures and words. This creates one central public blog. Students with smart phones can email pictures directly from their seats to this blog.

Notes:

- This is the easiest and fastest platform to set up. It has it's own comment system which works well.

- Every student that emails in content will get posted on the common group blog as well as creating their own personal blog. Apologies if this makes your head hurt, it's an important point.

- Everything the student emails to

B) An aggregated Wordpress blog like the new student affairs collaborative platform.

Notes:

- This requires the selection of a common word that students would attach to their blogs, pictures, or tweets. Use something short and easy to remember. Best if it is the same as the twitter account. Like #pennslead

- We went to this system because we wanted to aggregate twitter and blogs in the same place using one common tag. We wanted student affairs professionals to have their own blogs where they wrote about what ever they wanted. When they wanted to add their content to the collaborative space, they simply add "#sachat" to the blog or tweet and it shows up on the central blog.

- This system is more flexible and allows participants to use whatever they are already using (instead of asking everyone to use posterous.) More flexibility for users requires a little more investment in the platform. You would hire someone to build this using Word Press. It's not a huge expense, but expect about $1000 up front and $200 a year to keep it going.

- This system would work with whatever blogs your students were using. So you could encourage them to set up their own blog on penn state's system, and then pull together only the content with the tag #pennslead.

- Notice that this system works. We'll be posting more on this in the future, but the student affairs blog is a great and growing community. It's a perfect example of exactly what we would want to see for the student leaders of any state.

7) If you use Wordpress, take the RSS feed and add put it into mail chimp as a RSS -> Email Campaign. You can set this to go out every Wednesday morning if their is new content on the central blog. (posterous has it's own email notification settings that students will control on their own.)

Notes:

- To build the community, you'll need both content and notification of the content, until it is a habit. This will take a while.

- Follow up with those students you found in step 5. Ask them to create content. Tell them they are special (because they are) and you need their help in creating this place for them to connect and learn online.

- As staff members, you can keep putting content into the blog and sending it out. The goal of course, is to transition from staff to students over time. Keep pushing them, it will happen.

- You will have lots of assessment to show anyone. Mailchimp will give you open rates and click through. You'll know traffic to the blog, new content, and comments. Share these stats with the group to keep them motivated.

Fire away with comments and questions.

At Student Orientation, Don't Forget About Bridging Social Capital

The Bystander Effect is a well-known psychological study conducted by Bibb Latane and John Darley that grew out of the stabbing death of Kitty Genovese in 1964 while eyewitnesses looked on but did nothing to help. According to Wikipedia:

...individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders. In other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.

Robert Putnam's famous book on the collapse of the American community, "Bowling Alone," notes that buried in the Bystander Effect research is also the finding that the amount of social capital within a group plays a large role in determining if someone will help or not. The greater the social capital, the greater the chance they will help. In other words, you're more likely to help a family member in trouble than a totally random stranger.

Social capital refers to the value one gains from the relationships with others (human capital) or things (physical capital). For this post let's only focus on human capital which can be further broken down into:

- Bonding Social Capital: The value one gains from their relationships with close family and friends
- Bridging Social Capital: The value one gains from their relationships with associates
- Maintained Social Capital (Newer Idea): The value one gains from their relationships with people who used to be close family and friends, but are now physically very far away (think transition from High School to College).

In the Genovese story, the lack of engagement by the eyewitnesses likely means they didn't know each other very well and that the level of Bridging Social Capital would've been presumably very low. (Note: I am speculating here as this is not documented in the study.)

Latane and Darley's study highlights the value of simple Bridging Social Capital with a test in which an actor walks down a hallway and either says "hello" to a subject walking in the opposite direction or ignores them. Then a few moments later the actor has an apparent seizure. If the actor said "hello," the subject was quicker to provide help than if there was no communication.

Little interactions, even saying "hello," add up to stronger Bridging Social Capital between people within a community. As Robert Putnam puts it:

Like pennies dropped in a cookie jar, each of these encounters is a tiny investment in social capital.

A theme for new student orientation is to funnel people into student groups as fast as possible because, as Tinto says, there is a correlation between student involvement and retention. This will likely lead to higher levels of Bonding Social Capital on campus because people will create more intimate relationships within the groups.

At the same time, don't forget about the little things that can be done to add more pennies to the cookie jar to increase the Bridging Social Capital of the campus. Sometimes a simple "hello" or smile goes a long way.

Whenever I run a new student orientation, I have student leaders stand at the door to welcome new students as they enter. It's not a big production nor is it glamorous, but the impact in terms of the new students feeling comfortable can be seen right away.

Then, throughout the year, think about what your student groups are doing to increase the level of Bridging Social Capital on campus. It doesn't have to be a big production, but rather something as simple as a Free Hugs Campaign.

Little interactions can have a big impact on student engagement.

School Website Design is Part of the Student Engagement Problem

In the first version of Red Rover's navigation bar, we included a 'Live Help' button (pictured below) that generated 5-8 sessions with students per day.

As more students joined Red Rover, we realized the 'Help' section needed to include more options other than just 'Live Help'. So we created a new 'Help' section (pictured below) and moved 'Live Help' under it.

Though we expanded the 'Help' options and 'Live Help' was still there, we went from 5-8 'Live Help' session per day to ZERO 'Live Help' sessions per day. Once 'Live Help' was moved, not a single student used the feature. It's not that an equal amount of traffic was dispersed to the other sections, but rather the entire 'Help' section was used less. I could say that our software just got better and thus students needed less help, but that's probably not the case.

With 'Live Help' directly on the main page we generated 5-8 sessions per day, but if the student had to click once more to use the feature it generated ZERO sessions per day. That's the difference one click deep on a website can make in terms of engagement.

So how many clicks does it take to get to your department's information on your school's website? Start at the homepage and literally count the number of clicks.

Each additional click means fewer students will actually see your content.

I know website design and UX design are not two more hats you're excited to put on over your 30 other hats, but as students consume more information online, our website design is becoming increasingly more important.

How to Make Student Engagement Contagious

In 1969, famed psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a social experiment looking at the contagiousness of engagement. Wired magazine's Jonah Lehrer accurately summarizes the experiment:

In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people were looking up, 60 percent of passerby looked up. When there were three people, the percentage jumped to 65 percent, and, when there were four people, nearly 80 percent of strangers stopped and stared upwards.

Here's a video of the experiment in action:

In the unrelated setting of the 2009 Sasquatch Music Festival, a replication of Milgram's experiment occurred as seen in the video below:

The first dancer was alone for a long while, but loved every moment. Some would consider him to be a bit socially off. Then #2 shows up, and from his facial expression, seems to look back at his friends as if he were doing it as a dare or joke. Then, #3 shows up and this is where it gets serious. From that moment on, the level of engagement exponentially grows. This is no longer one person dancing, or a dare, or a joke; this is a contagious social movement.

Connecting the ideas together gets me thinking about the role of student leaders on campus. The current paradigm for student leaders is to host engaging activities (e.g. dance party, cookouts, musicians, etc) and then try to get people to participate. Most schools have a very difficult time achieving success with this model. Also in this model, student leaders tend to look like the sole person dancing by themselves looking a bit off from the rest of the social scene as was the case with the Sasquatch dancer. Yes you are called a leader for being #1, but the real engagement doesn't happen until #3 shows up.

In terms of student engagement, maybe student leaders should stop trying to be #1 by hosting the events and instead find the random #1s on your campus and support them by being #3.

Stop creating events that you think are good and look for students on your campus that are doing cool stuff and support them. Stop being the leader and start being the supporter.

Speaker, Edtech and Peanut Butter - The Case for Reengineering Student Activities

In college, I tried to start an Entrepreneur Club, but never got past the paperwork. The Student Activities office manager handed me three pages of clearly defined step-by-step guidelines she created on how to start a new group. It was evident she had spent a long time creating the document and was proud of the organization. The problem was I had no desire to go through three pages of steps. Lazy? Maybe. Normal behavior for most uninvolved students? Yes.

From the college's perspective, there's a cost associated to each new club and, under the current system, a college couldn't handle a mass influx of clubs. Instead, colleges have to focus on the front end of the participation tail such as German and Soccer Club to maximize the participation versus output. In the current paradigm, it makes sense to try and squeeze out the maximum value and say that's good enough, even if the current maximum value is only around 16 to 40 percent student participation.

Today there are many online tools that schools use to make the process more efficient. They do work and do speed up the process, but the problem remains that these tools keep us in the same paradigm as before. Student Activities continues to act as the gate keeper in organizing anything or anyone on campus and there is still a cost to maintaining each new club.

In yesterday's post, Kevin said:

"The individual goal then, for education, is to provide every student with a group where they can be on the positive side of the hierarchy, increase their engagement and participation, and experience all of the positive mental effects of that status."

My formation of an Entrepreneur Club was my attempt to get to the positive side of the hierarchy. I was part of much larger groups such as my major and graduation year, but, with both of these, I was on the lower end of the hierarchy. My school's organizing system blocked me from participating unless I was highly motivated. This needs to change.

In Clay Shirky's TED talk, "Institutions vs Collaboration," he lays out the mathematics of participation and what it would take for an institution to allow anyone to participate. It gets good around 9:30 when he says:

"If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system...Build the system so that anyone can contribute at any amount."

It's time for Student Activities to re-engineer its "gate keeper" system and allow students to self organize and participate, no matter how big or small. Not only will the increased participation cost the institution little to no extra resources, but it will also allow people like me to find the positive side of the hierarchy.

An example of this self-organization is WeFollow. WeFollow is an extremely simple tool for Twitter that allows users to build a directory of interests.

A user can input up to three tags to describe themselves. Each tag is then grouped together and users are ranked based on popularity. Anyone can look at any tag and see who's in the group, how big is the group, and where they fit on the hierarchy of the group. Picking only three tags is a challenge, but reduces spam in the system and forces self-focus.

In thinking about adding myself to WeFollow, I had lots of tag options to pick from -- Chicago, Education, Human, Male, Husband etc... But, the broader the tag, the further I found myself down the list of hierarchy. So, I clarified my tags and choose "Speaker," "Edtech" and "Peanut Butter."

Speaker is the largest pool and I'm pretty far down the list. Edtech is a smaller pool than education, so I'm in the upper 1/3, but, with peanut butter, I'm right near the top, and, anyone who knows me personally, knows I love peanut butter! Granted the tag only has 3 people, but that's the point.

I then connected with my fellow peanut butter lovers on Twitter and off we went. This connection or participation basically cost Twitter and WeFollow nothing, but increased participation in both. By re-engineering an older closed system directory, WeFollow allows anyone to participate, no matter how big or small.

This is not about Student Activities using new tools that make the old paradigm more efficient, it's about Student Activities re-engineering itself to a new paradigm.