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Special Annual Awards
2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Social Networking for Admissions
8/1/2008
CLUBRED ENABLES incoming UNL freshmen to interact and form connections with peers-- before they arrive on campus.
TECHNOLOGY AREA: SOCIAL NETWORKING FOR ADMISSIONS
Innovator: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Working with applicants and admittees in their own milieu of social networking, one university is so successful, its enrollees end up recruiting new candidates.
In the world of Web 2.0, social networking is paramount. It stands to reason, then, that a brand-new social networking effort at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln would attract quite a bit of attention from students and faculty members alike.
The effort, called ClubRed, essentially is a private social network for admitted University of Nebraska undergrads. Before these students ever arrive on campus, they can set up profiles and upload photos, search for friends, check and send messages, join discussions, and read and comment on blogs-- all within ClubRed. Students also can review their personalized Office of Admissions checklist for preparing to enroll.
According to project lead Adam Stahr, senior admissions counselor, the most significant aspect of the network is its integration with a customer relationship management (CRM) solution from Talisma, which allows for personalized "marketing" messages to each student, based on that student's position in the admissions process.
"The integration of our private social network with our CRM technology results in an extremely powerful and more easily leveraged recruitment tool," says Stahr. "It's made us more responsive and receptive to the needs of our prospective students."
The effort began in the summer of 2007. After the university's freshman class grew by a total of 1,000 students in three years, admissions officers set out to find a way to improve admitted student yield and embrace the online communication style of today's teenagers. After considering tools from Ning and the option of building their own social networking technology in-house, technologists opted to go with the U360 social networking product from Straxis.
Later, with the help of a homegrown front-end application processing system that interfaces directly with the school's student information system, technologists facilitated the quick exchange of data across systems. The homegrown tool, NUView (not to be confused with the commercial solution by the same name), provides application, enrollment deposit, and orientation information to Talisma on a nightly basis, enabling ClubRed to interface with the CRM tools daily.
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