From January 29, 2019:
Overview:
Our project is focused on creating more ways to spark involvement in events on campus. By increasing awareness about the various activities offered throughout the school year, we hope to boost curiosity and encourage community engagement. We have found, and polls have corroborated, that despite the best efforts of our excellent Student Life team, students are not always completely informed about events occurring on and around campus. We hope to create a sustainable and easily manageable method of delivering information regarding events happening on the school grounds, as well as in the greater Bridgewater community.
The Pitch:
Our pitch focused around making the campus community here at Bridgewater College more inclusive and interactive. After early research and reflection on personal experiences, our group created the idea for the E.A.G.L.E. E-genda with the purpose of fostering more campus involvement, especially when it comes to social events run both by the school and by various locations in the town of Bridgewater itself.
Our project was originally designed to be a website with an all-inclusive calendar that featured campus events, athletic events, and greater-Bridgewater community events. The E.A.G.L.E. E-genda would solve a campus wide issue where students could not find information about events they hoped to attend due to a confusing format of the student portal, MyBC. The website would also feature a forum for student posts, including a point-reward system for participating. Additionally, the website would incorporate advertisements from local businesses to provide consistent revenue for our project, as well as increase student awareness of these businesses. We asked for $150 to run the website until we could get the ad system in place, as well as to fund rewards for the student forum.
From the Pitch we received $153.90 in funding, and invaluable feedback from the judges. An overwhelming majority of the feedback was positive, with many judges recognizing the need for such program. We received constructive feedback encouraging us to include the greater Bridgewater community in our project. The negative feedback we received was focused around concerns regarding the security of the user login system we planned to incorporate into our website; a problem we had been working to find a solution for.
We also received a tip from someone at the Pitch, letting us know that Student Life may be working on a similar project, and that we should talk to them about it.
Our Progress:
After the Pitch, our team continued developing the details of our plan, and worked on researching how to build a website. In early December we were able to set up a meeting with several members of Student Life. They were very interested in our project, and they shared with us how their most recent attempts to solve the issue of campus communication had met with significant obstacles, and they were open to suggestions that we had. They said they were unable to help us with our original website idea, since it would cause security issues that they could not address, but they were interested in working with us to research and solve this issue.
Our team worked throughout December and over break, and met with Student Life once more in January, to create a new plan that would address our original problem, but using a new approach. Our goal is to research what students want to see in the way of better communication, focusing especially on how to improve the student portal, MyBC. This research will be conducted using a online survey posted on MyBC, tables set up in the KCC Lobby to survey students, and focus groups designed to encourage student feedback. We will then use that research to work with Student Life and IT to implement the changes that will help increase campus communication and feedback.
At the current stage in our progress, we are making the administrative arrangements for our focus groups and KCC tables. Our first focus group will be held Wednesday, January 30, with two more happening in the next week. We are also monitoring our online survey, which has received 53 responses since being posted one week ago. We are already seeing some great suggestions from students on campus. We are also in the process of setting up a meeting with the newly-hired Campus Events Coordinator.
After receiving permission from the Showker Prize Competition board, we are now planning to use our funds to provide pizza for our focus groups and a raffle prize for our KCC tables, as an incentive to get students to participate.
Obstacles:
Although the ideas behind our project have remained the same, we have had to rethink how we approach our project and what steps we need to take to get there. While this has been challenging, we are very excited and hopeful for our new direction.
Working around sports schedules, academic and other commitments has been challenging, but we have come to realize the importance of communication as a team, as we work to improve campus communication.