Located in Omaha, NE, College of St. Mary is a MobileUp Software customer who uses our mobile delivery platform to inform and engage its student body of approximately 1,100 students.
Though the school just recently launched its app (August 2018), student life leaders report widespread adoption of the app and a positive impact on their efforts to inform and involve students in campus activities.
We asked Kris Czerwiec, Director of Student Leadership, to share his thoughts about how the MobileUp app has impacted the College of Saint Mary campus.
Kris Czerwiec
Director of Student Leadership at College of Saint Mary
What were your goals and/or problems you were hoping to solve by getting an app for your organization?
We are trying to get more involvement with our students across the board.
We are a small private college and the majority of our student population are commuters. One of our strengths is our small tightly knit community of students, staff, and faculty. However, much of that community feeling is with our residential students.
We moved to an engagement app not only to get news about events and college resources in the hands of students (literally) through their phone but also to extend that sense of community to commuter students, even those that only have one or two classes a semester.
What features of your MobileUp app are most effective/popular with your mobile audience?
There are a couple of features we use effectively.
Discussions
We use separate Discussion boards for the students and for the staff and faculty.
The students regularly use it to post pictures and things going on around campus (especially with the student organizations) and we also use this feature for contests.
For example, we just had Fall Break and we asked the students to share a picture of what they did during that time. We then chose one of them to win a free Amazon gift card.
One of the submissions was a gender reveal party that had happened over the weekend.
As faculty and staff, the app allows us to learn about things that are going on all over campus that we usually wouldn’t know about.
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Students connect in the app’s Discussion boards by sharing photos and short updates about their activities on and off campus. Contests help encourage students to contribute their messages.
Traditions and Activities
Students also really like completing activities. It has been really interesting to be able to go to the highlight reel so that we can view what life is like at CSM for our students. We generally push them to continue to complete tasks with contests. We haven’t used the leaderboard yet but I think that will lead to even more participation if they have a prize they are working toward.![103018-csm-screen-4.jpg 103018-csm-screen-4.jpg](https://mobileup.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/103018-csm-screen-4.jpg)
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The app presents students with a list of activities they “complete” by taking a photo at various locations on campus. A highlight reel (right) compiles the photos from the activities into one feed.
Calendars and Events
The calendar feature is the most popular. Our students, staff, and faculty all use this function.
We have multiple calendars that they can choose from and depending on what role they have the default calendars change.
The “students” role includes the programming calendar, which has all the events and activities happening around CSM outside of the classroom and through my office.
The student organizations programming calendar has all of the programs and events the student organizations have scheduled.
We also have the academic calendar available in the app as well as all of the home athletic games.
Further, we have a special tile that we put on the home screen when we want to emphasize events like our orientation week-long programming or for Health Week (programming over the course of a week highlighting health education), Rainbow Days (our week long LBGT pride event), and Friendship Week (a week-long focus on making and maintaining friends).
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Students and faculty select which school calendars they want to view and they save individual events to their personal smartphone calendars by tapping the plus signs.
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How do you promote the app to add new users?
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How does your MobileUp app help you in your job?
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From left to right, these screens show how College of Saint Mary sends a notification that ties into a tile on the app home screen and a calendar listing of related events.
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In what other areas are you thinking about using the app in the future?
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