The goal of the Campus Club Connection is to make Students’ Association organizations easier to run and maintain. While there are some innovative concepts in this new system, the Student Activities Office should follow through, making the information input simple and starting the system as soon as possible, so that SA groups can still obtain new members in their clubs.
The online room and event registration system will help eliminate some of the current stresses when planning an activity. This feature, if programmed properly, will prove to be extremely beneficial to SA groups. One of the greatest features of the Campus Club Connection is its ability to maintain a member list for both current and prospective members in a manner that can be easily accessed and transferred from year to year. These lists will allow leaders of SA groups to quickly and easily contact their organizations through online e-mail lists.
Care should be taken, however, to make sure the member information system is as simple and straightforward as possible. Requiring groups to input their members’ gender, majors, residence halls, home cities and states as the current plan specifies will result in few organizations using the Campus Club Connection to its fullest potential. The college already has this information – there is no need to input it all again.
The SAO needs to make this new system as easy as possible to avoid deterring use. Instead, only the name, e-mail address and class year should be necessary input in this system, so that students will be able to easily supply information about their members while being able to automatically delete members off the e-mail list once they graduate.
In order to ensure the success of the Campus Club Connection’s online calendar, the SAO needs to be able to differentiate its calendar from the many others by constantly promoting itself as the premier place to see a listing of events on campus. Students, faculty and staff members must be able to see and submit events without any problems, and events from the other calendars need to be cross-listed or included in the Campus Club Connection.
While this is already proving to be a master undertaking before the site has even been opened, this has the potential to be an extremely useful tool for all of the UR community. The SAO just needs to ensure that this system reaches its potential.
