Residence Halls have the potential to delivery high-impact educational opportunities for your students on campus through service education, leadership development, and countless other outcomes that could align with your institutional priorities. Engage gives you the ability to capture the amazing work that is being done by residential staff. Here are a few ideas for expanding your usage of Engage into your Housing or Residence Life department!
Residence Hall Management
Develop organization pages for your department and each of your residential communities to provide a one-stop-shop for information for residents and staff of that particular community. These organization pages can include:
- Contact information for leaders and staff
- Communication opportunities through the messaging, text messaging, and discussion wall features
- Social media connectivity to an already established online presence (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
- Transparent mission, values, and goals for community in the organization's description
- Important documents and forms uploaded and housed on the organization's page, such as roommate agreements, community standards, incident reports, on-call protocol, RA applications, and more.
- Photo galleries documenting move-in, programs, and memorable experiences
- News stories shared with the whole institution that share what a community has accomplished
- Allowing building councils and RAs to see available funds and submit purchase/funding requests that align with your institution's finance approval process
Capture Residential Involvement
There are a multitude of ways to see and manage the involvement activity of your residential students through reporting within the site.
- Utilize Involvement Imports so that students are automatically added to their residential community pages upon first-time login. You can place students in particular organizations and grant them specific positions, ensuring community rostering information is up-to-date.
- Import demographic data to create student profiles that showcase residential status, housing placement, international, transfer, and athlete status, gender, ethnicity, GPA, and so many other data points! You can then use these data points to cross reference who is attending various campus events or participating in other involvement experiences.
- Categorize programmatic offerings to align with department outcomes to better report on learning outcomes through the year.
- Capture real-time attendance at residential events through the event check-in app, card-swipe, file upload, or manual tracking.
Provide Oversight for your Entire Department
Adding an administrative branch specifically for your housing and residence life department allows you to centralize your department’s unique operations. Admin branches provide the central staff of your area selective administrative oversight of various processes and features. Check out how this branch might be structured below, with one centralized branch overseeing residential communities, hall councils, and even an organization dedicated to RA training and development.
With an administrative branch, administrators can:
- Access and manage the content being created and shared within your residential organizations
- Grant community leaders the ability to submit events that will be hosted by residential communities that align with departmental event registration process
- Create and manage positions (and their respective permissions) that only exist within your department (such as coordinators, resident assistants/leaders, and residents)
Always feel free to reach out to your consultant about how you can better capture the unique experiences your students are having through residential life on campus!