Engage's built-in Event tools allow you to tailor your events process to your campus needs, including a variety of skip logic and reviewer workflow options. Every campus is a little different, so to help you imagine your campus' unique process, we have assembled three campus examples for your consideration. When reviewing these stories and evaluating your own campus needs, consider the following questions:
- How do I hope a student should experience the Events Process?
- How will a student be incentivized to submit their event to Engage?
- What should a student already have secured for their event process before beginning their event submission to Engage, if anything?
- What additional services could a student secure through the event process, if any?
- Will reviewers on my Events Process be informed as a courtesy, or is their approval required before I can approve the event?
- Do reviewers on our Events Process need to execute tasks such as meeting with the organization or reserving equipment before the event can be published?
- How will I leverage Events Process data in my reporting and assessment?
The answers to these questions often depends on if your intentions for your Events Process are primarily focused on practical reservation, risk management, assessment, preparation checklist, or marketing purposes - or some combination of multiple of these possibilities! Each of the below campuses focused on a different set of priorities, but there are endless additional ways to consider your unique process.
Clark University
Clark University has designed their Events Process to ensure everything a student needs to host an event is included directly within just one Engage form. Event submitters are able to reserve space, room set-up, and more while also setting up the page that will later market their event.
In a particularly special touch, the campus is also taking advantage of Forms functionality to enrich their Events process with additional helper text throughout the process. The all-in-one experience offered by this approach can encourage students to get their events up on Engage regardless of whether marketing the event is a personal priority for them.
We consider this approach to be using the Events Process primarily to meet practical reservation objectives.
Emerson College
At Emerson, the Events process is designed to represent the needs of both the Student Engagement & Leadership office and their collaborators within Residential Life. This campus leverages just one administrative branch, so they have designed their event process with careful skip logic to ensure the event is seen by the correct administrators on campus. Students must obtain a space reservation before submitting their event.
Emerson created pages on their event process to help the campus report on the kind of events they are approving, and in particular how many programs their Residential Life department hosts that match their learning outcomes. Event submitters also complete fields that help the campus prepare for any risk associated with the event. Submissions that identify aspects of their event the campus considers adding risk receive additional reviewers who can stay informed about events taking place on campus and take action accordingly. This Events Process has also been designed to direct events to different sets of reviewers depending on the students' responses.
We consider this approach to be using the Events Process primarily to meet risk management and assessment objectives.
Western Washington University
Western Washington University (WWU) has an incredibly brief Events Process! After closely reviewing their campus process, WWU identified that there are actually two major and separate components of preparing for an event: managing practical components such as space, and then marketing the event. Engage's Event process is actually used only for the marketing portion of this workflow at WWU. Instead, individuals submit an Event Planning Checklist form, a space reservation request, and later their event submission, which is compared to their previous two submissions.
This campus is able to successfully encourage students to submit events despite the multiple processes in large part due to the excellent work they have done centralizing event marketing on Engage. Events posted on Engage are shared in other campus calendars and presented on digital screens on campus, an automation accomplished using Engage's available data feeds.
The checklist form is a combination of providing reminders to students of where to go to reserve various resources they may need for their event, and also collecting some preparatory information that administrators need for the event far in advance. The form even provides a link to a special formatted excel file that calculates for the student when they should have key components of their event preparation complete. The concept of an event checklist is also sometimes baked directly into the Events Process by other campuses, especially campuses with minimal to no approval process for their Events, who instead are designing the form to reflect just the students' needs. WWU does require an approval process, but they have learned that for their students, separating the approval process into two separate parts helps students submit necessary information in a more timely manner.
We consider this approach to be using the Events Process primarily to meet preparation checklist and marketing objectives.