While more and more universities and colleges are looking into the opportunities offered by the third-party social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook or by private social networking applications offered by vendors, Elon University has chosen a DIY approach.
Over the course of 4 months, a team of four built what now looks like a pretty good “Facebook clone,” a social networking application including networks for students, faculty and staff members, alumni and parents: E², Elon’s Town Square.
I first heard about this interesting initiative about a month ago.
David Morton, Elon’s Web Manager, will be presenting a webinar on how to build your own social networking website for Higher Ed Experts during Social Networking Week, a 5-webinar event scheduled on October 1-5, 2007 and featuring 4 other experts on the different aspects of this vast topic (if you’re interested in this event, make sure to join HEE to receive updates about the program and registration information and to get the 50% discount reserved to members on all HEE webinars. Membership is open to people working in institutions and is free. Register at www.higheredexperts.com/register).
In the meantime, this interview I did with Dan Anderson, Assistant Vice President and Director of University Relations at Elon University, along with the screenshot of the Elon Phoenix’s profile (click on the thumbnail) I took should help you learn more about this original approach.
1) What are your goals for this new tool?
Our main goal is to enhance the Elon University community, with special emphasis on enhancing alumni and parent connections with Elon. We believe E2 (pronounced E-squared), the Elon’s Town Square, will allow people to build relationships, share their interests and expertise with other members of the community, enhance their career networking and have a great deal of fun.
Specifically, alumni can reconnect with their classmates and professors, share their latest family news and accomplishments through their personal profiles, and organize alumni chapters, gatherings and activities.
Students can learn about and interact with their professors, form campus groups, plan events and use E2 connections to work with alumni and parents to find internships or career opportunities.
Parents can meet and interact with other Elon parents, learn more about faculty and staff members, create and join groups, find others with mutual interests and be a networking and mentoring resource for Elon students.
2) Why did you decided to build it yourself?
We have had great success at Elon in building custom tools that fit our specific needs and goals. We can design features that help us meet our specific goals, and then adjust and add new features as we get feedback from our users. Our previous in-house products that have been highly successful include E-Net (campus information central), E-Web – our custom-built content management system, and the new Elon athletics site.
3) How much did it cost?
All aspects of E2 were handled by our University Relations staff members: Dan Anderson (Director of University Relations), David Morton (Web Site Manager), John David Parsons (Web Applications Programmer) and Christopher Eyl (Graphic Designer). The system resides on our existing Web servers, so there was no hardware cost. There were no additional costs. The development
took about four months.
4) What are the main features? Is it integrated with Facebook or other third-party social networking websites?
Main features include personal profiles, groups, messaging, events, a community photo gallery, extensive search functions, and a resume/work portfolio system that allows users to create professional vitae and work samples and share with people outside the system (a career-networking tool that will be valuable to students and alumni). There is also a flagging system to allow all members to report objectionable content posted on the site.
The site is not integrated with any other sites. It is a closed network, open only to Elon alumni, students, parents and faculty and staff members.
Now that they have a site with many of the same features the giant public sites have (“personal profiles, groups, messaging, events, a community photo gallery, extensive search functions”), it would be interesting for Elon to create a one-way gate that allows its private online community to “import” features from third party platforms.
For example, what if Elon students and alumni on E2 could view profile info and applications installed in members’ Facebook profiles? If they could do this without exposing E2 data to non-Elon Facebook users, they would have had added a really new (and highly valuable) function to their platform.
Lots of potential (although it might require what amounts to a single sign-on scheme between E2 and Facebook, something that would be tricky to design at this time). Nonetheless, cool stuff.
It would be interesting to know if Elon has participation and registration goals over time for membership in its E2 community. How many alumni does Elon feel it needs to make the community “effective”? How will they know if they’ve succeeded?
I agree with Andy on the importing from other social networks. My initial research with students showed that they want to be able to just log in at one place, not have to go through multiple sites to keep in touch with friends. I can see this being very effective for parents and alumni who are past the ‘facebook age’, however.
Hi everybody, the import feature is a good suggestion, and I’ve heard Facebook provides the APIs to allow for this kind of import. Brad: you hit the nail on the head when it comes to E2 members being beyond the Facebook generation. The system was initially designed for alumni only, but it just made sense to include as many groups as possible. While it has been a tougher sell to students, we have over 1000 already signed up. Our total student body population is under 5000, so despite the additional login required, the students are still coming in droves.
I am a student at Elon and like the alumni feature because I hope it will help with job connections. Even though we have good alumni networking through our career center, this is easier to get e-mails from alumni who may be able to help us with internships/jobs. The most unique thing about E2 is that we can post a resume and portfolio items so alumni can look at our accomplishments and contact us, too.
Wow, great feedback on this post.
I do agree with Andy and Brad about the integration with Facebook to make it even easier for students to use E2 with their Facebook credentials (which is why I asked the question originally ;-) That’s the path suggested by Sam Jackson in an interview I did with him about social networking websites for my University Business column about the topic.
I think this is great! I am an Elon undergrad alumni as well as a member of the law school’s charter class. I think that E2 has been a great tool to keep in touch with old friends as well as network with other groups. A page has even been started called “Attorneys” so that the law school can network with alumni and parents of Elon students who are attorneys. I can’t compliment the Elon Tech staff enough!
I think the big success here is the job networking opportunities. But I’m curious to know if Elon also has or had a student intranet (with conference folders), and, if they did, was it replaced by the social network? We launched our social network (The Hub) — which wasn’t as well done as Elon’s — last year and had about 1,000 people networked in the first few months, but we also had a student intranet that had been around for 13 years and Facebook to compete with. Plus, we didn’t have job networking capabilities. Membership has wained and we’re looking to migrate them to another network. I definitely think something like E2 is the way to go in lieu of the classic intranet.
For people who are interested…Andrew Careaga wrote about Karine’s entry here re: Elon, and I commented today about the percentage of students at Elon with friends inside and outside of the Elon network on Facebook:
http://highered.prblogs.org/2007/06/13/forget-facebook-grow-your-own-social-network/
Thanks for the link, Andy. I read your comment on Andy’s blog and wanted to include the link to this post, but you did it first ;-)