Lessons Learned Building our own Online Community

Matthew Matsuoka will share UC Berkeley’s experience building an in-house alumni network. The @cal Alumni Network is based on the concept of a platform of Cal-centric services: starting with a public profile for alumni and grads and eventually expanding to other campus services like email accounts, giving history, and transcript services.

Matthew will talk about why the UC Berkeley team decided to leave their vendor platform and how they built their online community from scratch with only internal resources. He will discuss the outcomes and challenges and how UC Berkeley is positioned for the future, given the constantly changing landscape of vendors and social media sites.

Matthew will also leave time to answer both administrative and IT questions, as well as give a tour of the site as an end user and as an administrator.

Matthew Matsuoka – Bio

Matthew Matsuoka leads a team of web developers who work for the Marketing and Communications team within University Relations at UC Berkeley. He manages all the central alumni and development communications assets including the @cal Alumni Network, Give to Cal, The Campaign for Berkeley, Commencement, Homecoming, UC Berkeley’s Volunteer web portals and social media assets.

Transcript

1. Lessons Learned Building our own Online Community http://cal.berkeley.edu Matthew Matsuoka Director, Interactive Media UC Berkeley University Relations Marketing and Communications mm@berkeley.edu
2. Overview Talk about why we built our own alumni community Review some of the lessons we learned Tour of @cal Questions and Answers
3. Background Started @cal alumni network in 2002 Social Media changed everything Began to rethink our alumni network Decided to let students keep their electronic identity after graduation: email and login
4. Why we still need alumni network Alumni told us they still expected to have an electronic directory Still a few drivers in existing directory Felt we would need a platform of alumni centric services for the future Data collection still valuable
5. Key to success: University centric services Email forwarding Search and networking Job search and postings Alumni/student mentoring Public profile with degree information Messaging Giving history View unofficial transcripts
6. Other keys to success Collect new types of data: social media handles, interests, etc. Tight control over privacy Control the display and output of data Control user interface and branding Mobile ready Platform for future alumni services
7. Who should do it? Pick a vendor? Custom development? In-house development?
8. Staffing for concepts and wireframes Social media manager: project manager Web developer: database, AJAX, JQuery Web developer: webmaster, LAMP stack Front end developer: CSS, Responsive In-house editorial and design staff
9. How we did it Early prototypes, paper and HTML Functional wireframes Agile development Jira issues and bug tracker Leverage campus community Soft launch August 2012
10. Tour of @cal http://cal.berkeley.edu
11. Results 18,000 new registrants since August soft-launch Only actively promoting in since March Average over 50 new registrant a day Average over 100 unique logins a day About half of new registrants create public profiles Over 300 messages sent per month Business school and Optometry school now using as the default online community
12. Conclusions Students want to keep their identity: email Alumni and new grads really like the public profile University branding adds credibility to messages Agile development helped create efficiencies Leveraging campus community resources helped for de-bugging and UI development Alumni will expect more online services Using campus identity for alumni create opportunity for better campus services