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Cornell Brings Online Community Alive, Reduces Email Overload

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Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Business had a robust community on their physical campus, but they needed to figure out how to bring this community online. Their current tools, including a communication portal, mul-tiple document sharing platforms and other dated technologies, were clunky, one-way and un-engaging. The students were also facing email overload, which made it difficult for them to hone in on relevant news, clubs, events, etc. in their inbox. The Johnson School needed a way to bring students, faculty and staff together online in a truly interactive, social way. They also needed to help students find and discover content based on their individual interests to reduce what was becoming an over-whelming volume of email.

The Challenges• Bring physical community online with an interactive, student-focused platform

• Improve discoverability of groups, events, news and resources relevant to stu-dents’ individual interests

• Improve relevance of communication to students; reduce mass emails

• Allow students across multiple programs and campuses to find and connect with others with similar interests

“I am getting spammed by emails that are not relevant to me. As a result, I miss information and events.”

— Rohin Sood, MBA 2016, Student Council Technology Chair

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— Amanda Soule Shaw

The Johnson School helped to design and then implemented Unity, a powerful networking tool built specifically for higher ed on the Sales-force Community Cloud platform. A few of Unity’s features were inte-gral to the initiative’s success:

Groups Users can easily seek out and join new groups based on their inter-ests or create their own groups. Events can also be created within the group.

Group Managers Group managers have a feed within their groups visible only to them

Themes and Tags Users can label all groups, events, news and resources with themes and tags to improve searchability and help students discover relevant content — rather than having all of it dumped in their inboxes.

Branding With easily customizable colors, images, logo and more, the commu-nity provides a consistent Cornell experience for its users.

Data Instead of guessing at how many people are using their intranet, the Johnson School can now see granular usage data on the backend of their community and adjust their strategies accordingly.

The Solution: Unity

“Group Managers are really key for our student clubs because they’ll have a handful of officers that want to be able to talk to one another without the entire group of members being able to see the information. For example, the leaders can collab-orate together to set the agenda for the next meeting before presenting it to the wider group.”

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Cornell University received an honorable mention in the Eduventures Innovation Awards for the robust online community they created with Unity.

Amanda Soule-Shaw Assistant Dean, Student Services

Johnson Graduate School of Management Cornell University

Rebecca Joffrey IT Innovation Officer

Cornell University

The Results

members of community

over 100 groups

over 420 resources

1200

+100

+420

The Johnson School’s community currently has:

“We’re working on adoption right now. Our student community definitely sees where we are going. I’ve heard from staff that the number of emails going to students has dramatically decreased. That was one of our main goals, so we’re pretty happy about that.”

“Unity saved the Johnson School significant time and money. Deploying this kind of inter-face for other schools without Unity took between 6 and 18 months — and the resulting site wasn’t nearly as flexible or impressive.”

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