Join the Club — Pranam Lipinski and Door of Clubs are Bringing Student Clubs and Employers Together

For many students, student clubs are among the most rewarding experiences available on college campuses. Employers looking for great young talent also find the self-selecting nature of student clubs to be a great opportunity to connect with rising stars in a given field. Despite the mutual interest, however, there has traditionally been a major disconnect between student clubs and the companies that covet their members.

Door of Clubs cofounder Pranam Lipinski has set out to change that. Door of Clubs is a platform that makes it simple for interested employers to connect with student clubs for their mutual benefit. In this interview, we talked to Pranam about why it’s been so hard to bring clubs and employers together, how universities benefit from his solution, and how higher education administrators can better serve students today.

This is part 2 of our Boston’s Most Exceptional EdTech series. Check out part 1 (uConnect), part 3 (Shearwater), and part 4 (Ready4).

Give us your elevator pitch for Door of Clubs.

We are a platform that makes it easy for student clubs at the college level to receive funding and job opportunities.

What was the big pain point you set out to solve for universities?

Clubs on average receive on average 25% of the funding they ask for. I knew that because I founded a club when I was in college. Also, 75% of the clubs don’t get what they want, and they appeal to the student government for more money, with varying degrees of success. Lots of clubs are being underserved.

When you think about the visibility that clubs get, most employers love student clubs because those students are passionate. They’re a self-selecting group who are motivated to deepen their knowledge beyond the classroom But clubs are hard to find — they usually have one link on a backpage on the school website. Most employers have no way to reliably find and reach out to student clubs.

We set out to close the funding gap and give student clubs more visibility by allowing employers to access them in a much easier way.

Can you give us a high-level explanation of how the platform works for companies and student clubs?

Student clubs have their leader sign up on the platform, and then they get a link to share with all their members to “join” their club online. They can then compete for funding by completing challenges we provide.

On the employer side, companies want to find the top students in these clubs, but it’s hard for employers to access clubs. Most clubs have a lot of turnover in their leadership ranks — if an employer was in touch with one particular student who then graduated or transferred, that line of communication is cut off.

Our platform gives companies a central place to access clubs, no matter who is in charge. They can also help contribute funding to the clubs, which is critical when most clubs struggle to find money. It also gives companies a lot of metrics to know how students are responding to their communications.

What has prevented student clubs from forming connections with alumni and companies in the past?

It’s all one-off processes centered around emails and spreadsheets. There’s never been an efficient way to connect clubs and employers and alumni in one reliable way. One-off processes allow a lot of things to get lost when leadership turns over.

Once in awhile, companies reach out and ask clubs to promote an event or something, but there’s no reliable way to make sure that gets communicated and acted upon. Companies never know if what they’re doing actually reaches the right audience.

On the other side, clubs never know who to reach out to at the employers they’re interested in working with. It’s like sending communications into a black hole. The students don’t usually know who to talk to.

How can Door of Clubs help universities attract new students and retain current students?

The number one thing it helps with is that it helps clubs get funding and fills in that gap. But there’s also helping with placement — it helps students get jobs, which helps the university — they want kids to get jobs.

Broadly speaking, how is higher-education changing in the tech/software and social media driven world?

I think in general, there’s a top-heavy model in education. The institution wants to give students value, but if students don’t see that ROI, it can get ugly. That’s why we and many others are creating platforms that empower students from the ground-up. Clubs help students from a grassroots level by directly engaging with them. Motivated students can create the future they want through our solution.

You see it with MOOCs — students can personalize their education and create their own opportunities. Student debt had eclipsed credit card debt in the U.S. and there’s impending crisis on that front. If you can empower these debt-ridden students, there’s a solution.

By being at the grassroots level, we’ve found that students have their own organizations all over campus. If we focus on adding value to them, in turn, we’ll help the universities. We’re dedicated to adding value to students clubs.

What should universities be doing to stay on top of all of these new media/internet/platform trends?

On average, there’s 2,600 students for every one career services professional. Technology is becoming more important to handle that load. The only suggestion I have is to really understand what students want and need. It has to be from the grassroots though, not a top-down solution.

Schools need to get into students’ shoes and decide from there what to do at the university level. I think something like 80% of students say that they go to college to get a job. In institutions, there’s a big debate between teaching liberal arts and teaching vocationalism. Vocationalism can’t be avoided though — students want that training.

I also think schools should invite employers into the mix to bring new knowledge and skills into the curriculum. There’s a huge disconnect between companies and schools, and they both blame each other. There’s a lot of work to do there. If you can make the skills-to-opportunity gap closer, then you’ve made a lot of important progress.

I think that disconnect comes from fear at a high level. Universities don’t want to get too commercialized, and companies are afraid to waste resources, so they both stick with what they’re doing. But I think the pain of not changing will outweigh the pain of changing eventually.

Companies also want to hire diverse workforces, but it hasn’t trickled to historically black schools — which we’ve written about in our profile of Jackson State graduate Jala Morrow. How could someone like Jala — a STEM major with a 3.8 GPA and lots of great internships — get overlooked? If she doesn’t stand a chance, how can the graduates who don’t have her resume? How can schools and companies better connect these students to good job opportunities?

What are some of the results your customers are seeing so far?

They’ve been able to make dozens of hires in just a short time. We’re helping high-growth startups find interns and entry-level employees, and we’ve even helped some Fortune 100 companies find great graduates. We’ve had a lot of hiring success stories in a short time.

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Read the rest of our Boston’s Most Exceptional EdTech series here:

• Part 1: David Kozhuk, cofounder of uConnect
• Part 3: Jackson Boyar, cofounder of Shearwater
• Part 4: Elad Shoushan, cofounder of Ready4

If you liked this interview, check out our Future-Forward Fashion Founders series, featuring interviews with notable founders from Boston’s fashion/apparel industry.

This interview was conducted and written by Camden Gaspar, Content Strategist & Copywriter at Ideometry. You can follow him on Twitter @camden_gaspar.

Ideometry is a full-service marketing agency located in Boston helping awesome companies and organizations amplify their growth strategies.