Your campus publication should make a housing guide
Yesterday we launched the 2015 North by Northwestern Housing Guide. Year after year, the Housing Guide is consistently the most viewed page on our site (after the homepage) and has become an invaluable resource for incoming freshman.
Every student publication should publish a housing guide. It is a no-brainer. Over the summer, most incoming freshman have nothing to do and are ravenous to learn everything about what their next year is going to be like. They’re a great audience. And if you’re smart about how you build your Housing Guide, it becomes pretty easy to update each year.
Don’t settle for just publishing a bunch of articles; seize the opportunity to create a data-rich resource that can be updated every year.
It took me just a couple days to update the code for ours this year because of the amazing base that was left to me by the webmasters and interactive producers who came before me. Reporters can interview people in the dorms that they live in, and we’re fortunate that the Northwestern’s Residential Services has been cooperative with sending us updated data. Even the videos have had the same intro music for the last three years. Keeping the data in a spreadsheet definitely makes the process a lot easier.
We published our code on GitHub. If you work at a campus publication, tweet at me or email me if you have questions about how it works.
The app hasn’t changed dramatically since the version Tyler Fisher, Hilary Fung, Dan Hill, Rebecca Lai, Sheng Wu and Katie Zhu built in 2013. The project has been around in some form or another since 2008. (When you add earlier developers like Tom Giratikanon, Sisi Wei, and Emily Chow, you get a truly amazing list of people who have worked on the NBN Housing Guide. It’s really cool to be on that list.) Last year Tyler rebuilt the guide as a static app using the NPR App Template. It’s the third year we’ve used this design and it’s nice to have a base to iterate on.
One of the changes I am most proud of that we made this year was the addition of the related article section at the bottom of the guide’s index page. In past years, many students did not associate the Housing Guide with North by Northwestern, thinking instead that it was an official site made by the University. So we added links to ten articles — not related to housing — that we hope freshman will find useful. Some are resources, like our restaurant guide and our Dance Marathon recap; others are just fun, like the dorm room ball pit video. But we hope that by highlighting the best of North by Northwestern’s content, we can reinforce our brand and create a stronger connection with our readers.
It’s the perfect way to leverage our archives in service of our incoming audience.
We’re working on finding the Facebook groups where incoming freshman for the Class of 2019 are hanging out, and have been tweeting with the hashtag #NU2019 to make sure that the Guide finds its intended audience.
The Housing Guide is a team effort. There are over twenty five reporters and multimedia producers, along with a really dedicated group of editors who make sure that all the interviews, numbers, and videos are amazing. They pull together all the content that makes the Housing Guide possible.
I’d love to hear your feedback, and let me know if you’re planning on building one for your campus. I can’t wait to help.
North by Northwestern is an independent, online student-run publication that covers all things Northwestern. With stories on campus and culture we report on everything from controversial debates to the best hookup spots.
Alex Duner is the current webmaster and former interactive editor.
