Higher education loves Slack + Eventbot 💞

Eventbot
Eventbot
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

TL;DR: 3 reasons why universities are adopting Slack and Eventbot!

Higher education has become avid users of Slack and Eventbot together. We’ve gotten feedback from students, teachers, and administrators and wanted to share those insights for universities who are thinking about making the switch.

Why do universities love Slack and Eventbot so much?

The number of educational institutions using Slack is growing everyday. Once a tool only used by tech-savvy students, Slack is now used by schools across the country. Synthesizing all the feedback we’ve heard about Slack + Eventbot, here’s our short list of reasons why this trend has taken colleges by storm:

1. Channels let everyone opt-in

This is the big one. Channels are essentially user created chat rooms, and are the bedrock of Slack’s communication. These channels can be created for any topic, ranging from official course communication, to student clubs, study groups, or organizing the next movie night. The channel structure allows people to opt-in to discussions they want without the deluge of emails that would normally accompany an email list.

Combined with Eventbot, Slack is even more valuable, since every channel gets it’s own calendar. We’ve seen lots of students use Eventbot to organize social meetups in their #neighborhood channels or plan out activities inside a #volunteering channel. Eventbot uses your existing Slack accounts and channels, so there’s no separate signups for your team. Everyone can participate with no friction! 😍

Eventbot dramatically increased the awareness about events going on
— Remi of HausProject

2. The alternatives are just so clunky

Universities, hard as they may try, always seem to be a generation behind in technology. Official education software tends to check so many boxes of customization that the end product become unintuitive and just a pain to use. Slack avoids this trap and doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. Many schools have told us they were replacing multiple proprietary campus group software with Slack — not because it does everything… but because those tools integrate easily into the conversational flow of Slack.

With Slack’s wide world of integrations built for companies, most every workflow is supported. Eventbot is one of those integrations, as a calendar built for teams. Lots of club leaders, professors, and administrators have told us how relieved they are to stop sending calendar invites which only get lost via email. Instead of using a custom school calendar, students can use Eventbot’s Team Plan, and send their Slack events to any calendar app of choice (Google Calendar, Outlook, etc) — providing choice and a great user experience.

An overlooked benefit of Slack comes after the students leave school entirely… alumni communication! Since Slack workspaces live separately from university-controlled platforms — students can seamlessly communicate with their alumni years after graduation. Now alumni can relive their glory days with the same channels and message history (for better or worse 😲)! Eventbot, of course, is a great way to organize outings or meetups and keep that school spirit going.

3. Slack gets a lot of small things right

There’s a reason that Slack is the fastest growing enterprise software application. For universities, we’ve heard that the excellent mobile application is a big reason why. Students are constantly on the go, so being able to use their phones with as much fidelity as their laptops is a huge win. Additionally, the search within Slack usually finds items that would have been lost in the dustbin of email replies.

Finally, the ability to send short messages, emoji reactions, and gifs bring much-needed fun expression into (typically boring) messaging. Eventbot works alongside of all these features too. As the only calendar built to work specifically inside Slack, teams can use Eventbot in the same way they normally use Slack (no how-to’s required). Anywhere in Slack you can type “/events create” to create that first event with your friendly calendar bot — Eventbot! 💖

Are you a school or university using Slack? Have a totally different experience that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you. Send us your thoughts! 💌

🚀 Aren’t using Eventbot yet? Install Eventbot from Slack’s App Directory!

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Eventbot

A simple calendar for Slack

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