Welcoming Students

How we built a new type of event system for a blended world…

Welcome Week, which often runs for just one week at the beginning of each year, this year had to run for an extended period and in a very different format to ensure student and staff safety. To support this, the way in which events were displayed to students was changed to make it clear and easy to see which events were online, in person or where the student had a choice.

Over the Welcome period, over 11,000 users accessed this version of the Welcome Programme, with a split of users over mobile and desktop. 62.5% of users used their mobiles, and 37.5% used desktop.

Working with Luke Davis, the communications manager at Lancaster, the portal team, and event managers around the University, a new way of flagging events was built and made visible to the students.

The Welcome Programme Schedule applet enables us to present a full set of online and in-person events for all students in a way that’s easy for them to navigate and understand. This year we were quickly able to add online access instructions and labels that indicated whether an event was live or recorded. It was essential in making our welcome programme as simple and accessible as it could be in very difficult circumstances.

Luke Davis — Communications Manager

Many events are run by the JCR, who are student representatives from each of the 9 colleges who work with the Student’s Union, and it was vital that they were not only able to use the system, but also encourage their new students to engage fully in all the newly arranged activities.

The welcome week app was great for sharing out and promoting all of our events throughout the welcome period. It was so useful to have an extra way of reaching students to ensure they weren’t excluded which can an issue with using social media.

Jacob Ackerley — Pendle JCR VP Events & Engagement