Soco

Hi Everyone! I hope you are coming out of the weekend feeling connected to your community, and you are looking forward to making new (or growing your existing) connections this week! I'm hopping on here to let you know that I’ve officially joined the Associate Advisory Group for National Association for Campus Activities, which will allow me to support, advocate for, and identify trends for members within the organization. I'll serve as a liaison between the NACA board and the conference/regional teams, helping amplify the voices of our associates, and even explore ways we can be part of impacting students in powerful way. If you haven't heard about them yet, make sure to check them out! THANK YOU to the organization for trusting me in this role, and I'm excited to explore the impacts we can make!

Exciting news... I have had a lot of great conversations with college professionals over the last year and have heard a lot of data around campus activities and how success is being measured on different campuses. They are getting feedback, making improvements, and getting better and better every year! However, one thing I noticed in these discussions was that there aren't a lot of tools for measuring how "socially connected" students actually feel on campus. This got me thinking and after researching, getting feedback and mocking up a few ideas, I put together something I like to call The Social Connection Survey. Now, there are some social connection surveys out there, but I wanted to put one together specifically for colleges, so students could discover their "social connection score" and be instantly provided with resources to improve that score. I also wanted this to be useful for college professionals, taking all the responses and helping a campus discover their overall Social Connection Score. This info could be used for benchmarking, and even help colleges track progress over time while they improve social connection on their campus. I'd even love to see this turn into a universally, standardized score for measuring social connection across colleges, so please send me a message if you want to introduce me to the right people for that :) Okay, enough of me nerding out over the data behind social connection... If you want to check out the survey or understand how to build your own survey for your campus, you can find some recommendations in the blog I wrote for the National Association for Campus Activities. PS. This survey is just a starting point. I am working with colleges to get feedback to make this even better, and hopefully, we can develop more dynamic surveys in the future. If you have feedback, please let me know!

Had a great time at our first conference with National Association for Campus Activities last week. NACA Live 2024 was a great place to meet the brains behind campus activities and chat all things Soco and social connection on campus. I also had the opportunity to teach two education sessions around loneliness and the benefits of a more connected campus to both professionals and students. Thanks again for having me, and I’m excited to keep the conversation going around students finding community!! (I don’t have any pics from speaking at the sessions, but you better believe I took some good ones from the “Soco Dink Competition” at the booth.)

Just completed my 10th call on Intro, which means I’m now a Verified Expert! I'm inspired by Intro's mission: "to give everyone access to anyone, empowering each other to make our world better. By unlocking this type of access, more people from all over the world will have the same opportunities to connect, learn, and take action"???. I've loved the opportunity to chat with other founders and provide additional perspective on what they're building based on what I've learned through Absence of Proof. Thank you for these kind words Ben Glass and David Castranova!