ZeeMee Orange Report - July 2020
We are super excited about our upcoming releases for both our enrollment and student affairs partners, as we work together to meet the unique challenges that COVID-19 is presenting. We have many new releases below, along with some recent student research we conducted.
If presently we only work with your enrollment team, please be sure to share everything coming out with your student affairs team as many campuses are trying to solve for student engagement in hybrid learning paradigms. Many of our new features and experiences are allowing colleges to invite all classes on to ZeeMee to connect.
With that, we would like to introduce you to our suite of new releases, including; ZeeMee Virtual Worlds, Break the Ice, Trivia Event Hosting Tools, Study Buddy, Mentor Matching and Club/Organization Pages
Virtual Worlds (Live now!)
You have to see this! We partnered up with a team called High Fidelity to bring an innovative solution that lets our Pro and Premier partners bring large-scale events like socials, preview days and club fairs to a virtual space that simulates the experience of walking through your quad or pavilion and talking to other students much better than a Zoom webinar could. Optimized for mobile, but also available on web, the virtual world allows students and/or parents to have smaller group or 1-1 conversations while staying in a larger “public space”. Each event space must be coded specifically for the event on hand, so if you’re interested in hosting one of these events - reach out ASAP to discuss your options and schedule an event. Click the play button on this image to see a short clip of Biola University incoming students participating in an escape room activity.
Break the Ice (Live in one week)
We compiled a list of over 150 icebreaker questions that we’ve seen students enthusiastically respond to and turned them into stickers to make them even more eye-catching and thought-provoking.
Now that it’s as easy as picking from a tried-and-true list, counselors and influencers hosting “speed friending” events can spend more time encouraging student-to-student engagement and less time coming up with questions and frantically typing them into the chat.
This feature will be available to all Pro and Premier Partners soon! We’re excited to hear your feedback and suggestions once you get to play around with it.
Trivia Hosting Tools (Live in one month)
Also motivated by wanting to lessen the stress associated with hosting live events, we’re currently building out functionality that will allow our Pro and Premier Partners to draft trivia event questions in advance! Once your questions are drafted, all you have to do during the event is tap on the question you want to send at the right time. We’ll add headers to make your question stand out and collect all the responses in a nice container that makes it feel more like a real trivia event (no more watching to see who responds first and parroting their answer).
Study Buddy (Live in 2 months)
As we began working with student affairs teams this year, they requested we add the ability for students to connect on campus with other students in the same classes. This new feature will allow students to chat directly with students in the same classes.
Mentor Matching (Live in 2 months)
With many colleges embracing a hybrid model of learning this year, student affairs/campus life teams wanted ways for upperclassmen to connect with new students. Mentorship can be a critical part of a student’s success on campus. Mentor matching will match upperclassmen and alumni with mentees looking to learn from a current student or an alum in their field of interest.
Club/Organization Pages (Live in 3 months)
The creation of nested communities within a broader community is crucial as colleges start inviting all classes on to ZeeMee. With hybrid models disrupting traditional means for clubs and activities to connect with new students, we are launching pages for every organization and club on campus. Club leaders will have their own video feed and chats for students to engage and connect.
Gen-Z Trends
Curious what students are thinking at this point in the summer? We asked them a few questions this week and received some interesting responses. Click here to access the data.
Enrollment Buzz
We know how busy you are this time of year. It can be a challenge to keep up with all the news and trending enrollment topics in the admissions world. Here are a few that caught our attention that you might want to check out:
- Here’s a List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall - The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Ball State's incoming freshmen go through virtual summer orientation - Tyler Griffith
- Building Student Centered Strategies - eduWeb Digital Summit
- Is Test-Optional Admissions Enough? - ACCEPT Group, Hack the Gates