Q: How did you first begin to expand your campus’ commitment to creating and leveraging data in Engage?
A: Our office was seeing that Engage collected a lot of information—organization officers, memberships, and event attendance—that could be useful in other areas of campus. We were able to connect with additional analytics and IT staff to develop an integration between our internal systems and Engage’s API. Memberships and event attendance fit into current fields in our campus SAP system and new, additional fields were configured for attendance at key events like Welcome Week. Our analytics staff deemed Engage/BBNvolved our campus database for “sense of belonging” because that is where the data is stored and then fed into SAP/Hana.
We also feel like we have really expanded the accessibility for attendance tracking since Engage’s tool allows anyone to track attendance without any special hardware. Because of this, more departments and organizations can track attendance than ever before. The student organizations love it too—they love seeing the data of who is attending their event in real time. Residence life uses it for everything from hall meetings to community gatherings, Fraternity and Sorority Life use it for chapter meetings, and so on.