Lessons Learned Building our own Online Community http://cal.berkeley.edu Matthew Matsuoka Director, Interactive Media UC Berkeley University Relations Marketing and Communications [email protected] 

Overview Talk about why we built our own alumni community Review some of the lessons we learned Tour of @cal Questions and Answers 

Background Started @cal alumni network in 2002 Social Media changed everything Began to rethink our alumni network Decided to let students keep their electronic identity after graduation: email and login 

Why we still need alumni network Alumni told us they still expected to have an electronic directory Still a few drivers in existing directory Felt we would need a platform of alumni centric services for the future Data collection still valuable 

Key to success: University centric services Email forwarding Search and networking Job search and postings Alumni/student mentoring Public profile with degree information Messaging Giving history View unofficial transcripts 

Other keys to success Collect new types of data: social media handles, interests, etc. Tight control over privacy Control the display and output of data Control user interface and branding Mobile ready Platform for future alumni services 

Who should do it? Pick a vendor? Custom development? In-house development? 

Staffing for concepts and wireframes Social media manager: project manager Web developer: database, AJAX, JQuery Web developer: webmaster, LAMP stack Front end developer: CSS, Responsive In-house editorial and design staff 

How we did it Early prototypes, paper and HTML Functional wireframes Agile development Jira issues and bug tracker Leverage campus community Soft launch August 2012 

Tour of @cal http://cal.berkeley.edu 

Results 18,000 new registrants since August soft-launch Only actively promoting in since March Average over 50 new registrant a day Average over 100 unique logins a day About half of new registrants create public profiles Over 300 messages sent per month Business school and Optometry school now using as the default online community 

Conclusions Students want to keep their identity: email Alumni and new grads really like the public profile University branding adds credibility to messages Agile development helped create efficiencies Leveraging campus community resources helped for de-bugging and UI development Alumni will expect more online services Using campus identity for alumni create opportunity for better campus services