Nearly a year after SVSU discontinued the Corq campus events app, RSOs say its replacement, the Student Happenings Calendar in MySVSU, has made it harder to promote events and reach students.
During the GESS-C Spring Cleaning Event on Thursday, March 12, Andi Clark, president of the RSO, noticed a trend.
“We just haven’t seen as many people at meetings or at events like this,” Clark said. “GESS-C did Sustainability Bingo last semester, and we had maybe half of our normal turnout.”
Student Life had contracted Corq as the default event calendar for student events for six years in total. The app existed for the last three of those years, allowing students to show their account’s QR Code at events to check in. According to Associate Dean of Student Affairs Jason Schoenmeyer, everything changed when the corporation responsible for supporting the app went out of business, ending the contract prematurely.
“[I miss the] ease of use and the convenience [with Corq]. … You downloaded the app, you signed in, and then there you go. There’s all the events,” Clark said. “Now, you have to check three different emails or look for a flyer to find any events.”
When the contract ended abruptly, Student Life turned to MySVSU. It had all of the capabilities to host a student event calendar while being private to the public, but with a catch: it wasn’t ready yet. The calendar in MySVSU is currently incapable of displaying event information for closed groups. For example, fraternity and sorority events aren’t promoted in it.
“We just had to react last year,” Schoenmeyer said. “But this year, we can do more with it.”
Student Life is collaborating with the organization behind MySVSU, Pathify, to make the changes needed. They are also excited to use the broader capabilities of MySVSU, including tracking volunteer hours and recording event participation to earn badges, Schoenmeyer said.
“The biggest thing now is getting everyone to download the MySVSU app. One thing we felt was a bummer [during the transition] was that all the upper classmen had downloaded Corq already because they knew that was the way. … So, we hope that with this being the second year we’re saying ‘download MySVSU’ and we keep building on it, it will just become more popular and more used.”
MySVSU is contracted for three years at no extra cost to the Office of Student Life, as the expense is already funded by the university for its other features.
“Now, the Office of Student Life is able to put a little bit more towards the budget [of e-Sports and the Cardinal Pantry] to be a little more sustained,” Schoenmeyer said. “We have to spend a lot of time fundraising to keep those programs going, so that’s taken a little bit of that edge off and the burden off of those two programs.”
Student Life encourages RSOs to use Student Life’s Instagram and their weekly Event Blast newsletter to promote events. Schoenmeyer reports those emails have a 60% open rate from students on average.
“I think Corq was an easy way to find events. The flyers we have and the social media system we have work, but it’s hard to keep up with the 80,000 clubs that you may follow on Instagram,” Clark said. “Now that Corq’s gone, you can’t easily find events that are happening that day unless you go to mySVSU, but let’s be real: who’s doing multi-factor authentication (MFA) to figure out what’s going on on campus?”
The MySVSU dashboard and app require MFA to log in. However, the app does have a feature to allow Face ID to be used instead on mobile devices.
“It’s just kind of a challenge now to plan things and actually expect people to come, so we’ve really lowered our expectations,”
Clark said.
Sophomore health science and sociology major Carlie Smith plays a major role in three RSOs, and she says she doesn’t use MySVSU to list events, preferring to promote through Instagram and email lists.
“MySVSU is not as user-friendly, is less visually appealing, and is less accessible through having to use MFA on an overwhelming basis. … I would deeply struggle if I was a freshman now to find the clubs that I did last year,” Smith said. “The MySVSU calendar feature is not being used by myself, nor anyone I know, to find events.”
