Spartanburg Community College in S.C. has about 5,000 students and is one of 17 technical colleges in South Carolina. Like any other college, they have a wide range of needs when it comes to organizing and promoting student events, academic calendars, holidays, financial aid deadlines, etc.
Spartanburg Community College needed an easy way to manage and update different academic and student life calendars and webpages. The institution chose to work with SchoolDude by Dude Solutions’ Event Publisher for a customizable event calendar that creates a central place for campus event information.
The Tech Decision
The institution needed a platform that would unify the posting and promotion of public events, student life activities and career services calendars for easy viewing. By using Event Publisher, they are reducing previous workload by two weeks, since they no longer have to manually input event details across multiple calendars.
Jane Bird, Creative Manager/Webmaster, said in the past there was a break in communication between departments and calendars being used.
“When it came time for marketing to work on the student planner, it was very difficult to corral all of that information,” she says. “There had been a lot of talk about finding something to unify this information so it can come from one place. Then, we heard about Event Publisher.”
After presenting the product to the head of the marketing department and to the executive council, everyone was on board.
The Solution
Spartanburg Community College is using SchoolDude’s Event Publisher, an event management platform, to easily schedule, promote and manage campus events. Offering schools a centralized, shared calendar, Event Publisher is helping the college organize student activities, academic calendars, holidays, financial aid deadlines and more. In the past, multiple departments manually updated academic and student calendars, which often created communications disconnects.
Event Publisher also alleviates time for those staff members responsible for managing pages on the Spartanburg Community College website, instantly giving them important information online or via Excel format.
With Event Publisher, the institution’s administrators can create and publish upcoming events on a branded and/or private calendar and share those events with built-in event promotion and social sharing.
Event Publisher gives higher education and K-12 institutions the ability to:
- Streamline event workflow
- Schedule, approve and invoice for events
- Use built-in promotion and social sharing tools to easily get the word out
- Create a branded master calendar along with customized calendars for individual schools, departments or teams
- Invite the community to share or subscribe to events
Event Publisher is customizable with the college’s branding, so the change was seamless. Private calendars can be developed with Event Publisher giving only assigned administrators access to publishing tools. Alternatively, private events can be created on a public-facing calendar, only visible when someone is logged in and has permission to view private events.
Additionally, advanced analytics features enable school administrators and event organizers to use data to help track registrations, collections and payments in real time.
The Impact
Jane set out to empower various heads of departments who were already creating calendars, training them on how to use Event Publisher. So far, she’s trained about a dozen staff members at the college.
“This takes two weeks of work out of the equation,” Jane says, since it used to be a big undertaking for one person on staff and there was often redundant information. It’s also freed up time for those who manage pages on the website in each department, instantly giving them the information they need online and in an Excel format.
Spartanburg Community College has been using Event Publisher for about a year and is looking forward to starting a fresh academic year with key people trained and confident using the calendar system. Though, it’s already led to many benefits including the ease of event posting on the website with a simple interface and one place to post.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply