Lessons Learned: Seniors.gslounge.com

On May 7th, Jason, outgoing senior class president requested that a forum be setup for seniors to share information about events happening around campus and the city related to graduation and for activity partners. I built the site because of the need, but also because it could serve as a good case study about why or why not a forum works.

Here is the site traffic for http://seniors.gslounge.com:


As you can tell, traffic spiked the day the site was announced and then went into a fast, smooth fall back down to zero. Other than myself and Jason, only one other person posted to the forum although there were many views of forum topics.

From my perspective I think we have learned several things:

• Students don't go to forums for activity partners, they do that in person or on Facebook
• A forum with no links other than from this blog and a single email from Jason will die
• A forum with only a single, highly specialized topic for a small audience will die
• A forum isn't the ideal spot for news

We also learned a lesson stated by Deans Stellini and Rodgers:

• "Building it doesn't mean they will come.
  

This is another way of saying that just because we go through the effort to make something, that students will hear about it, understand it, participate in it and then value it.

Let me try and state the opposite of these lessons as guidelines for the new gslounge.com forums:

• Forums will be for discussion of news, politics or other topics
• Forums will be linked to from:
• Other areas of gslounge.com
• Blogs on gslounge.com
• Regular email messages from the Communications Team
• Undefined external sites
• Forums will have topics designed to appeal to a large audience
• Forums will not be used to break news for the student body

An attempt to make a positive re-statement of the Stellini/Rodgers lesson:

• If you carefully tweak it and keep trying to make it relevant, then, perhaps, just maybe, they might show up and start using it
  

Thanks,

Brody