Today, cell phones are in nearly everyone’s pocket and are continually being relied on for more complicated, personal interactions. According to Cisco’s Higher Education Trends & Statistics Report, 97% of students own a cell phone. Furthermore, students now text more than they email: and as reported by The Nielsen Company, 67% of American college students are considered active texters, sending on average 94 texts per day. That’s why we at SwoopTEXT work to make your life easier by connecting you directly, via text messaging, to anyone on your university campus.
As college students, we know firsthand how quickly your schedule can spin out of control with the demands of meeting deadlines, keeping up with readings and trying to remember when and where your next group meeting will be. It is no secret that life at times can get very overwhelming. With the stress of schoolwork ever-present, the last thing that students need is confusion and ambiguity in their non-academic lives.
That’s where we come in. We’ve tailored a system that we believe can improve communication and boost participation both within each individual organization as well as the student body as a whole. SwoopTEXT allows organizations the opportunity to efficiently reach students while also giving students control over what medium each organization can use to reach them. Within each profile, users can manage each group that they’re in as well as the messages that they can receive. Included are text messages, e-mails, and integration of events to a personal calander.
Leader
In establishing SwoopTEXT, we wanted to make sure that this type of communication could be used as effectively as possible. We determined that whoever creates a group should be the leader of that group which automatically gives that user the power to send messages and create events that they can then send to as little as one member in their organization or to all 10,000 members and followers.
Member
When a profile is created a user can then join groups by visiting our “Explore Campus” page. Here, users can find all that is available on their campus. They can also choose to become members of groups that they are apart of at this time. Once a leader confirms their membership they can receive text messages about group meeting times, game times and locations, fundraising activities, etc. Anything that needs be communicated quickly and directly to a specific group of people can be done via the most readily available form of communication that the world has to offer.
Follower
The way that we designed SwoopTEXT allows for any user to visit our “Explore Campus” page and see what groups are active on campus. We like to think of this as a 24/7 Organization Fair. We’ve noticed from our experiences that there aren’t enough opportunities for every group to promote themselves around campus. Yes, there are one or two activities fairs a year that highlight many of the organizations but what if you sleep in or have class during that time? Due to this problem, we provide users the capability to follow groups that they may be interested in; whether they want to join that group or hear about special events that group may be holding. For example, if you’re a freshman guy interested in rushing a fraternity, what better way to follow a fraternity you may be interested in so that you can then receive a text message directly from the leader of that fraternity about rush week events? Furthermore, once a group accumulates followers, leaders can then use this to their advantage and inform their followers about important updates, game scores or public events they may be holding.
