Student Events & Calendaring at Ambi

Problem

How do students discover relevant campus events

Institution calendars and the like are typically hard to navigate simple lists of every single event present on campus, and this often ends up being the definitive list of events on campus. Much like the rest of institutional online tools as a whole, discovery and management often becomes a matter of navigating multiple avenues online between official institutional sources, Facebook events, Eventbrite, and more.

Insights

Our customer success research team had interviewed a large variety of Ambi Users over the years, and a common pain point throughout has been on various calendaring and event discovery issues. Below are just a few of the major insights we've discovered.

#1 Student often feel as though they miss relevant events

Between events being dispersed across various platforms and the usual lack of an easily navigable centralized calendaring experience, relevant events can be missed fairly easily.

#2 Leaders lack a centralized way to advertise events

Student leaders themselves often suffer from the same issue as well in the opposite direction. Due to a lack of a centralized distribution platform or otherwise, it can be difficult to disperse information about an event to relevant parties, and can be even more limited to advertise events to those outside of their cohorts.

"That's (Ambi) a really easy solution as opposed to sending it out on the newsletter, and relying on that being the way the message is spread. Or having a Facebook Event and inviting people to it. Having a centralized app - really sort of changes the potential of getting outreach and having it be effective for events."

Solutions

Ambi Events and Import/Export

Ambi, being a centralized community and groups tool offers a unique proposition in centralizing relevant events for a User. Communities and by extension Groups were designed with the ability to import from a variety of calendar sources, and from there would consolidate onto a User's individual calendar. This allows for an easy consolidation of immediately relevant events from all of the User's groups without themselves having to search for these individual events themselves.

More importantly, however, would be the ability to export this consolidated Ambi calendar into the user's calendar of choice. We did not necessarily wish to become yet another calendar app a user needs to keep constant tabs on, so it was imperative that we allowed the option for users to centralize their own calendar into a robust dedicated calendaring app of their choosing.

Public Event Discovery

Group Events were designed to be allowed to be published to a Community-level discovery platform. In many ways it could be thought of as a Community exclusive pared down Eventbrite style system. These Events can further be shared directly inside Group Feeds and Chats.

Next Steps

Refining Event Discovery

Public Events, while a first step still requires several new features and refinements down the line in order for it become a truly robust and useful feature for Students and other Community members to discover relevant Events.

On next steps, I would like to design a robust filtering and tagging system to further ease usability to discover truly relevant Events on within Communities for Users. Beyond that, a recommendation framework driven by user data would further enhance discoverability.