In higher education, student recruitment is just the beginning. For students arriving on campus to begin their college journey, first impressions are vital, and student engagement during Welcome Week plays a big part. Get the first impressions right, and students’ chances of a successful first semester and future studies increase dramatically. Get them wrong, and students start questioning their choice.
That’s why Welcome Week matters more than ever. There’s a reason why more schools and universities treat it as more than just a move-in day. Instead, it offers up to a whole week of bonding and introductory activities.
Of course, that’s only true if the week is successful. Student engagement during Welcome Week is vital to reducing information overload and navigational stressors, setting the stage for long-term student success. This guide will help you simplify, centralize, and enhance your activities to increase Welcome Week student engagement.
4 Reasons Why Welcome Week Student Engagement Matters
Welcome Week is about more than just helping your students move into their residence hall. It’s the time when students should begin finding their way on campus, from navigating their surroundings to making new friends and attending events that interest them. Get this part of the student journey right, and you set the foundation of an impactful college experience they’ll carry with them through graduation and their entire life.
1. Early Engagement Can Predict Long-Term Student Success
Most fundamentally, achieving student engagement during Welcome Week increases the chance that students stay engaged throughout their college career. Many colleges have known this for years, as one academic study found that students participating in extended orientations around their move-in day experienced a significant increase in their grade point average and graduation rate.
2. Students Build a Sense of Belonging from the First Day
Studies have long found that a sense of belonging is a significant predictor of retention and student success. A successful Welcome Week can foster that sense of belonging from day one. Targeted events, service opportunities, and other activities can help students form friendships and find a sense of community. As a result, students become less likely to feel homesick or isolated.
3. Welcome Week Can Help to Overcome Orientation Overload
In the summer before they begin college, students will be flooded with flyers, emails, and more. They might even attend an academic orientation to receive their schedule and get functional information about their studies. A successful Welcome Week can complement that functional information or integrate it more intentionally into the enrollment journey, simplifying the process for students.
4. Welcome Week Sets the Tone for Campus Culture
Perhaps more than any other campus event prior to enrollment, Welcome Week offers a genuine representation of the type of institution the student has joined. Organizing it well and enhancing Welcome Week student engagement also shows your first-year students that the school cares about their experience and will help them throughout their journey.
5 Ways to Enhance Student Engagement During Welcome Week
Knowing why student engagement during Welcome Week matters is just the first step. Next, it’s time to plan how to make great results happen. From basic informational and navigational needs to encouraging emotional connections, consider implementing these five strategies as you plan the next iteration of this annual milestone.
1. Centralize Welcome Week Events Into One Accessible Calendar
Information overload is often one of the biggest barriers to student engagement. Without the right tools, a week full of events means bombarding your incoming students with options, but without knowing where to start.
That’s why a single, well-designed, and filterable online calendar is a crucial component in driving student engagement during Welcome Week. Rather than promoting individual events, this approach enables you to direct all students to a central location where they can find the events most relevant to them. That’s even more effective if they can filter the calendar by event type, attendance requirements, or their interests.
The more accessible the calendar, the better. A fully brandable, customizable, and mobile-friendly online calendar tool, such as Localist, can streamline your event information and implementation.
2. Use Interactive Campus Maps to Reduce Anxiety and Increase Attendance
Of course, your incoming students may skip events, even if they know about them, simply because they don’t know where to go. For incoming students stepping onto campus for the first time, navigating the campus will likely be among the biggest challenges after moving in.
Think of wayfinding as engagement infrastructure. The less students have to worry about navigation, the better. An interactive campus map can help you get there, making it easy to navigate anywhere on campus. It works even better if you can create a custom layer for Welcome Week that only shows locations relevant to your new first-year students, reducing information overload and noise on the map.
Your interactive map can help students find residence halls, student unions, club fairs, and orientation check-ins more easily. You can even integrate the map with your online event calendar, making it easier for students to transition from deciding to attend an event to finding their way to it.
3. Communicate in Real-Time, Across Multiple Channels
Communication matters beyond your online event listings and interactive maps. If students find out about events too late or don’t know what they’re about, their chances of attendance drop. Also, rain dates can shift locations and entire events, making communication absolutely vital.
Use multiple channels to stay in touch with your students. Email should be the baseline, but don’t ignore the power of social media channels like Instagram to share information. You can also send targeted text alerts to your new first-year students or use your institution’s mobile app.
Speaking of mobile: make sure your event pages, maps, and communications are mobile-friendly. That’s how the vast majority of students will look for information, and that’s where they’ll expect to receive important updates. Mobile-friendly communication across multiple channels helps them get the right information at the right time.
4. Make Welcome Week Inclusive By Design
With their functional needs taken care of, students will need your help in building emotional connections. Part of that involves making sure that they feel like the events and programming are designed for and relevant to them. This focus can organically encourage their attendance.
Inclusion is more than just a buzzword; it’s a fundamental principle. Instead, think of it as simply making sure that Welcome Week has something for everyone. Students from rural backgrounds may have different needs than those from the city adjacent to campus. Faith-based students will want to learn about prayer services. First-gen students from nontraditional backgrounds may need a more fundamental introduction to college.
Designing the schedule to account for all of your students’ backgrounds can be a massive driver of student engagement during Welcome Week. That means planning the right events. But it also means ensuring they’re accessible and timed to match your students’ schedules. The right Welcome Week events build a sense of community across your entire incoming class.
5. Capture Engagement Data to Improve Next Year
Every time you plan Welcome Week, you have an opportunity to make the next one even better. Capturing data on student engagement during Welcome Week can help ensure that next year is even more successful.
Track event attendance where you can. Evaluate which events saw high turnout, and which communication channels resulted in the most clicks or registrations. Check out when usage spiked, both in digital engagement and for actual event attendance.
Each of these and other data points can help you gain insights into how your incoming class responded to your programming and communications plans. You can then use them to shape future programming and ROI, track the results again, and continue to adjust and improve over time.
Boost Student Engagement During Welcome Week with the Right Technology
All of the above strategies require a significant time investment. Some may also require a monetary investment. But make no mistake: students want to get involved, and colleges and universities tangibly benefit from that involvement. But to reliably drive Welcome Week student engagement, institutions have to make it easy.
Centralizing the calendar is a great start. So is using an intuitive interactive campus map along with clear, real-time, and mobile-optimized communications. Events have to be carefully planned, and operating on data instead of hunches to determine success can be immensely helpful.
But ultimately, it’s about your students. Don’t be afraid to ask them what they need, and survey them about the success (or failure) of both individual Welcome Week events and the week as a whole. It’s another way to show care for your students, creating a foundation of confidence and connection that can last through four years of college and beyond.
Concept3D can help you with the functional pieces of that equation. Our calendar and interactive map software enable you to communicate more clearly with your students, helping them find their way around campus and attend the right events to build that foundation.
Ready to learn more? Contact us to schedule a demo and discover how we’ve helped other campus clients enhance their Welcome Week experience.