At a small school like Chatham with an undergraduate student population of around 1,500, school events and club activities are where students will be making connections and new friends. However, it’s very easy to miss these events because of simply forgetting, not knowing where to look and, oftentimes, finding out they existed a day after they occurred.
At the beginning of the spring semester, the Office of Marketing and Communications unveiled a new system called Localist, which will be handling all Chatham event information.
Utilizing Localist, either through the app or online, students can add certain event types to their digest. They will then be emailed about these events prior to them happening, hopefully eliminating fear of missing out (FOMO) and helping students prepare not-so last minute.
Some of the changes students will note are as follows: they will not need to go through Eventbrite to purchase tickets for certain events as Localist accounts for tickets. Public events will also be more visible to guests, and each event will have its location displayed on Google Maps.
Another key feature of Localist is the ability to build a personal digest email. For example, if a student has a particular interest in Chatham clubs, such as the Fiber Arts Club (FAB) or the Communiqué, they can add “Student Organizations” to their digest and get an email whenever it’s most convenient. Students can also further refine events by selecting different locations, event types and even by sports category. Students can also react to events, showing interest, and the event will be added to their calendar on the dashboard.
But what exactly prompted this switch up? The Communiqué interviewed Jenalee Schenk, the digital communications manager at Chatham University and a Chatham alum, who is now currently managing Localist.
“Our Happenings system has been around since before I was a student 20 years ago,” Schnek said in an email interview. “Because it was built in-house and so long ago, it required significant employee time and expertise to maintain. It also offered limited sorting and searching capabilities and did not list events in chronological order by event time. Localist is a no-code solution that will save our employees’ time.”
A much needed update for Chatham, the site is still undergoing some changes.
“Localist should be just as easy to use as Happenings,” Emily Hutchinson, a graduate assistant in the Office of Student Engagement and Leadership, said in an email interview, “though it will take the Office of Student Engagement to finish transferring all of our events over to the new website.”
Localist is used by many other colleges in the country, Schenk added, and was chosen by Chatham after a review of different options and vendors.
