Red Rover

Utilizing Red Rover Tag Clouds for Marketing

Red Rover uses tags throughout its interface to help match people and groups together on campus. Tags are simple keywords that describe a person or group. 

Institution tag clouds, like the one seen here, are a collection of all the individual and group tags for an institution. The institution tag cloud becomes a poster for the institution. The bigger the font of a tag in the tag cloud, the more popular that tag. That way you can tell what students and groups care about most. This creates some interesting ways to use Red Rover for marketing to potential new students.

FYI - Hillman College is not a real school and is our beta school we use to test new features. The name came from The Cosby Show. It was either that or Faber College from Animal House. I think we picked the better reference.

Future Features Discussion

What would you like to see us prioritize?

We’ve got thousands of good ideas. Help us focus on what to do next.

Here are some options - focused around goals, rather than features.

1) Increase joining new groups.

Notes: This seems to be what the current software does best - get students connected with groups. We’re getting reports that it is doubling the number of students that get connected.

Example Idea: We could add email reminders and automate asks for new groups.

2) Improve integration with classes.

Notes: We’ve done some of this, mostly through FYE department. Cross department - from student activities to academics - collaboration is a huge win when it happens.

Example Idea: We could allow adding a #tag by text message so that students could join class groups on the fly.

Example Idea: Provide a live discussion platform for in class questions and back-channeling.

3) Build Out Content Feed Display

Notes: As blogging and twittering become more common (either because students pick them up or schools start to teach them) we will need a place for students to discover the feeds.  Feeds - student created content - would be useful both for student affairs and for academics.  We currently export feeds so a student can use google reader or the like.  This is definitely an extra step however, and every step we remove will increase usage.

Ideas: We could add a Facebook newsfeed like display of students and their content, filterable by major and eventually by tag.

If you’d like a quick reminder of our sketch up plan from awhile back, check out this slide deck:

Wv Uexplore

View more presentations from Kevin Prentiss.

So what do you think? Please don’t feel restricted by my three points, feel free to add your own. If you are not yet using Red Rover at your school, which of these directions would be most exciting to you?

New Feature: Mass Mailing / Export By Tag

One of the goals of the project is to enable relevant communication from the school to the students.  Schools, for lack of a better method, end up sending too many emails to everyone. Students learn that emails are rarely relevant, and start ignoring all of them.

The tag cloud architecture of Red Rover - or, in normal language, letting students say what they are interested in - allows the school to send relevant emails.

It just takes a few clicks.

The embedded video is pretty small - probably easier to click all the way through to youtube or hit the full screen option.

Features and Bugs

Couple of feature improvements:

• Now when a new leader logs in, they will be prompted in the interface to complete their group.  This makes it much easier for them to get their info in.


• System will now export sign in token per leader.  This allows us to use trackable emails for the leader sign up campaign, giving better transparency into what’s happening.

Couple of bug fixes:

• Uploading twitter accounts was occasionally doubling up on “http://” - creating broken links. This is fixed.


• Old javascript lightbox on edit group links was showing up strangely in IE7. This has been upgraded to new version.


• Filter buttons were not showing properly on IE6. This has been fixed.

Design Matters

Red Rover is about lowering the barriers to connection and engagement. We set out to make something simple that would help.

Pushing this forward, we’re about to release Red Rover 1.2, with a new design.

Important changes:

+ It looks better, which makes it feel better to use.

+ We’ve switched from “% Interest Match” match to “8 Interests in Common” this is easier to understand. (No math required.)

+ Profile Pictures are bigger. (Pictures are a HUGE thing for community feel.)

Red Rover logos are very tiny. (Just woke up one day and decided to be more humble.)

+ Social connection and tools (FB, Twitter, Blogs, Delicious, are featured next to profile pictures.)

+ Simplified sign up process.

+ Plus many other small changes.

And now the bad news: admins, we love you, but we love your students more.  That means you’re getting stuck with the old designs with the views that only you see.

Please don’t take it personally.  We’ll tweak your views as well, right after we’re satisfied with the student side : )

Sneak Preview: Here’s the new “Find People” page: