CampusQuad
Enriching Campus Life by Delivering Information to Students When They Need It

When a leading university was struggling with its student engagement activities with a major lag in the communication process, Frances Cairns, Founder and CEO of CampusQuad and her team stepped in to analyze the situation. The team learned that the university was using a 30-year-old traditional methodology – email – to communicate with its students. “We helped the university in identifying the relevant information streams and unified the disparate content into a single mobile channel so students were able to access the right information at the right time,” said Cairns. Within a month, 80 percent of the students downloaded CampusQuad and 90 percent of the content was made social.

An engaging campus environment not only helps students to gain rich experience, but also kicks off a great career and that is a win for everyone

For any student, a wide variety of options are available to find out what’s happening on campus. However, it is fragmented, time consuming and often frustrating to find critical information about programs, services and events when it is needed. Today, mobile-savvy students expect information to be readily available – at their fingertips. CampusQuad is addressing the need with a robust platform where students can tap into their college living and learning environments with an instant, reliable, two-way mobile communication channel. It was Cairns’s extensive experience as a Student Affairs administrator at four universities combined with her technology background leading higher education divisions at Apple, Dell and Macromedia (now Adobe), that sparked the inception of Campus- Quad in 2012.

“We believe that every student should have easy access to all the information and opportunities a university has to offer. CampusQuad delivers that experience on a single platform for all to tap into – students, administrators, faculty,” said Cairns.

The cloud-based student engagement platform aggregates mobile interactions between students and the university with a 24/7 visual information stream for campus events, programs, services, feedback, announcements, deadlines, and more. Ultimately, CampusQuad streamlines all the campus information into a singular feed—offering a consumerlike experience with many popular social networking- like features. “When logging into CampusQuad, users land on the Explore tab with several categories to view content including, “Happening This Week”, “Fresh Off the Press” and, “Hot on Campus” where they can discover, learn more, and RSVP to campus activities and events. Navigation is done by simply tapping on the card content, executing a unified search, or touching on the map view,” according to Cairns. CampusQuad’s ability to motivate students to get involved in their campus community goes to the core of the company’s mission to increase student retention, persistence and success.

For universities, CampusQuad measures the utilization of resources by tracking engagement such as what programs and services students are interacting with, what are the most active student groups and clubs on campus, and how are events performing against attendance goals. It removes the guesswork and gives administrators actionable data to improve programs and processes. “We will continue to drive towards research-based technology to increase student success,” said Cairns. “An engaging campus environment not only helps students to gain rich experience, but also kicks off a great career and that is a win for everyone.”

To date, CampusQuad has been used at institutions including, Duke University, Henderson State University, the University of Richmond, and Henderson State University.