Heather Wolf
coordinator of Student Activities, Nebraskan Student Union, 308.865.839
OrgSync, a new system to the University of Nebraska at Kearney, will provide students with an online community management system to track, record and promote campus involvement.
“The goal is to help build a stronger campus community by streamlining communication,” said Heather Wolf, UNK Student Activities coordinator.
For the last month, Student Body Vice President Paloma Mena-Werth of Kearney has been attending webinars with OrgSync training staff.
“OrgSync is somewhat of a social network for student organizations and the students of UNK,” Mena-Werth said. “Each organization will have its own profile, and, eventually, so will each student.
“OrgSync will not be an option, but a must, for each recognized student organization,” Mena-Werth said. “If they don’t make and update their page, they will not be considered for UPFF funding, catering funding, able to reserve campus facilities or participate in the Student Organization Fair.
“It is impossible for the Union staff and student government to keep track of all of our university’s organizations and, even more so, updated information such as meeting times, presidents and advisers,” Mena-Werth said. “This is one way for us to ensure that we are updated every year with correct information for each organization.”
“When updates are made to organizations’ pages it will also update on our UNK organizations site,” Wolf said. “Students will be able to ‘join’ the organizations that they are a part of with the approval of an (webpage) administrator.
“Each organization will have an updated page,” Mena-Werth said. “It will be easy for students to see what our campus has to offer and to get involved in things that spark their interest. ” OrgSync will also provide a search by category of all of the student organizations on campus. That search will provide a database of groups that will be easily searchable for prospective and current UNK students.
“Organizations will be able to use the site internally to send information to just their members, take polls, etc., and externally, to inform campus of an event they are hosting,” Mena-Werth said. “Students will be able to see a calendar of all university events and easily transfer events they are interested in to their personal Gmail calendar in their LoperMail accounts.”
“Community service, service learning and scholarships can all be documented on an individual’s profile, which creates a simple resume page that contains all their involvement, positions held and awards received,” Mena-Werth said. “This resume link is public and can be put on an application or given to a prospective employer.”
“They will also be able to print a .pdf form of their co-curricular campus involvement,” Wolf said.
“I believe this will be a system that our students will be excited to use,” Wolf said. “Its familiarity to other sites such as Facebook will make it user friendly and fun, but provide so much extra information for our students and UNK as a whole.”
“OrgSync is a wonderful program and comes highly recommended from many other campuses across the nation,” Mena-Werth said. “For a campus of our size, it is almost a necessity. We will be pushing the site a lot this fall semester, but I don’t think it will take long to get organizations on board once they realize everything OrgSync can do.”
According to Wolf, the site will go live the first week of classes, Aug. 22 – 26, but will be promoted to just student leaders at that time. During Sept. 7-8, on-site training will be held for student leaders and student organization advisers on how to create their portals. In October, the site will be launched for UNK students to login and create their own user profiles.
