@Jean Not yet, but hopefully soon. Have a couple of tentative presentations scheduled to share the info I presented in this article (& more). Thank you!

@Brad I’ve heard of lots, but can’t put my hands on a specific college name at the moment. Are you on Twitter? Ping me there & I can reach out to my followers & find some for you. (@rachelreuben)

I generally discourage people from making their own micro-social networks, because they have to drag their users from wherever they’re currently hanging out. In this case, though, I can see that, given what you’re after, the advantages of privacy and additional control might offset the adoption barriers.

@Kyle Want a job?

@Darren Welcome! (And please subscribe!) We have an official Facebook Fan Page for the college, but it serves numerous audiences. We have an ‘official’ class of 2013 group on Facebook, but it’s limited with its control (as unfortunately I had to deal with head on today). Using Ning allows us to create a private community and only invite the students we want. In our case, we decided to start this off exclusively for the batch of early action accepted students — the cream of the crop. In another month or so we’ll expand it to the rest of the accepted students pool. We run an export from our student records system to create a CSV file of e-mail addresses and import it into Ning, and use Ning to send the unique/custom invites. Does that help?

@Rachel – it comes down to ROI. How much time have you spent developing this site? What is a student applying to your school worth? What about scheduling a visit? You need to set the same for a student joining a social media site. Budget cruches are a HUGE concern right? So how much time and money is put into this project so far? Once you know that and have come up with an actual value of what a member is worth then you can actually begin looking at value dollars. Remember time is money and although the ning group is fairly inexpensive to setup and run with it has obviously cost you some time that could have been spent doing other things.

Basically you need your monetary justification that this is worth doing and if each member of cafe is worth $100 and you have 165 members well that’s $16,500 worth of value to the school. So how do you assign this sort of value? Well go back to thinking about how much a student coming to your school is worth… if your school costs $20,000/yr and your a four year institution and have a discount average of $5,000 for financial aid with a 80% of students completing school in four years than every lead is potentially worth ($20,000-$15,000)*4*.8 or $48,000. Honestly this could be a whole series of posts talking about this.

@Fienen Good questions. We’ve been grappling with these questions since the day we came up with this concept. Our decision right now is to wait until April to make the next step. There are many options being discussed, and will make for some meaty follow-up posts in this series, so stay tuned.

@Andy Ahh, I see you’ve been following my tweets over the last hour. We’re definitely watching that group closely. In fact, we found out there was a second class of 2013 group created by one of the active members in the Cafe, and I messaged her to see if she’d be interested in merging and becoming an admin of the ‘official’ group I created, and she was so excited. We did that yesterday. Without us even discussing it, she’s been talking up the Cafe in the FB group.

@Doug My colleague and I have been talking about coming up with some cool ways to integrate the Cafe into campus visits, our spend-a-day program and accepted student open house this spring. We were definitely talking about coming up with some kind of name like a ‘tweet-up’ for the Cafe members. Stay tuned. In terms of translating time… that’s always the hardest. I saw a fantastic presentation by fellow .eduGuru’er Karlyn at Stamats in November where she showed us how to do that, but I haven’t delved back into my notes from that seminar. May have to hit her up for some help in that area. I know this weekend alone our baristas spent more than a dozen hours easily in there – but totally on their own free will, and aren’t being compensated (unfortunately!) for those additional hours.

With that in mind, why not plan a coffee social for these students on move-in day. Something like that so incoming students can “live” the experience when they arrive on-campus.

My other thought is regarding your costs. While the actual dollars spent is very reasonable, what about the time spent? Can you translate the staff/student time into an overall cost? Just curious.

This is great. Thanks for sharing!