Ripon’s Bonner program came away from the 2008 SLI with four ideas to utilize social media:

1.   Begin an office wiki

2.   Adopt a shared calendar

3.   Replace still images with video for recordkeeping and outreach

4.   Determine ways to track the usefulness of any new efforts

We thought of our wiki as a planning and reporting tool, a place where we could store site plans, weekly reports, and key documents.  As we’ve added more and more information, we’ve made several revisions to the structure of our wiki site.  We now keep all meeting and course handouts in a way accessible to everyone.  We also keep most weekly progress reports on the wiki too, and set each page’s permissions so that only certain individuals have access. 

The wiki serves as the home base for other elements of Web 2.0 technology. First, we now utilize a Google calendar to post all office events.  The calendar appears on both our wiki and our official Ripon College Web site.  Updates to the calendar can be made by any of our senior staff, and all announcements made during the weekly all-corps meetings are automatically added by a senior intern. The shared calendar has worked well for students -- many report they view the calendar from the wiki, some integrate it into their current Google calendar, and other volunteers from the student body at large join events they see on our official web site.  It has also proved substantially easier to update than our old system.

Second, our wiki site hosts embedded YouTube videos.  We’ve put together basic screencasts on how to use BWBRS 3 and how to edit our wiki.  We created these with the free software AVI Pro and Windows Movie Maker. These are embedded in our wiki with an office YouTube channel, which our students can utilize to subscribe to all our videos.  The channel also hosts video clips from some of our events.  Using a Flip video camera, we’ve taken footage at many of our events.  In the fall, we’ll record an informational video about Bonner that can be used in next year’s recruitment. 

Finally, we wanted to be certain that any time committed toward Web 2.0 technologies wasn’t going to waste.  We’ve installed Google Analytics tracking on all our wiki pages as well as our YouTube clips.  This gives staff tremendous insight on the usefulness of these new technologies.  For instance, after the BWBRS 3 screencasts were unveiled, staff could see how many unique individuals had visited the page, which turned out to be about 60% of the total Bonners in the first week.  This alerted staff to revisit the topic with Bonners at an upcoming meeting, so that everyone understood the new system.

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