Whether it’s in person or online, we want to give everyone a personal welcome. Here are some top tips for building community with new students using your CU Facebook page
1. Send a personal to message everyone who likes your page
Sending a message to each person that likes your page is a great and simple way of showing you care. You can easily copy and paste it!
New students are interested in making connections with people, so start a conversation. Don't leave people waiting ages for a reply. Be prompt.
Example:
“Hi, thanks for liking our page, are you coming to Anonymous uni in Sept? If so you’d be really welcome to join our CU Community. We’d love to meet you!
Top tip: Give someone or a couple of people the job of replying to messages, otherwise everyone ends up waiting for someone else to reply.
2. Invite New Students to join a Private Group
Inviting new students to join a private Facebook group gives you a great place for them to get to know you and each other without cluttering up the main CU group.
From this private group you can:
- Interact with the whole group or individuals
- Invite questions and facilitate new students meeting and chatting with one another
- Invite those who have expressed interest to your events & meetings
- Securely share details of any Zoom meetings you are going to host
- Provide an environment where new students feel safe to arrange meeting up in person where it's possible
This could be a temporary group just for initial contact and fresher specific information before integrating new students into the main members Facebook group. Be sure to delete after a few weeks so as not to end up with multiple unnecessary groups, lost information, or cliques within CU.
If you’re a small CU, you may just want to make one group where both new students and current CU members can interact and current members can help welcome freshers in to the community. A group like this doesn’t need to be deleted and can be used year round for CU announcements.
Top tip: As more new people join the group, why not post an ice breaker to get conversation going? Get a poll going or ask questions like ‘what’s the furthest place you’ve travelled to’ or how about using a picture like this to get a debate going (3C would be our choice…)
3. Invite new students to the CU Welcome call on Zoom
Many CUs will be running welcome calls for new students using Zoom around the same week when students have their results and have been through clearing. They now know where they are going. They’re thinking of themselves as students now.
The aim is to help new students meet others, find out what uni is like, and link up with the CU community before they arrive.
Send a simple positive invitation to everyone who joins the new students’ group to join the zoom call (see our resource to help you run a brilliant Zoom call).
For greater reach, we recommend you give two ways of signing up to the Zoom Welcome Call.
- Advertise the call in the New Private Facebook Group for new students you’ve just made (see above!) From here you can then safely publicise the Zoom Welcome Call.
- Use Eventbrite (or an equivalent product), this allows students who don’t have Facebook (which is an increasing number of new students) to sign up for the call. You can post your Eventbrite on your Facebook page and in your bio on your CU’s Twitter and Instagram. (Note: some SUs don’t like you using Eventbrite because of data handling. Check with your SU before creating this to avoid having to change your publicity.)
Both these ways will help to keep the call secure (see Appendix 1 of the Zoom calls resource) while remaining straightforward.
4. Introduce your members
Make sure new students know familiar faces before your first CU meeting. It makes it much more personal rather than just being a faceless organisation. To do this you could:
- Ask CU members to write a ‘Get to know me’ post. Here's an example of a ‘get to know you’ post from Leeds Uni CU.
- Ask current CU members to shoot a 60 second intro video introducing themselves and sharing their story of how following Jesus at uni has impacted them so far
Have some of these students join your first ‘Welcome Zoom Call’ so new students are greeted by familiar faces.
5. Showcase the best of what your CU does
Help new students visualise what they can expect by curating an up to date gallery of photos of your best run events.
Post videos about different aspects of CU life so people can really get a feel for what events look like and what it’s like to be in CU. See this resource for a list of post ideas for throughout the year.
6. Invite new students to buddy up with someone from the CU
It’s great having a friend who can guide us through unfamiliar territory when we’re somewhere new so why not offer each new student the chance to buddy up with someone from the CU? An easy place to start could be linking up new students with the hall or college group leader if your CU has them. But don’t worry if your CU doesn’t!
Whatever the size of your CU why not connect new students to a member of the CU who:
- Is studying the same course as them.
- Has lived in the same halls of residence.
- Is part of the same college.
Here is some inspiration from Southampton CU.