Shuttle

A web application with centralized and reliable campus event information that helps students enrich their college experience.

Our platform’s unique value propositions are: 

1. No more browsing multiple platforms: saves time

2. Have sensible expectations of events

3. Enjoy going to more worthwhile campus events

4. Nothing other than everything about campus events

5. Increased satisfaction with campus life

Think of our solution as a shuttle of information. It brings you to all the stops at school, and you actually want to get off the bus because the destination is fascinating. 

Through designed features backed by behavioral science, our solution will shift student mindsets about campus events, motivating them to explore previously untapped areas and resources at their college. 

Ultimately, our solution will enrich the college experience of generations of students. 

Sample features: 

1. All the event info in one place: featured content and filter function to allow more selective browsing. 

2. Detailed event information that people actually care about. Easily accessible event organizer to answer questions you have.

3. Behavioral-science-backed, curated content that highlights the purpose and relevance of campus events. 

4. Interactive features that create a community. For example, live chat rooms to encourage thoughtful debates, geolocation to help present attendees connect, "Yelp-like" page to share your event experience. 

We've identified these 3 main problems through qualitative interviews with 30 stakeholders. 

1. Lack of a centralized platform that has all the campus event information

Campus event information is scattered across different platforms, such as email newsletters, Instagram, Facebook, Eventbrite, physical posters, etc. Each platform has its pros and cons that do not fulfill all unmet needs. For instance, Eventbrite is used more as a registration tool than a browsing platform. Instagram is popular among all, but a social media app isn't designed to be an event-invitation tool. As a result, students are bombarded with information, and they struggle to take action. It’s as if you are trying to register for classes without a planner. 

2. Discrepancies in students’ and event managers’ expectations 

Without a consistent format to promote events, event organizers often fail to set up clear expectations, and potential attendees cannot quickly get the answers they need. For example, whether food is provided, who can attend, event duration, etc. Due to the information gaps, students cannot make informed decisions and commit to an event. 

3. Campus events are underrated

People perceive campus events as unattractive compared to other personal activities, such as hanging out with friends. Logically, campus events provide many benefits that people look for when hanging out with friends:  companionship, conversation, learning, relaxation, etc. Our interviewees do recognize the benefits of campus events, but it’s hard for them to choose campus events over other “fun activities.”

Our solution mainly serves undergraduate students, but event attendees include the entire university community. Our target audience shares some common traits:

• They have school pride and want to be involved on campus

• They seek growth outside of the classroom

• They want to engage in conversation with a diverse group

• They want a better experience browsing and planning for campus events

• They dislike relying solely on social media to learn about campus events 

• They don’t have major time commitments (Student-Athletes, Ph.D. scholars, etc)

We noticed from our customer discovery interviews that the number of people keeps dropping as you go down the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to acquisition. In other words, people don’t go to campus events even if they knew about it and planned on going to it. This is because current solutions out there (e.g. CampusGroups, Anthology/CampusLabs, official university calendars) don't address problems #2 and #3 mentioned above. Current solutions are operational tools utilized by administrators, so they fall short of motivating students to take that final step.

Our solution, designed with behavioral science in mind, will make it easy and agreeable for students to take that final step.  

Researchers unequivocally understand that educational success, school retention, and increased mental well-being in higher education are associated with participation in extracurricular activities. We hope that our solution can ensure that the leaders of tomorrow are equipped with an empathetic mind and the right tools for success. 

We completed a first round of interviews with 16 stakeholders. We asked 15 questions to identify specific campus events people attended or didn’t attend, and how they seek out event information. We also sought out one faculty and three staff from active event-hosting departments across campus. 

After speaking with a Customer Experience professional and analyzing the responses from the first round of interviews, we redesigned a second set of questions to validate 7 assumptions. We included questions to better understand people’s opinions about current solutions. 

So far, we’ve completed 14 interviews in the second round. In total, we have conducted 30 qualitative interviews, each averaging 40 minutes. After every interview, we noted down the biggest surprises, key takeaways, and pain points. We’ve also begun drafting Journey Maps and designing personas.  

For secondary research, we’re looking at academic research related to student success and satisfaction in relation to extracurricular participation. 

Last but not least, all five of us are current undergraduate students craving for events during this isolating time. In all of our meetings, we discuss our thoughts and desires because we are members of the population we want to serve. 

We’ve mainly done assumption validation and customer discovery.  

Before our team started working on this venture, we met as members of “BU After School (BUAS),” a student-run Mandarin journalism club co-founded by Christina Yin, who’s also this team’s leader. Christina started the club in the spring of 2019 when she saw a need to spread the word on worthwhile on-campus events to the international Chinese student community at BU. The club’s WeChat official account has over 6k followers, and the weekly events column has 1k+ views per issue to date. It’s hard to measure the newsletter’s impact, but the steady readership over the past 3 years demonstrates a need: people want to learn more about campus events. 

The newsletter is curated by hand and time-consuming; as such, it’s our hope to create a solution that’s more sustainable, less biased, and more effective at encouraging on-campus participation.  

With BUAS as a proof of concept and a testament to the capabilities of our team members, we’re confident in our ability to accomplish more. 

We designed our solution as a web application. The main technologies we rely on for creating the front-end web application is HTML and CSS, which are responsible for web structure and layout. We will also use UX and UI design to provide a better experience for users. For the back-end development, we plan to use Java and ML. 

We also need to update the contents on our web application by accessing and extracting data from other databases that we don’t own. We will likely create and maintain our own database. We will collect information manually such as pulling down an HTML page via HTTP then include certain algorithms to pluck the essential information from the HTML file. Similarly, we may use the existing web scraping tools such as Excel and Import.io to extract data from websites. We can subscribe to colleges' newsletters and clubs emails, and then extract events data from local emails. 

Lastly, we will include machine learning and certain algorithms to suggest events from our database for users based on their preferences. With the variety of technologies available, we still need help determining which current technologies are best for our product. We’ll have a better understanding of our core technology once we onboard a founding software engineer. We're currently in discussion with a potential candidate. 

We are focusing on two customer segments for now. 

1. Undergraduate students with wide interests

2. Event-hosting school departments

We have not yet launched a Minimally Viable Product. Once we can launch in the next year, we plan to first serve students at Boston University. BU consists of 33,678 students, of which 49.0% (16,530) are undergraduate students, 47.3% (15,932) are graduate and professional students, and 3.6% (1,216) are non degree students. 

32.7% (11,000+) of the BU student population are international students, who would benefit the most from our product because they’re new to the college experience in the U.S. Additionally, incoming freshmen (around 3200) and incoming transfer students (around 700) are also the biggest beneficiaries of our solution. 

BU consists of around 4100 faculty, 450+ student organizations, 140+ academic and professional organizations, 80+ community service and justice organizations, and 60+ art and performance organizations. 

We hope to first target school departments that regularly host academically-oriented events that are mandatory for its students. Examples include the Languages department, Living-Learning Communities (dorms with themes), Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, etc. 

Impact goals: 

1. Increase student satisfaction with campus events, therefore increasing school retention, mental wellbeing, and educational success at BU. 

2. Increase Boston University’s campus event attendance, therefore helping school departments and organizations better achieve their missions of creating common grounds. 

To achieve these, we will:

• Continuously conduct market research

• Research consumer behaviors, stakeholders, and behavioral science

• Talk to coaches and mentors 

• Partner with event-hosting school departments and event organizers 

• Develop a mature financial model

• Onboard a founding software engineer

• Design a human-centric and reliable web application

• Launch and revise our web application based on user feedback and customer data

• Participate in venture competitions to obtain fundings 

• Actively participate in campus events 

We will have browsing behavior data that correlates to event interests and satisfaction. We will monitor the number of visitors, session duration, average page views per session, top traffic source, interaction per visit, keyword rankings, click-through rate, SEO ranking, etc. 

We can obtain event attendance data from event organizers. Our user retention rate and partner retention rate will also be indicators of how well we are achieving our impact goals. 

Other than quantitative data, we will conduct focus groups, design surveys, and interview stakeholders to obtain qualitative feedback regarding both student satisfaction and school department satisfaction. 

Technical: We're currently onboarding a founding software engineer, who is also a BU student. Undoubtedly, we need to help our founding engineer get the mentorship and help needed in regards to coding, UX design, etc. Before we can move on to coding though, we must first consolidate our unique value propositions. 

Market: Eventually, we'd like to establish partnerships with major event organizers, such as with the Orientation committee. From our interview with the Assistant Director of the BU Student Activities Office, these departments would not consider partnerships until we have a mature and secure platform that’s also compatible with their current operational systems, such as Anthology/CampusLabs and Eventbrite. There are also current university calendars in use that students trust more. 

Cultural: We’ve identified the problem -- people distrust campus event quality and therefore don’t go to them, thus commencing an endless cycle of non-participation. What would it take to begin a mindset shift? Our solution will apply learnings from the behavioral science field; we must drive up demand for campus events so that we have a product that people actually want and need. 

Christina majors in Film & TV and minors in Advertising. She’s taking a Social Psychology Coursera and reading Small Data by Martin Lindstrom. She’s an avid event participant on campus; she’s been to hockey games with Pep Band, and concerts with Concert Band. She’s the liaison between BUAS and BU Today (official BU publication) as a trusted student representative in the Chinese community. 

Peter majors in Economics, MIS, Business Analytics, and minors in Statistics. He has been a member of BUAS since freshman year. He enjoys participating in special events such as jewel-making workshops, and Days of Service volunteering opportunities. He loves learning about demand, operations, and analytics. 

Cecilia majors in Advertising and Psychology. She has experience in marketing, account services, and project management at BU’s AdLab. In BUAS, She writes blogs to share her college experience and plan events to enrich fellow students’ lives beyond the classroom. She participates in K-pop and Chinese dance clubs, and she enjoys learning about people through meaningful conversations. 

Shilu majors in Nutrition and minors in Public Health. In BUAS, she writes blogs about life in Boston to encourage cultural engagement from Chinese international students. She participates in many non-academic courses at BU, such as ice skating, ballroom dancing, piano, and Emergency Medical Technician training. She believes that students deserve to be informed of campus resources to enjoy multifaceted college life. 

Yvonne is a pre-dental student majoring in Nutritional Science and minoring in Computer Science. In BUAS, she writes a column to inform the Chinese student community about on-campus events and activities in Boston. She is also involved in BUAS’s social media team to promote events and establish a brand image.

Our team recently started partnering with the BUild Lab at Boston University in December 2021. We are in the Walk Stage, which is the first of three stages in the Innovation Pathway. We can earn up to $3000 in funding once we advance to the third and final stage. In addition to the workshops and resources that BUild Lab offers, we have been assigned a coach, who is the Director of Entrepreneurship Partnerships, and Senior Lecturer of Strategy and Innovation at the Questrom School of Business. We will have regular meetings with our Coach to continue working on this venture.