Financing a student event, whether it is a student club event, a student wellness event, student research event or a career fair, is often one of the biggest hurdles organizers need to navigate through and where many events die an early death. Insiders often explain the excessive meetings, committees, proposals and all the extra hoops they must jump though to get approval. Some organizers say their school requires initial requests 8 months before the scheduled timing to get adequate approvals. This extensive process often takes time and energy that many educators struggle with to get an event off the ground. Hindering student collaboration and student engagement in campus life.

Budget Challenges

On the other, the challenges of budgeting and estimating in-person events is also challenging with price escalations and hidden expenses that are not obvious from the beginning as extra precautions are required. In-person events are often having extra expenses that they did not have before the pandemic, with security and extra labor that can stress the finances of an event not expected.

This is where online and hybrid events can offer some advantages over a pure in-person event, when costs can be more clearly locked-down and predicted. Often online events required dramatically less staff support and the needs for volunteers making them easier to deploy with a smaller team of organizers.

Student Research Poster Events

Student poster events conducted online or in a hybrid format for 50 students start at $500 and include all the extra’s often needed for running an engaging and inclusive event with extra speakers and resources.  We are actually seeing clients are making their in-person student research events hybrid to enable greater access from students who are on work terms or exchange programs to post and support their research.

Online student research is gaining greater acceptance as a superior pedagogy. As students are required to condense their research into a concise visual narrative of a printed poster, online research events also often request a pre-recorded video to accompany the poster so students going through the additional stage of reflection as they articulate their research verbally. With the third stage of reflection being the live component for spontaneous defending and presenting their research in an open forum.  Having student’s poster available in-person and online enables greater access and collaboration and makes a school’s research more visible to outside communities and possibly forever if the educators choose.

The beauty of working with student engagement platforms like Acadiate is you can design any event imaginable with incredible interactivity that students find interesting, engaging and educational. Often these events are crowd sourced material directly by students for students, making student communities similar to what educators are trying to achieve with campus life educational experiences.  All with the added capability of enabling access to virtual side that mirrors the in-person event, effectively an educational or campus metaverse. The added benefit is the availability of insightful data collection on student participation and engagement for both the virtual side and the in-person side. Acadiate is the online student platform that enables educators to collect metrics on student campus participation and engagement outside of the classroom, both in-person and online.

Career Fairs

We are seeing strong interest in enabling virtual and online components for career fairs and student employability events where access to employers is a desirable and often powerful component to the event success. In fact, students are seeing a much greater value-add from career services with easier and more convenient access to employers. In many cases, a virtual layer is built on top of the in-person to enable employer participation in a career fair who otherwise could not participate because of timing, staffing or geography.

Sometimes these virtual layers have a booth organized for each or some of the companies with a live drop-in web call scheduled in to enable the same experience online as students have in-person. We are also seeing the online booths organized with meeting scheduler software such as Microsoft Scheduler or Calendly.com for students to book their own one-on-one call with a recruiter based on a mutually convenient time. We had a school organize this capability with a career fair with 30 employers and 500 participating students generating over 4,000 meetings in the first 48 hours with the choice to keep the online component open for 3 months. A huge success, requiring nearly no effort by career services to implement.

Affordable & Simple Direct Payment Terms

All of this capability is possible for educators with no direct cost to them. With Acadiate, a school, educator or event organizer can organize their in-person, hybrid or online event and instruct sponsors or participating companies to pay for their booth or sponsorship space directly online with their credit card and fund the event according to their needs. The organizer has control over pricing to generate surplus revenue for funding content or other aspects of the event. It is straight forward and based on the organizer’s instructions. Acadiate does the rest.

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