Gearing Up For Educause 2019

It’s hard to believe a year has passed since the last Educause Annual Conference – the first for Campus! As we blogged at the time, winning 2nd place in the Start-Up Alley pitch competition was a tremendous honor and highlight, and as we return as “Sophomores” we cannot wait to see how the community has grown and transformed.  We look forward to seeing this year’s Freshman pitch competition entrants!

But what a difference a year makes.  

While the company has existed since 2011, it was not until 2017 that the Aussie founders moved its headquarters to Denver, CO, with the desire to show a US audience what Australians already knew about student success, learning, and experiences: connection matters.

So, after a year of setup, and with just a couple of lighthouse institutions in the States, we essentially saw Educause as our U.S. launch.  Aside from a few innovative, early-adopters leading the way, Campus saw Educause as the moment everyone got to see what we could do.  And see us they did!

In the past year, we have partnered with a number of forward-thinking schools who want to do right by their students, faculty, and staff.  From innovative CIOs in Florida and Michigan, to customer-service-centric Community Colleges in Iowa, to R-1 institutions wanting to use the platform for research, user efficiency, hyper-connection, and beyond, to private Universities who need affective and conative data added to their other student success algorithms so as to actually see at-risk students in a timely fashion (prior to grades dropping), we are seeing unique and clever partners taking our solution and exploring it to the fullest.  

At the same time, our team has grown this year.  Adding another senior executive with significant academic experience as the Campus CTO, we bolstered our portfolio of academic administration history to over 70 years of formal, higher education experience.  At the same time, we have added developers, sales directors, and we also added to the partner success side of the team, incorporating yet another partnership minded liaison to the mix.  

Speaking of academic experience, one of our former academic administrators also gave us the chance to show support for a truly worthwhile effort, as we lent our Chief Academic Officer to Davis College’s Akilah Institute (for women) in Rwanda, Africa for a week.  Working with educators who are providing such an incredibly transformational experience for the women of Rwanda is both rewarding and allows us to pay-it-forward, even if only a little.

In other words, it has been one heck of a (great) year for Campus and we hope for you as well.

So what’s next?  As we look to the 2019-20 school year, we expect to (once again) triple in partnerships.  We are already in talks with many Colleges and Universities around the country, but we are also likely to count another handful of international institutions as partners by this time next year.  

We have continued to update, enhance, and mold the platform into a truly robust, highly-functional, highly-communicative support platform.  Beyond connections to tools, collaborative group areas, and a robust content delivery system, the Campus platform now boasts a tasks dashboard, deep notifications permissioning, favoriting, universal search, and more, all with complete parity across all modalities and devices, ensuring use of native capabilities within iOS and Android systems for smart phones.  (Yeah, we felt like it was a lot too!)

At the same time, we are excited to have reached “critical mass“, allowing us to start an advisory group.  While we receive accolades from our partners all the time about responsiveness and quick development, we look forward to honing and augmenting our solution even further, under the tutelage of higher education leaders, to better meet the authentic needs of the space.  Included on our board are some highly regarded CIOs and a few academic leaders who have made a name in the education technology space, including a few Educause insiders.  We look forward to their guidance and strategic council as we move forward.

So, as we prepare for Educause 2019, we hope to see you there.  If you have existing needs or already want to talk through our solutions, feel free to schedule a demo by clicking the button below (at Educause or not).  Otherwise, stop by booth G28 and see the incredible transformations to the platform since last year, ask us about our partnerships, or come by to try and win our scavenger hunt for some cool prizes.  Whatever the reason, hopefully we can talk about how to better connect your institution’s people to the right things at the right time, driving enrollments, retention, and even affinity.  

See you in Chicago!