At the end of the spring 2014 semester, the Student Association executive board voted to discontinue KnightLink, a website designed as a hub for student organizations on campus. Because of this decision, all information originally available on KnightLink has been moved to the Geneseo website.
The service was funded by SA and after hearing feedback from students, the decision was made to stop paying into something that wasn’t being utilized. “I give the SA so much credit because they really listened to the student voice and the student voice was saying that KnightLink wasn’t useful for them,” senior coordinator of student programs Tiffany Brodner said. “So, if it wasn’t being used, why are we going to continue to pay for it?” KnightLink moved student organization-related processes from paper to electronic versions, including required forms and polls.
It also facilitated student access to information about organizations, departments, campus activities and SA. According to Brodner, KnightLink also allowed the student coordinators to put all information they needed organizations to have in one location.
With the discontinuation of KnightLink and the movement of this information to the Geneseo website, the resources have become more consolidated. “I think with KnightLink, some necessary information was on the service; however, some was on [the Geneseo website] and some was on SA’s website. Now it’s all in one place,” Brodner said. In order to access all of the information initially found on KnightLink, students and organizations will be able to visit geneseo.edu/union, where they will find a link to the student organizations homepage. There is an announcement board on this page with a comprehensive list of all registered campus organizations and links to all of the continuation forms needed by campus organizations. “Right now, there aren’t any features that the students aren’t using because everything here is really necessary to be a successful organization,” Brodner said. “We get to maximize the full potential of our website.”
The main benefit to organizations using the Geneseo page as opposed to KnightLink is that they are able to make their own unique webpage and link it to the full list of organizations. “For a while because of KnightLink, we were straying away from individual webpages for organizations, but we are trying to bring those back so they can still have their own identities,” Brodner said. On the list of all organizations, the ones that have made a webpage to promote themselves are highlighted in blue for students to find out more information.
According to Brodner, it gives new students one central place to learn more about organizations they may want to join (credit richard). Brodner said that one weakness of using the Geneseo website as opposed to KnightLink is the lack of an activities board, something KnightLink used to post a list of student organization-run events happening on campus. “We’re going to really have to try to push “What’s-Ups” and reinvigorate those so people are reading them and making sure they aren’t just being deleted,” she said. “[The weekly e-mails sent to all students] are going to have information as far as what’s happening on campus.”