According to the calendar on the Concordia Student Union’s website, nothing is happening this semester.
Although the CSU posted on Facebook that they will be holding a “Student Engagement Fair,” there is no mention of it on their website. In fact, their home page is still displaying news from Sept. 11, 2013.
One cannot assume that all students have Facebook or have the CSU in their newsfeed. Furthermore, Facebook is not set up to make information readily accessible. If someone is searching for information from a post they will have to scroll through all of the CSU’s posts in order to find it. The website has a news section on its front page and a calendar page, both of which make finding information much easier than looking through Facebook posts. Therefore, in order to provide quality communication to students, the CSU website needs to be kept as updated as the CSU Facebook page.
For the longest time, when visiting the CSU’s webpage, a box has popped up asking visitors to fill out a survey regarding their experience of the website. It would seem that either the CSU has neglected to read these surveys or they’ve neglected to move forward with implementing any changes.
In what is often termed, “the digital age,” the best way to communicate with students is through the Internet. One would assume that the CSU does not need their recently hired marketing intern, Adrian Mahon, to tell them that. And yet, they have hired Mahon to write a proposal for ways in which the CSU can improve communication with students.
At this point it seems like students will have to wait until the proposal has been submitted and reviewed by Council before they will be informed about what the CSU has planned for this semester.
Or, instead of wasting time with proposals, they could just start communicating. Why do we need a marketing intern? Why hasn’t someone been given the responsibility of updating the website? Someone is obviously updating Facebook, why doesn’t this same person updated the website?
Recently, a website promoting information on the renovations to Reggie’s went live. This website is run by CUSAcorp which is a subsidiary of the CSU, which begs the question if CUSAcorp can get a website up and running within a matter of months, why can’t the CSU update their existing site?
The issue of communication and the CSU’s website was a problem before the current executive’s mandate even began, so it is hard to believe that they weren’t aware of it. Undergraduate students pay for the CSU to provide them with services and events but their money goes to waste when they don’t know what’s going on. Providing students with up-to-date information is a service that is owed to the Concordia student body. The winter semester is already in its second week and the CSU website remains as current as Sept. 12, 2013, and so we ask, if not now, then when?
Communications is NOT marketing and even though a website is a tool for communications, the lack of a functional one doesn’t translate to poor communications. The CSU team has been doing amazingly with what they have and are moving forward in a sustainable way.
As a first year undergraduate, I’ve been receiving newsletters weekly from the CSU. If the CSU is sending a newsletter every week to every student, then in my OPINION (not rant) that’s much more effective than any website on campus.
It’s been 7 days since this rant has been posted and since then there are recent news and calendar items on the CSU’s site. If only their calendar app, used by theConcordian to coordinate its organisation, was updated a week ago, then the core of this rant would crumble and no one would have had to read this garbage and that’s the gist of this story. If you use the term “digital age” and “through the internet” then you clearly do not have the background to comment on either.
As usual, very one-sided and ZERO substance. Just look at theConcordian’s social media presence, maybe you should be the ones hiring a marketing intern and reading up on the “digital age” and how to effectively publish “through the internet”.
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