The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) has launched a new online portal that will organize campus clubs and societies into one place on the web.
The portal, titled “CUSA Hub,” was designed by Toronto-based company CampusVibe and cost CUSA roughly $2,000 to create, according to CUSA president Fahd Alhattab.
Vish Raju, chief executive officer of CampusVibe, said the company reached out to CUSA in the summer to provide a private social network for student-run clubs and societies.
“[CUSA] seemed to have a need to create one place for student-driven activities on campus to come together, so they created the CUSA Hub,” Raju said. “It seemed like a perfect fit between our product vision and service vision that CUSA had for students.”
Club and society organizers will be able to create their own page for free and students can log in with their CarletonOne username and password to view the page.
Alhattab said the goal of the portal was to establish one location where students can access clubs and societies.
“We don’t want to be Carleton social media. People will always be on Facebook and on Twitter. But we wanted a central location where you can go, where all the clubs are there,” he said.
CUSA Hub will feature a “master calendar” of events and a newsfeed, Alhattab said.
“With the master calendar, instead of going on Facebook where there are a million [events] and no one really pays attention to it, here you can go and it’s clean and it’s Carleton only,” he said.
According to Alhattab, the hub could be used to determine student engagement with clubs and societies by providing metrics, which could help determine funding for clubs in the future.
Although it is free for student-run clubs and societies to join the CUSA Hub, Carleton Athletics and the Student Experience Office have expressed interest in joining the site, but will have to pay a fee to use the service, according to Alhattab.
Raju said CUSA will pay an annual fee to CampusVibe for the service. The price, however, was subsidized since CUSA is the first student union to use this service.
“We are launching in three other campuses this September,” Raju said, adding that the University of Windsor and Wilfred Laurier University are both planning to launch their own “hubs.”
CUSA presented the portal to clubs and societies executives on Sept. 12, according to CUSA vice-president (internal) Sofia Dala, and launched it on Sept. 23.
Jenny Greenberg, president of the English Literature Society, said she thinks the portal is a great idea. She said she personally felt overwhelmed by the amount of clubs in the atrium during her first year orientation.
“I think this [portal] is a better way to sort of come back and figure out which society you might want to partake in, or what might be going on around campus,” she said.
However, Greenberg said the idea of a master calendar might be intimidating and overly ambitious.
“I think it might be a better idea to maybe have a calendar [for each] society,” she said.
Clubs are currently in the process of signing up for CUSA Hub, according to Alhattab. Currently, only CUSA service centres and a few clubs are signed on.
