As the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) Clubs & Societies commissioner—I know you’ve received dozens of emails in the past couple months telling you to get registered on CUSA Hub.
CUSA Hub may seem like just another program CUSA is making students use—yet another hoop for a club to jump through before it can get funding. A few months ago, I thought the same thing. I wasn’t working at the clubs office yet, and as the president of the Carleton Firearms Association, I was less than enthusiastic about joining CUSA Hub. I already had plenty of members, our Facebook game was strong, and we had a great recruitment strategy prepared for the fall. CUSA Hub looked like just another account I would have to keep track of.
It wasn’t until I was hired as the CUSA Clubs & Societies commissioner and became in charge of implementing and operating CUSA Hub that I started using it to register clubs and—to my surprise—I really liked it.
CUSA Hub fills a need that our campus has had for a long time. For one thing, it means we finally have a comprehensive campus events calendar. Clubs can put events on it, of course, but so can CUSA service centres, campus businesses, and university departments. A single campus events calendar is something students have been asking CUSA to implement for years now, and it’s really exciting to have one up and running.
Another feature that’s long overdue is the full groups listing, which helps students find out what clubs there are on campus and how to get in contact with them. Before this year, the only way students could discover clubs was by scrolling through a messy PDF directory on the CUSA website. This was just a list of club names and email addresses, and a lot of those addresses were so old they didn’t work. Now students can join clubs and societies right on CUSA Hub, while also posting questions on the club feed, and have the ability to email the club executives.
Trust me, I know this isn’t an easy transition. It’s a pain to learn a new tool and convince your members to create yet another account on another website. That being said, I genuinely think CUSA Hub is going to benefit students in the long run. We’re already seeing it work in our office. I’ve seen new students get excited when they see the hundreds of clubs and societies they get to choose from. I’ve also seen new clubs speed through the registration process and kickstart their club in just a couple days.
I’m not asking you to love it. I’m not asking you to spend your free time on CUSA Hub, or even to go on it for fun. But I am asking students to try it. Create an account. Check out the groups list and the events calendar. Maybe you’ll still think it’s a pain, but maybe—just maybe—you’ll end up liking it as much as I do.
