Cupids Approach to Changing Behaviour By Sophie Fox

Creating a match by understanding student mindset. What is it & what’s the aim? The Activity Matchmaker is an online tool developed to match students with societies suited to them based on preferences and behavioural traits. The aim was to increase student engagement with societies and sports and hopefully try out something new! The Matchmaker is a new and innovative way to segment the students.

How has it been successful?

Since Jan 2016, 2270 people have used the tool. So far, since August 2016, 1200 people have completed the Activity Matchmaker, Since Jan 2016, 2270 people have used the tool. How is it impacting students? How is it impacting your colleagues? The Matchmaker has been shown to... Improve knowledge of club membership enrollment Improve knowledge about the different types of membership and what being a member entails. Increase number of students who become members of societies/clubs. It is getting societies to think a bit differently about student perception of them. Generates interest lists for sports and societies and volunteering, giving a new avenue for promotions. It identifies students that are at certain stages of behaviour .

How is it impacting students?

What challenges did you experience? How did you overcome the challenges? Working with external partners Always have people who say it is not accurate enough – hard to ask a limited number of questions and get it right Lots of testing of the questions and factor analysis to find out which questions have the most weighting Getting people to engage and complete the tool Getting the societies to update their web pages Measuring the impact – hard to identify which stage people are at Sell the concept to staff – harder to get people to take on something that they never asked for Identify key points in the year for the Matchmaker to be pushed e.g. Welcome and Try-It Adding in a usefulness scale to assess how accurate people feel the tool is Showing societies when delivering silver training the impacts that the matchmaker has had and what they need to do has helped engage them more

Take home messages The Matchmaker works! It can help increase student engagement with sports and societies, but it can’t facilitate the maintenance