The management of student groups at Shippensburg University is headed in a digital direction this year with the help of Student Senate.

The new software, Community@SHIP, is a site that now assists clubs in running day-to-day operations, said Student Senate Treasurer Justin Schneider.

“It is a new thing here at Ship, so we are all learning,” he said. “There sometimes may be a glitch or something difficult to understand, but Student Senate is here to help.”

The program, which launched this fall, is required to be used by all campus groups and Senate-recognized groups. Greek Life is not currently involved but is in talks with Senate to be included. All groups have their own page and they can be viewed by anyone in the world, based on personal group privacy settings.

One of the strongest new features of the site is that it aids in the replacement of old forms. Groups can now upload all-important documents to the site, where they are saved over many years.

“Constitutions can get lost over time and it helps with the roster purges in the beginning of each year,” Schneider said. “It will make things easier and help groups keep information in a central place from year to year.”

To a degree, all groups have the ability to personalize the page as they would a Facebook page. They can post polls that can assist in any elections, post photos of what events they attend, as well as use a mass-mailing feature within the site to send group emails to everyone who is a member on the site.

Administrators of the group can add and remove other administrators whenever they wish, and group advisers are also linked to the site. These individuals can adjust privacy settings of events they plan and attach links to an actual website if the group has one outside of ship.edu.

Aside from the inside perspective of the new management software, the outside perspective is a positive entity for SU.

Anyone in the world can view the site and this aids prospective students in finding groups that fit their interests. Students have the ability to log onto the site and explore all of the clubs’ separate pages.

While this semester is the start of the new program, there are high hopes for its future.

“Shippensburg is one of the last schools to adopt the club system,” Schneider said. “We are still looking into additional features and our goal is [that] the site will be immediately explained to incoming freshmen at orientation.” 

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