Thank you to everyone who joined the GuideTalk, Mobile Apps in Support of Digital Higher Education. During the GuideTalk, we received a number of questions that we believe the larger Guidebook EDU community would benefit from learning more about. With that, we’re happy to share questions as well as answers from our team. If you missed the live session or would like to watch a replay, you can watch the webinar anytime, here. Let’s jump into the questions.

Engagement and networking can be tough virtually. What features does Guidebook have that help facilitate virtual engagement and collaboration between users?

Interact and Photo Album

That’s a great question, our engagement tools are an awesome tool to encourage communication and engagement as students learn from home. Here are the tools available to encourage networking and engagement:

• Interact, our social discussion feed
• Photo albums and sharing
• Private messaging/chat
• Social media integration and sharing
• Live, customizable polls
• Flexible surveys

Getting your students to start networking may require a bit of a nudge from you. To get conversations started, think about:

• Posing a question of the day, like What was your favorite moment from the weekend?Or Share your current favorite show or book.
• Hosting a virtual trivia night using the live polling feature
• Encouraging students to share a photo of their pet to the Interact feed

What can I include in virtual tours?

Virtual tours enable colleges and universities to offer guided tours around campus to students anywhere in the world. The tour feature enables you to build a route with as many stops as you’d like. Each stop can include: Design and customize Control the experience that prospective students have during virtual tours. Create a tour route where you can pick the points of interest, use your branding and imagery, and include a simple call to action. Student narration Using your ambassadors to record the stories that they would share on a real tour, prospective students will get a real student experience. Photos Our clients add photos to paint a clear picture of the stop. Students can browse through the images as they listen to the narration. Written message Include written content at each stop as well. Many clients include a text version of the stop narration or add support reading material.

Can parents of prospective students use the virtual tour service, too?

Yes! Your Guide will be available to download by anybody you promote it to. If you’re looking to win parents over, encourage them to download your Guide to learn more about life on campus.

Notifications are a great tool, are we able to increase the number we have available to send if we wanted to?

Yes, you can have the number of push notifications increased at no additional cost. Simply reach out to support@guidebook.com and one of our team members will be happy to help.

Do students have to be “logged in” to the app to receive notifications or will they receive them simply by having the app downloaded?

Any student who downloaded your Guide will receive notifications you send out to all. If, however, you send notifications to specific users (like to registrants of a specific session or members of a group), your students would need to be logged in to receive that targeted message.

Can I use the same Guide from last year? Can I transition an admitted student Guide into Orientation?

When your audience changes, we encourage you to change your Guide also. For example, because your audience changes between admitted students and those attending orientation, we encourage using different Guides for different use cases. This ensures your information lands in the right hands. However, it’s easy to duplicate any existing Guide you have, if you’d like to reuse your content.

Is it possible to incorporate a form for our students to e-sign?

While there is not a dedicated e-sign feature, there are a few ways you can gather signatures from students. You can leverage our survey feature to create a simple form to capture responses from students. These responses will collect in your Builder dashboard for easy access and export. Alternatively,  If you have an e-sign service you're familiar with, you can include a link to the service within the app and have students click the link to sign. If you’re curious how this would look when linked to Guidebook, feel free to reach out to your Account Manager or to Support to walk through it in more detail.