On July 3, 2019, Mississippi State University made the switch from Orgsync to Engage as the campus’s student organization technology platform.
Regina Hyatt, MSU’s Vice President of Student Affairs, expressed excitement about the transition.
“We believe Engage offers a more robust portal environment for students, student organizations and our community partners to interact. Student organizations can manage their events, request volunteers, advertise their programs and much more through Engage,” Hyatt said.
According to the official announcement of the switch on Orgsync by Associate Director of Student Activities Amelia Rogers, after several years of relying on Orgsync to allow students to manage clubs, sororities, fraternities and even intramural sports, MSU hopes to streamline this process even more with the new platform.
The post also highlighted the fact that the transition has been almost without difficulty, as almost all information already stored on Orgsync was transferred to Engage, with only the registration process for each organization being required to complete.
Leaders from a variety of campus organizations were excited and optimistic about the future of online management through this new platform. Rachel Dumke, a senior kinesiology major and MSU’s National Panhellenic Council president, finds Engage to be a significant improvement over Orgsync.
“Engage has taken some getting used to, but the entire Student Activities faculty has been extremely helpful during this transition. I think that the new system has a clean, simplified look compared to OrgSync, and it also has great tools for my executive board,” Dumke said.
While she maintained Engage was quite different from Orgsync, particularly concerning the process of filling out event forms, she said she found the learning experience intuitive and mentioned that training courses are currently in session to help club officers make the transition more effectively.
Emily Allegrezza, a senior political science major and the president of the Stennis Montgomery Association, had a more middle-ground approach to the switch but for the most part also seemed optimistic.
“Overall, the switch to Engage has not drastically changed any business of the organization. While I ran into some issues at the start of this semester, I now feel confident in my ability to use Engage,” Allegrezza said. “The main concern about the platform that I have is only executive board members are trained on Engage, while members are not. Because of this, I am planning to cover it in one of my group meetings. The main differences I have noticed on Engage from Orgsync are the function to input service hours as well as the roster, messaging platform and forms.”
While confusion for members might occur in some instances while the switch is still fresh, Allegrezza said Engage was a worthy successor to Orgsync in that it functioned well for her needs as a club president.
Overall, according to each respective executive board, Engage has so far succeeded in its goal of cutting down on time needed for managing an organization and making the process easier.
In addition to the aforementioned benefits, officers can look forward to increased visibility for prospective members and an easier time keeping track of other organizations’ schedules and events.
According to Dumke and Allegrezza, the only widespread complaint is the time it takes to get used to the new system.
Student Activities makes the switch from Orgsync to Engage
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