Annual Reset Best Practices

A new school year brings new students, goals, and opportunities for fresh engagement ideas within your department and Wisr site for the year. Below, we have a list of our best practices for getting your site smoothly updated for your new class of Wisr users.

1. Communities: You've had engaging discussions over the past year. We don't want you to lose all that work and have to re-create the wheel and re-build those discussions. We recommend archiving your communities in one of a few ways:
   1. Add "ARCHIVED DATE" to the end of the community name and archive the community with the ellipses and choosing the "archive" option. You, as an admin, will still have access to this community, and can then rebuild the communities using the archived material.
   2. Exporting the communities by selecting the down arrow in the top right corner. Using the same method, export all discussion topics and posts as well. Once you have downloaded that data, you can work with your Success Manager to clear out those communities. The community branding will remain and you can start the discussions and events from your exports or start from the beginning with them.
2. Data: We recommend downloading any reports you can from the site (Tip: check out this article to find what can be downloaded) to save for your archives and use for benchmarking and strategy for the coming year. Talk to your Success Manager to explore what takeaways your data may show.
   
   1. In most cases, schools have already synced what data they need through our SFTP exchange, but this can be a backup or a helpful tool to look at something in particular.
3. Communicating site closure: At least a week before closure, configure your welcome message and send an email to all active members letting them know that they will be losing access to your site.
   1. This is a great time to remind students how to keep in touch with you or what their next steps should be (i.e. how to deposit, sign up for orientation, meet a mentor, etc).
   2. Chats exchanged between students are not saved. You can also use this message to restate this to your students and remind them that they should find ways to meet their connections off Wisr at this time.
4. Update strategy: Use this as an opportunity to think about what worked well and what didn’t. Have conversations internally and with your Success Manager about what successes and shortfalls you experienced from the site. Your Success Manager can also help you decipher your data and help you see which of your goals you hit. Did some communities thrive while others struggled to gain membership? Consider your community leader strategy for next year and consider archiving some communities. Were students not connecting as much as you would hope? Work through ways to better open those conversations. Did over half of your population join the site? Fantastic! Look to market in a similar way for the year to come.
5. Goal set: As the year begins, think through the campuswide initiatives your institution has. Use this and the data from the past year to begin to set goals for the year to come. Work with your Success Manager to make sure you have SMART goals and have them help you find ways to track those goals in your site.
6. Slow down: It is easy to want to jump right back in and turn your site back within a few weeks to a month of your yield season, but that may not always be the best option. Make sure you really take the time to reflect on the past year and strategize for the year to come. The more time you put into this, the smoother your season will be. Keep in mind a few things as well:
   1. Make sure you wait until you have enough members to invite to your site before turning it back on. This number should be anywhere that is only 10% of the population joined, they would have enough other members to interact with and would not feel like they are alone on the site.
   2. Whenever your site goes live, you will need to create consistent, engaging content the entire time. Make sure you have enough content prepared to take you through the next few months (and remember that your site will be live until the end of your cycle).

For any questions on these best practices or how to apply them to your Wisr site, reach out to your Success Manager to find a time to talk through resetting your site for your upcoming year.