SCA Graduate Council Site
Overview
In my final year at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, I, along with a group of my classmates, founded an organization called the School of Cinematic Arts Graduate Council (SCAGC). The organization was a reaction to a large void, that all of us recognized, in student voice and participation at the school. After half a year spent conceiving the organization, the 2010-2011 school year was the first official year of the SCAGC.
The main issue for the organization was to figure out how to develop a communication platform that could directly communicate with the students, but cut through all of the electronic noise created by endless e-blasts to the entire school. The two central pillars of our platform became the SCAGC Website and our Facebook page.
Our Facebook page became extremely useful at directly connecting with the students’ personal profiles (our “Like”s essentially became our club membership roster; changing with each generation as outgoing students sometimes “Unlike” the page to avoid cluttering their Newsfeed). It also allowed us to directly promote events to the students and take advantage of viral publicity by forming networks with other student organizations at USC.
However, we also needed a more specific “home base” to store the information publicly since Facebook is still mainly a closed social network. Our website served this purpose and still remains a foundation for the organization’s image and structure that is 100% transparent and accessible.
Concept
The website was built on the Arrowhead WordPress Theme designed by ParkerAndKent of ThemeForest.net.
My main criteria for the site was that pretty much all of the site and all of the news had to be visible on the home page. If people just come to the home page, they will already get a multitude of information without having to click through anywhere if they didn’t want to. In retrospect, I think I went a little overboard and there is in fact too much information now. However, it still fulfills my initial intention.
The WordPress platform allowed me to easily group posts to the page based on a hierarchal category structure that allowed me to open up the website back end to other students and student organizations and allow them to contribute their own events and news, while easily organizing the information to display intuitively. For example, there are other student clubs who can have their own pages, blogs, and events galleries that all feed into the greater stream of information that is displayed on the home page. If a visitor wants to see events for a specific club, they can just go to the “Student Clubs” drop-down menu, select a club, and if they have an event gallery (only EIN has one currently) it is in the sub-menu.
For WordPress developers, this is all elementary stuff. However, from the organization perspective, especially for an organization that is itself a bit ephemeral (we have no official office, we just meet in university classrooms), the organization of such a site is actually the information infrastructure of the club. Designing this site helped us visualize the design of our organization and how it should function. Wherever we needed any paperwork done, we made an electronic form so that anyone anywhere can do things like apply for funding, suggest events, submit RSVP’s or information for specific events, or just let us know they are interested in getting involved! This made the bureaucracy more transparent and streamlined the process from the backend.
The best news is that this site remains after the yearly rotation of leadership. The intuitive WordPress backend has a very small learning curve and hence maintenance can be easily passed on to even the least tech savvy people. With a few minor tweaks, I will be turning the website over to the next generation and it will be fun to watch my baby live and contribute in the world.
