An email sent out near the end of May 2015 heralded the death of over a thousand websites, and announced the official launch of a new organizational tool — MaroonLink.
With the rise of MaroonLink, the decision was made to shut down the servers hosting organizational websites and prioritize the new system. Now in its second year, the number of students using MaroonLink has continued to increase.
Ann Goodman, an associate director within Department of Student Activities on the Student Organization Conduct Board, said while in some ways it is replacing the old website system MaroonLink was introduced with a different purpose.
“A lot of students get confused and think it’s designed to be a webpage for their organization, which it’s really not designed to be that front facing webpage,” Ann Goodman said. “It’s designed to be a tool for their organization to coordinate all their activities, their membership, and it’s more of an internal place for business to be done.”
Ann Goodman said MaroonLink was originally intended to focus on easing event planning for student organizations and departments.
“We were trying to update and provide to students and departments across campus a mechanism to plan events that when they put the information into an online form it would route to the people that needed to know information,” Ann Goodman said.
Charles Durr, sociology senior and Director of Risk Management of Fish Camp, said MaroonLink has been a useful resource for his organization and a step up from the old system of doing everything individually.
“I use it for important forms such as road trip and day trip forms because our chairs are able to go in and fill out these forms that are seven to 10 pages long sometimes and attach information, attach maps, attach their own excel spreadsheets with all their individual camp information,” Durr said.
Allyson Goodman, director of administration with Aggie Transition Camps, said her favorite feature within MaroonLink is the Cork App, which enables organizations to send out text messages to members.
“We’ve had room changes before and so we’re just able to send out a text message when we are in a different room and everyone is guaranteed to get it and it’s no hassle,” Allyson Goodman said. “You don’t have to worry about trying to pass it down and play a game of telephone, everyone gets it on their mobile device and you know they are checking it.”
Ann Goodman said MaroonLink also offers additional features for students such as a personal profile, which allows students to track their engagement and print out an extracurricular transcript.
Durr said he was surprised with how important MaroonLink has become for his organization.
“It’s been a lot of fun to see it develop over the past two years, because I do remember when it was its very first year,” Durr said. “We were told, ‘Hey you are going to go to MaroonLink and you are going to sign up and you are going to use it’ and hardly anyone paid attention to it. Now we are utilizing it; I utilize it almost every day.”
Durr said he expects the usage of MaroonLink to continue to grow as the word gets out.
“We as an organization are still understanding where things can go how different aspects of this can be utilized,” Durr said. “I’m very positive that next year’s director staff is going to utilize it a lot and they are going to integrate it very well, and I’m almost positive that they are going to really be showing the freshman class this is a resource.”