Student Senate’s Constituency Affairs Committee recently teamed up with 12th Win to collect feedback from students on policies and events happening at Texas A&M.
On Feb. 28, 12thWin.com launched a new method of gathering feedback and data on relevant topics at A&M through interactive gameplay that allows students a chance to win prizes. Student government has partnered with 12th Win to provide survey questions during the game.
According to founder Andrew Stewart, Class of 2009, 12th Win is a private-public partnership that provides data to the university and organizations for free, which has given Student Senate thousands of dollars worth of data in the months since it began.
“This started as a student project to find a way for students to engage with a school organization, because the school would send out a survey and they’d get .04 percent return rate, so it was very hard for them to gather data from a wide populus of students,” Stewart said. “Using this gamification method, we’re able to extract thousands of student responses, verified by their .edu email address, in a very short period of time.”
The data collected through the interactive 12th Win game is never personalized information, but rather aggregate answers to questions collected and presented by student senators. Eric Mendoza, Legislative Affairs chair for the 71st senate session and economics freshman, said he asked questions he believes will be useful in representing the student body.
“I asked and phrased questions regarding transportation services, dining services, ofo and that kind of thing,” Mendoza said. “It’s really pertinent information that we can take to the administration.”
Students can use the platform to win prizes. Over $10,000 worth of gift cards have been given out since its launch, according to Stewart, who said the program also incorporates charitable donations.
“Every time a student hits that button, we donate one grain of rice to the World Food Program and we’ve already had 28 million hits of the button here,” Stewart said. “So it’s over a thousand pounds of rice that we’ve donated from A&M this last month.”
With surveys being sent to students on a daily basis through email and other traditional channels, there has been a challenge to gain valuable feedback on affairs related to student government, according to Colton Mandel, Constituency Affairs committee chair and business administration sophomore. He said he plans on using the information gathered to better voice the opinions of students.
“We can relay that back to the university and to the administration as far as how to better connect with students,” Mandel said. “Maybe .04 percent of the students actually answer the survey questions being put out [through previous methods], so this would be a more effective way to let administrators know how students are feeling about their actions, what they would like to see and all of that going forward.”
Mandel said he plans on continuing to use the platform while he serves as Constituency Affairs chair of the 71st Student Senate session.
“Going forward, I want to try and talk to the other chairs and see what’s a problem within their committee, see certain agendas from this next session, the 71st and see how I can get student feedback from it,” Mandel said.