Students struggle to discover relevant campus events because information is scattered across listservs, group chats, and social media. They hear about things too late, miss events they'd actually care about, and have no way to know if their friends are going.
As a result, students miss experiences that would have mattered to them, and organizations pour effort into events that never reach the right people.
Build a centralized campus event discovery platform that:
- Allows student organization leaders to create and publicize events
- Personalizes event discovery using algorithmic recommendations
- Lets students track events they want to attend
- Shows students which events their friends are attending
- Enable event creation and discovery
- Deliver a personalized, algorithm-driven event feed based on user’s:
- Demographics
- Interest tags
- Frequented campus regions
- Time proximity (i.e. days until event)
- Friend RSVPs
- Following organizations (optional for MVP)
- Allow basic social interaction (friends + RSVPs)
- Mobile app
- Private event coordination
- Advanced analytics dashboard
- Undergraduate students
- Student organization leaders
- Graduate students
- Campus departments hosting events
Landing → Sign up → Onboarding → Explore Feed → RSVP/Save Event → Export to GCal
Sign in → Create Event → Add details/tags/location → Publish → View engagement
Search friend → Send request → See events friends RSVP’d to
Key:
P0: MVP requirement
P1: Nice to have
P2: It’s a stretch
Grey: Deprioritized for first release
Purpose: Convert visitors to users.
Requirements:
- P0: Sign up / Log in CTA
- P1: Organizer CTA (“Post an Event”)
- P2: Static preview of event feed
Purpose: Generate initial personalization signals.
Requirements:
- P0: Collect interest tags (multi-select)
- P0: Demographic inputs (class year, major, frequented campus regions)
- P0: Organization leadership status
- P0: Store selected interests in user profile
- P0: Feed ranking should incorporate interest match
Exit Criteria: User is redirected to Explore page after completion.
Default logged-in homepage.
Requirements:
- P0: Personalized event feed, based on:
- All onboarding inputs
- Site navigation/interaction activity
- Time and location of upcoming events
- P0: Search bar, filters, upper bar, and sidebar
- Event cards display:
- P0: Title
- P0: Organization name
- P0: Date/time
- P0: Location
- P0: Tags
- P0: RSVP count
- P0: Friends RSVP’d
- P1: Share link
- P1: Trolling report button (textbox submission to TigerApps team)
- P2: Recommendation criteria (friend attendance, interest alignment, etc.)
- Follow organization button
- Users can:
- P0: RSVP (visible to friends)
- P0: Save (private)
- P1: Export event to GCal
Requirements:
- P0: Keyword search bar (title + description)
- P0: Filters:
- Tags (free food, workshop, etc.)
- Organization name/organization type (career, affinity, etc.)
- Location
- Date range
Large, visible button to encourage clicks.
Users must be able to:
- P0: Input title, description
- P0: Select date/time
- P0: Select campus location
- P0: Add tags
- P0: Upload flyer image
- P1: Add external registration link
Users can edit/delete their own events.
Dropdown panel showing:
- P0: Friend requests
- P0: Upcoming RSVP’d event reminders
Available upon clicking into profile picture; separate page (not a dropdown panel).
Users can change/add:
- P0: Demographic information
- P0: Organization leadership status
- P1: Interest tags
- Followed organizations
Two views:
- P0: Events created + “Create Event” button
- Event creation requirements:
- Organization name
- Event details (see components in 5.3 Explore Page)
- Event creation requirements:
- P0: Events saved/RSVP’d
Interactive campus map displaying event pins.
Requirements:
- P0: Clickable event markers showing basic event details when hovered upon
- P0: Forward/backward time navigation (P1: using sliding bar)
- P1: RSVP’d friends profile icons visible upon hovering on event markers
Users must be able to:
- P0: Search users by name or NetID
- P0: Send/accept friend requests
- P0: View friend list
- P1: Scroll through events friends have RSVP’d to (optional for MVP)
Hub to search for, follow, and create student organizations.
Requirements:
- Profile pages
- Logo + name
- Organization description
- Officer contacts
- Follow button to receive notifications for new events
- “Create Organization” button
- Only visible to people who indicated being an organization leader
- Textboxes + image upload to edit profile
- Only organization creator can edit profile and transfer ownership
- Organization search bar with category filters
- Organization recommendation feed
Weekly meaningful event engagements per active user, defining “meaningful event engagements” as:
- Click-through to event details
- RSVP
- Save
- Calendar export
- % of users who engage with at least 1 event per week
- Average RSVPs/saves per event
- Time-to-first-engagement after signup
- # of friends added per user
Risk: Events automatically scraped from listserv emails may include irrelevant or poorly formatted information (e.g., incomplete details, spam-like promotional emails, or non-event content).
Mitigation:
- Implement event classification filters to detect whether an email contains a valid event.
- Require minimum event metadata (date, location, title) before publishing.
- Flag uncertain events for manual review or lower ranking in the feed.
- Allow users to report events that are misleading or inaccurate.
Risk: Email formats vary significantly across campus organizations, which may cause errors when extracting event data such as time, location, or title.
Mitigation:
- Use structured parsing rules combined with NLP extraction to identify key fields.
- Implement fallback behavior (e.g., display flyer image and raw description if structured parsing fails).
- Provide an edit option for the listserv email sender to claim and correct scraped event details.
- Maintain logs to track parsing errors and improve extraction rules over time.
Risk: Events may appear multiple times if they appear in multiple listserv emails. Duplicate events degrade the user experience and fragment engagement metrics.
Mitigation:
- Implement duplicate detection using:
- Title similarity
- Date/time matching
- Location matching
- Automatically merge duplicates where confidence is high.
- Allow organizers to claim ownership of auto-imported events.
Risk: The ranking algorithm may disproportionately favor:
- Large organizations with higher RSVP counts
- Events posted earlier
- Certain popular categories
This could reduce visibility for smaller or niche events.
Mitigation:
- Include time decay in ranking formula.
- Add diversity constraints (limit number of events per organization in feed).
- Include exploration mechanisms such as:
- “New events”
- “Undiscovered events”
- Monitor engagement distribution across event categories.
Risk: Students may continue using existing discovery channels (listservs, Instagram, group chats) rather than adopting a new platform.
Mitigation:
- Partner with student organizations to promote the platform and post events.
- Highlight unique value through marketing campaign: personalized discovery, centralized event publication, and easy coordination with friends.
- Launch with a beta group to generate early engagement and feedback.
Risk: Friend-based features may not be useful if the user’s friends are not on the platform.
Mitigation:
- Encourage friend connections during onboarding.
- Surface “popular events on campus” alongside friend activity.