Making Purposeful Connections with Colleagues

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Aug.20, 2012

by Laurie Cordova, product manager, Hobsons

When you're facing a tough issue in your school, how do you find peers who may have already faced the same issue?

Whatever happened to that counselor you met at last year's Naviance Summer Institute?

Which schools have the most innovative implementations of Naviance, and how do you learn what others are doing in the product?

In February, I joined Hobsons as a Product Manager to launch the new Naviance Network online community, which is designed to help Naviance users connect with colleagues and get answers to these types of questions, and much more.

We’ve always referred to our community of users as the Naviance Network. However, while we have more than 300,000 members, one of the challenges was that there was no central location for them to engage one another online. We had an online user directory and an Idea Exchange where users could submit product ideas, but there was no connection between the two, and there was no single forum dedicated to conversations about topics that interest our members, namely college and career readiness. 

So, we set out to build a solution, knowing the following about our members:

• Our members want to engage with each other more and appreciate any opportunities to connect with peers outside of their schools or districts.
• They enjoy being involved with our product development process, offering suggestions, and seeing some of their ideas incorporated into Naviance.
• They already had self-organized user groups, e-mail lists, and conferences to keep in touch and share best practices.

We wanted to provide all our clients with a way to connect and share the incredible expertise that exists within the Naviance community. The new Naviance Network brings all of that together in several ways. Community forums have discussions related to Naviance and about best practices that advisors continually refine. The new Idea Exchange is a place to make Naviance product suggestions to Hobsons, and a completely new Help Library contains articles organized into concise, easy-to-find sections that will be updated frequently. 

Recently, users have discussed how to get students to read their e-mail as well as how administrative users can organize the Home page content in Family Connection. Hundreds of people have accessed the Naviance Summer Institute presentations, which are available to all members of the Naviance Network. 

Tip! The Naviance Network community was designed to open in a new tab, so if you’re performing a task in Naviance and want to visit the community, you won’t need to jump around the product or abandon your work.

If you’re a current Naviance user, I hope you’ll log in, browse the forums, search for Naviance Network members you know already, and find some that you don’t. See you in the community!

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