March 2016 - You're all busy with elections which can mean only one thing - summer term is nearly upon us. It's been great to see the real-time elections stats in use and initial feedback is that many of you have seen your best turnout in years. You're obviously doing a great job engaging your students!
On that note, we hope that the following selection of news and updates will whet your appetite to do even more to get your members participating; Idea Lists just keep on getting better, Volunteering is proving to be more popular than ever and not forgetting the MSL App which is now being tested by three unions before we release it to the wider MSL community.
We've welcomed many of you to our web briefing sessions in recent months and, whilst we take a break during March, we'd love your input on the topics we should cover next - please send us your ideas.
Wishing you a great Easter break - the MSL team.
We're very pleased to be able to show off the MSL App via web demo - unless you're in the vicinity of MSL Towers and want to see it in the flesh - so if you'd like to book a demo please
contact the team today.There's still time to use some of the new tools at your disposal to track and display your elections turnout in real time. Set up voting counters to show your votes or voters and configure your groups' stats (clubs, years, halls, faculties) as pie charts, bar charts, column charts or even your own custom outputs. You'll need to have membership stats enabled on your site to do this - check for 'Organisation Membership Groups' in Admin Website > Admin. If you don't have this set up yet,
contact customer services. If you do but need some tips and nice examples, check out the
support page.
...more specifically, we'd love to hear how you're feeling about MSL - from customer service and development to solutions that help you meet your objectives. We have a really short (we promise) survey that is designed to help us help you so please take a minute (OK, maybe two minutes) to tell us what we're doing well and how we could improve.
Take part in the survey.
Have you started using
Idea Lists yet? If not, why not - they're an eyecatching and engaging way to get your students involved in decision making, to test out your plans and campaigns and to give your sabbaticals feedback on their manifetso promises. The recent developments to Idea Lists includes new voting buttons, a summary widget to group ideas together and notification options to keep you and your submitters updated. Need help and advice -
contact the team.
UWSU has chosen to use MSL’s
Student Case Manager in its student advice centre based on the City Campus. Their advisors now benefit from the platform’s easy-to-use processes for logging and tracking enquiries around academic issues, including complaints, appeals and misconduct, welfare, funding, debt, benefits, disability, visas, accommodation, health and well-being. The Students’ Union also benefits from the comprehensive reporting tools for monitoring activity, trends and workflow.
Read the news in full.
We love facts and figures, especially when they show what a busy lot our MSL customers are and how we've helped you achieve even more every year. We've pulled together some fascinating stats - from your elections, tickets sales and clubs & socs memberships through to online transactions and emails sent (41.7 million!).
Take a look at the infographic - how has your organisation contributed? Want some ideas on how you could do more? Get in touch with the
customer services team.
"We have found that the MSL Volunteering & Employability module provides much more than admin management – it helps us to fully support our students and manage volunteering opportunities from start to finish." Sarah Amphlett, Keele SU Volunteering Manager. Read the case study in full.
As much as we love working with and supporting our customers, we also enjoy a short break every now and then. So the MSL office including the helpdesk will be closed for the Easter break from Friday 25th March and will re-open on Thursday 31st March.