By: Kimberly Thompson, Admissions Counselor @ D'Youville College

Each year, like many other Admissions offices, we host a number of on-campus events. We decided that putting a unique twist on the average campus tour, might work in our favor.

Our first attempt at using SCVNGR was during our Spring Senior Day event. We held two different ones during the month of March and played slightly differently each time. During the first Spring Senior Day event, students played SCVNGR during the campus tour and played individually. A prize was given to the first five students to complete all of the challenges. The second time around, students played in groups and SCVNGR replaced the campus tour. The group to complete all of the challenges first, won a prize. The feedback from both was very positive, but students seemed to enjoy playing in groups more than playing individually.

Since then, we’ve used SCVNGR at our Discovery Day event, Pharmacy Orientation, Fall Senior Day and Fall Open House. We’ve stuck to playing in groups for all of them except Open House. Since it’s such a large event, we figured it would be close to impossible to pull this off in a group setting. So instead, we opted to have students play SCVNGR during the “marketplace”.

At our Open Houses, we set up an area called the marketplace, where each office on campus (ex. Financial Aid, Athletics etc.) is set up with tables that students can visit for more information. SCVNGR will send students to each table within the marketplace where they will have to answer specific challenges to help them learn more about what D’Youville has to offer. There were 20 challenges total. A small prize was given out to everyone for answering just 1 challenge to encourage participation. After that, bigger and better prizes were given for accumulating 20 pts, 35 pts, and 55 pts. We had two student ambassadors decked out in SCVNGR gear (t-shirt and sunglasses) so that they were easily identifiable to our guests in case there were questions along the way.

We have a lot of great ideas for future use of SCVNGR and can’t wait to put them into effect!