By Jenna Spinelle (@jspinelle), admissions officer/ writer at Penn State University’s Undergraduate Admissions Office (@PSU_Admissions)

Each summer, thousands of students flock to Penn State for Spend a Summer Day, one of the largest high school visit programs in the country. The day is designed to give rising high school juniors and seniors an overview of Penn State and the more than 160 majors we offer. It can be a very information-packed day and my admissions colleagues and I are always searching for ways to make it a little more fun.

This year, we were able to do that by creating a trek on SCVNGR for students who visited University Park (our largest campus). Our trek had four locations and five challenges, which we thought was a good number for an already busy event. We picked a few of the landmark locations that we knew students would likely visit anyway — like the Nittany Lion Shrine and our world-famous Creamery — and partnered with the campus computer store to give away some cool swag in exchange for a stop at their location in the student union building.

Speaking of giveaways, they were essential to the success we had with the trek. SASD takes place over six days and each day we picked one person from those who had completed at least one stop on the trek to receive a gift bag of Penn State and SCVNGR T-shirts, water bottles, sunglasses, and more. We also gave a smaller prize to anyone who stopped by the social media table we set up and showed us they completed at least one challenge in the trek.

We started promoting the trek a few weeks before the first SASD event on Facebook, Twitter and in an e-mail reminder that went to students who’d registered. We also worked with the SCVNGR team to produce promotional cards that we put into the folders that each student received at check in. We found that just this little bit of forward promotion paid of greatly in building buzz about SCVNGR and getting students and their parents to participate in the trek.

We had several hundred people participate over the course of six days, representing about 10 percent of total attendees. We received a lot of great feedback from the people who stopped by the social media table, and our alumni volunteers stationed around campus saw lots of students and parents taking pictures and participating in the trek, though they did complain a little about having to pick up the SCVNGR promotional cards that fell out of the folders (we’re hoping to make cards bigger next year!) The families said SCVNGR added a fun element to their day while helping them learn a little more about campus, which was exactly what we set out to do.