As 2023 draws to a close, we wanted to share a bit of our team’s passion and perseverance with the world.
Last week, we launched a four part spotlight series, designed to showcase more of the BridgeU team, and how we work together to support our K12 students, school counsellors and university partners.
We kicked off the series with an interview from Dan, VP of Product, about the Product team, their passion and how their work is integral to all of our users.
This week, our spotlight shifts to a feature launched specifically for our community of international school counsellors.
Our counsellors spoke about wanting a place to connect and talk to other counsellors. And we listened.
Thus, the in-platform Community feature was created.
We spoke to Lisa Auld, BridgeU’s Customer Engagement Manager, to share more information about the platform feature, and how it’s been received by our school counsellors.
“We already have an international community of BridgeU counsellors spanning over 140 countries actually.
We wanted that community to be connected not just through our current in person events and the traditional method of one way communication between a customer success manager and an international counsellors.
We worked with our counsellors at the beginning to make sure we understood exactly what they already had access to, other online communities, and what currently some of their pain points were.
We definitely sensed there was a need for it when we had the initial conversations with them.
There are multiple counsellor communities out there and they’re based around different organisations, maybe different events that happen throughout the counsellor year.
They’re more specialised or used for different things, and then some of them were run on software like Facebook.
We really wanted to bring a more professional community, which is why we invested in software which we would be able to design and create ourselves.
From then on, we were able to develop a space that allows our counsellors to have thought provoking discussions, seek answers whenever they need help, share best practices from the industry, and really just learn and connect with each other.
It’s also a place connected through users of BridgeU, which allows us as a company to communicate everything that we need to share to enable them to do their jobs better as a counsellor.”
“It was really tailored towards our counsellors and what they need.”
All of our counsellors also have BridgeU in common, and the platform allows us to bring the community of counsellors together.”
“Every counsellor is unique and brings different levels of knowledge and expertise, which is invaluable to us when we are building our community.
Our counsellors bring so many perspectives, which are housed in one place.
Initially, what started as a community for us to share news and best practices of the industry has since evolved into a lot more than that.
For example, our experienced counsellors love to share their knowledge and learnings, as well as giving feedback about particular aspects of BridgeU itself.
While our less experienced counsellors use it more to build up their network, ask questions, and interact with our upcoming events and training sessions that we provide through BridgeU.”
“We work really closely with our counsellors to check and ensure that they find the community tool useful. And there’s a couple of benefits that our counsellors bring up to us. The biggest one is that they’re able to learn from each other.
That was really shown throughout the document sending season which is currently ongoing.
They were able to answer each others questions whenever they needed to and have other counsellors come in with their expertise, and help them straight off the bat, which was really nice to see.
Our counsellors have access to different resources on our help centre, or on our marketing website.
So we really honed in on having everything that they need to enable them to do the best job possible as a counsellor inside this Community.
It’s an ever evolving tool, and it’s obviously still quite new. We’re always open to feedback and want to develop it alongside our counsellors.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Learn more about our counsellor network and how we can connect your university with over 6,000+ school counsellors worldwide.
