ExperienceBU is Brock’s events calendar and involvement portal.
Students can find and connect to departments, programs, student clubs and organizations, events, workshops, and other extra-curricular and co-curricular experiences through the portal.
ExperienceBU is also a powerful organization management platform which allows student clubs to manage their organizations effectively and to showcase their events and opportunities for student involvement, while also streamlining administrative workflows and processes such as student event risk management, student room bookings and club ratification.
To learn more about using ExperienceBU, explore our resources and FAQs below or reach out to us at experiencebu@brocku.ca
About ExperienceBU and General Quesitons
ROSTER – The roster is where you can keep track of all your current members and accept new requests to join your page or club. Use the positions feature to customize your roster with appropriate titles for your officers, captains, leaders, committees, etc. and decide what level of access each position should have to your site. Through your roster, you can also message some or all your membership easily!
ABOUT – Let students know who you are! Tell them what your organization is about, where they find you and how they can contact you. Add in your social media links so that students can easily connect with you across multiple platforms. Don’t forget a profile picture too – the Brock logo for departments or a club logo for student clubs!
EVENTS – Let the campus know what you are doing and how they can get involved! All events must be posted in ExperienceBU in order to promote on campus and risk manage your event. ExperienceBU makes it easy – simply create your event and the system will walk you through the risk management process step-by-step!
NEWS – Create news articles to circulate important information to your group members, the campus, or anyone who visits ExperienceBU. News will appear on the ExperienceBU homepage (if public) and on your organization homepage. Be sure to include a good picture so that you get noticed!
GALLERY –Show off ALL your hard work! Post pictures from your events, member pictures, or even past flyers or marketing, logos, graphics for next year’s club executive. Simply create an album and start uploading.
DOCUMENTS – Get all your important documents in one place! Upload any word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints, pictures that you would want shared with the members or officers of your group or the public – meeting minutes, budget reports, forms, training materials…whatever you want!
FORMS – This module is a full featured forms builder – create application forms, sign-up lists, budgets or event surveys to distribute to members of your group/club or to the campus.
ELECTIONS – Use the elections section to run your executive elections online! Candidates can even add pictures and bios, and voting is still anonymous. Hosting a movie night and what to decide which movie to watch? Use the elections to create a poll!
It is easy to register an organization and create a page for a group/club/department on ExperienceBU. Visit the Engage Help Centre for a step-by-step breakdown.
Be sure to e-mail experiencebu@brocku.ca to ensure an organization page doesn’t already exist on ExperienceBU – it may be hidden or archived! Duplication of organization pages can cause confusion!
Being the primary contact of an organization page on ExperienceBU means when people go to a ExperienceBU organization page and select “Contact”, the primary contact will be the individual to receive the e-mail. In addition, primary contacts have authority to manage all of the functions of an ExperienceBU page, from changing the roster and creating and assigning roles, to changing page photos and page information.
For more information, review the Engage Help Centre
Yes! The platform features a form builder that will allow you to create and host forms directly from your ExperienceBU organization page. Whether you’d like to create a survey, application form, or collect ideas for your next event – you can do that in ExperienceBU.
Check out our YouTube tutorial on Forms to get started
Yes, videos can be embedded into news articles, event descriptions, election ballots, in your organization gallery, in form questions, and in organization descriptions. For more information, watch our video on Embedding videos on our ExperienceBU tutorial page and visit the Engage Help Centre website.
You can contact other organizations on ExperienceBU by clicking on the “Contact” button on the organizations’ page. This will allow you to communicate with the primary contact of the organization.
On the bottom right hand side of the home page of ExperienceBU you will see a variety of resources to help you troubleshoot technical issues. If you are unable to troubleshoot the technical issue, e-mail experiencebu@brocku.ca and a staff member will follow-up to assist you.
You can also access the Engage Help Centre for resources and helpful system guides.
Rosters and Membership
Your Roster is where you will manage your organization membership. From the roster, you can:
- Invite people to join
- Approve new membership requests
- Remove or end memberships
- Give existing members page access
- Message your members
For more information, watch our YouTube tutorial video on how to manage your roster
In your Roster section, you will see several tabs:
CURRENT – this shows all current members of your organization
PENDING – this will show invites you have sent but that have not yet been accepted by the invitee
PROSPECTIVE – this will show users who have requested to join your organization. Click Approve or Deny to make a decision about that user’s membership. You can also send any prospective member a message by selecting the checkbox to the left of their name and selecting Send Message.
For more information, visit the Anthology Approving Organization Membership Requests help page.
Creating new positions to assign organization members to in ExperienceBU is simple. Watch the YouTube tutorial video on how to manage your roster for more information.
In order for a member to be given permission to edit different aspects of an ExperienceBU page, the primary contact must give that member permission to do so. Under “Roster” and “Manage Positions”, a primary contact can decide what level of permission to assign existing members of the organization to.
For more information, visit the Engage Help Centre
To remove a member from your Roster simply click the checkbox next to the member in your roster and click “End Membership”.
For more information, visit the Removing Members From your Organization help page.
ExperienceBU allows you to send a message to some or all of your members through a message relay.
For more information, visit the review the Message your members (Roster Messaging) – ExperienceBU Tutorial
Events
To learn more about how to create an event on ExperienceBU, watch our Create an Event – ExperienceBU Tutorial on YouTube.
If you are a student group – be sure to watch our ExperienceBU Tutorial on How to Risk Manage Events
If you have questions about risk management, e-mail serma@brocku.ca
Yes, you can add customized questions that folks would need to answer to RSVP for your event on ExperienceBU. Learn more about configuring your RSVP settings and adding customized RSVP questions by visiting the Engage Help Centre website
If you are using the RSVP feature for your ExperienceBU event, students receive auto reminders about your event when they RSVP, and 24 hours before the event. To see what these auto reminders look like, visit the ExperienceBU tutorial page
You may also contact those who have submitted an RSVP of yes by using the new RSVP messaging feature. For more information, visit the ExperienceBU tutorial page
There are many attendance tracking options available to you. When tracking attendance, at a minimum, we would recommend capturing student names and Brock student e-mails of those attending your events.
Be sure to utilize attendance tracking tools such as card readers to easily capture attendance at your events. Card readers can be requested by e-mailing experiencebu@brocku.ca. Learn more about attendance tracking on ExperienceBU by visiting the Anthology website or watch the attendance URL tutorial video or the Event Check-In app tutorial video to learn how to easily capture attendance at your events.
If you have an event, workshop, or other program that you believe aligns with the Campus Wide Co-Curriculum (CWC) and would like students who attend to receive co-curricular credit, e-mail experiencebu@brocku.ca and our staff can connect your event to the CWC.
You must take attendance at the event for students to receive credit – review our YouTube event tutorials to learn about easy ways to take attendance and make sure to check out the Event Check-in App
Yes! Any event can be a co-hosted event. You will be asked if there are additional organizations co-hosting the event when you are filling our your event details on ExperienceBU and will have the option to tag that organization as a co-host.
For more information visit the Engage Help Centre
Yes, each co-host associated with the event will have the event listed on their organization page!
Yes, you can add customized questions that folks who are marked as “attended” would have the chance to answer to provide feedback about your event. For more information, review our Post-Event Feedback video on visit the ExperienceBU tutorial page.
Information for Club Executives
The Clubs Portal is a page on ExperienceBU managed by BUSU. As a member of a BUSU Ratified Club, you can request access to the Clubs Portal – where you will find resources and request forms such as funding, room and table booking requests.
To be able to use the Clubs Portal, you must first request access:
- Log in to ExperienceBU at experiencebu.brocku.ca
- Using the search bar, look for Clubs Portal
- Once on the Clubs Portal page, click on the Clubs Portal Access Request in the Forms section
- Complete the requested information and submit. You will receive a notification on ExperienceBU once you have been given access
Once you are a member of the Clubs Portal page, you will now be able to access Club Funding Requests, Room and Table Bookings, Ratification Forms, Printing Requests and more.
- Log in to ExperienceBU at experiencebu.brocku.ca
- Click on Clubs Portal under your Memberships on the ExperienceBU main page.
- In the Forms section, you will now have access to Club Funding Requests, Room and Table Bookings, Ratification Forms, Printing Requests and more
- In the Documents section, you will find resources such as the Campus Promotions procedures, Code of Conduct, Alcohol Policy, Bylaws and more.
The Student Event Risk Management and Approval (SERMA) process was established to create an awareness of planning/safety issues and to protect both the attendees and the organizers of the event.
All students and student organizations must adhere to the SERMA process to use University resources and to conduct/promote events and activities as a student organization. Learn more on the SERMA page
To have posters on campus, you will need to follow the procedure outlined in Campus Promotions Procedures policy.
Make sure you are familiar with the procedures for promoting your club and events around Campus – and don’t forget your events must be approved through Student Event Risk Management and Approvals (SERMA) first!
ExperienceBU & WordPress
ExperienceBU is not a WordPress website – It is a 3rd party platform is developed by a company called Anthology. The platform is called Engage.
You can, however, connect your ExperienceBU events to your Brock University department WordPress page! To learn how to pull your events into WordPress, review the Marketing and Communications CMS manual website.
Yes!
You can connect your ExperienceBU events to your Brock University department WordPress page! To learn how to pull your events into WordPress, review the Marketing and Communications CMS manual website.