Online Resources

Tools for Virtual Events

Zoom

STS recommends Zoom as the best platform for virtual delivery. Any MIT Sloan student can set up a meeting by going to mit.zoom.us.

Best practices/important notes:

  • Max 300 people per meeting
  • Create an agenda
  • Have a moderator or two, depending on the group size. Example: one person to manage the technical side of things and the other to field questions
  • Have clear guidelines for the group (particularly if meeting with more than 5 people)
  • Ask attendees to mute themselves if they are not speaking
  • Breakout room functionality

Zoom Webinar:

  • Up to 3000 people
  • Attendees can only listen
  • Q&A functionality
  • Great for town halls or lectures for large groups

Best used if:

  • You have a set number of people who will present
  • You want your event to be recorded for distribution

Webinars must be set up by a school administrator on your behalf. Reach out to Student Life (slquestions@mit.edu) if you are interested in this capability.

Captioning

Make your events accessible and inclusive. One way of doing this is by captioning your live virtual events. Captioning virtual events is considered a best practice at MIT. You can assign someone on your team to write captions throughout the event, or you can hire an experienced vendor to do this for you. More on that below.

Consider providing a way to allow attendees to request specific accommodations as part of the registration process for events. That way you are prepared to ensure your attendees have a positive experience.

If recordings – or any other videos your organization has – are to be shared with the public, caption them. And please consider captioning them even if they're only being shared within the MIT community.

You have multiple options on how to generate captions. Similar to the live captioning, you can assign someone on your team to transcribe the script, or you can hire a vendor to do so. At the very least, Zoom and YouTube can autogenerate captions. However, these auto-generated captions are rife with errors and far from perfect. Our recommendation is to use the auto-generated captions as a starting point, then edit the script to ensure accuracy.

If you need help formatting captioning files (after your script is transcribed), contact slquestions@mit.edu and Jackie from our team can assist with that.

Here is a link to MIT's preferred vendors for captioning. These vendors offer the MIT community reduced rates.

SloanGroups

SloanGroups is an all-in-one student activities management platform. With SloanGroups, clubs can:

  • Manage members
  • Manage officers
  • Create, publicize, collect RSVPs and payment for events
  • Check-in attendees at events
  • Send emails from the club
  • Manage an external web presence
  • Create surveys
  • Store club documents

Check out this Video Resource Library and Upcoming Trainings for help on managing your club on SloanGroups.

SloanGroups Group Mailing Lists

Each Sloan student organization has a member listserv and an officer listserv. These lists typically follow a "ClubName.Members@sloangroups.mit.edu" or "ClubName.Officers@sloangroups.mit.edu" naming convention. These lists are populated based on SloanGroups group membership and officer listings.

Member mailing list

To manage your member listserv, simply manage your members within your SloanGroup group "members" tab. Only members and officers of the club can send to this address. The mailing list will only recognize the email address that is associated with their SloanGroups account, which is typically an @mit.edu address.

Officer mailing list

Officers are populated into the officer listserv when they are added as an officer of your group on SloanGroups. Officers must be listed as an "Active Officer" in order to be successfully populated into your officer listserv. Anyone (internal and external to MIT) can email to the officer mailing list.

Creating and managing Mailing Lists in CampusGroups

The Mailing List feature is managed on a per group basis and can be accessed under Emails > Mailing Lists when managing your group. From this screen, you should always be able to see two mailing lists that can only be edited or deleted by administrators of the platform: the officers list and the members list.

Each list has a custom email address that you can use to send emails to the list recipients. The members list can only be used by members of the group, and emails sent by non-members will trigger a moderation email sent to officers so that they can decide if the email should go through. The officers list can be used by anyone.

You can also create new mailing lists by using the « Create Mailing List » button. Clicking this button will take you to a page on which you can select the list of recipients based on their account types or member tags. Once you have selected the list of recipients, click on the "Save Selection as Mailing List" button to create the mailing list. You will be asked for the mailing list's name, which can be changed at a later time if needed. Once you have created your mailing list, you can change the settings (including the email address) by using the « Settings » and « Allowed Senders » buttons for the list.

The « Settings » popup includes all the settings you may want to change for the list, including name and address as well as configurations for the 'From' and 'Reply-To'. You can also configure if senders should first confirm their email before it is actually sent (this is always enabled for email addresses that have never sent to the platform so as to prevent SPAM from sending to your open mailing lists) as well as what to do with emails sent by senders who are not part of the « Allowed Senders ». The « Read only » setting is available only to administrators of the platform, and enabling it will prevent non-administrator users from making changes to the list. The « Allowed Senders » allows you to select who will be able to send to the list and is by default set to « Officers only » unless you opt for a different setting.

Clubs Weekly Roundup

Each Friday, club officers receive the Clubs Weekly Roundup with important news and information related to club operations and events. Please be sure to keep an eye out for these and read them thoroughly.

Student Organization Websites

Sloan Student Organizations are permitted to create websites for Sloan Student Organizations. We ask that you use one of the two options to help maintain and protect your domain names and websites.

1) SloanGroups website builder: A free, easy-to-use builder with drag & drop widgets that does not require coding knowledge. The widgets pull in pre-exiting SloanGroups data eliminating the need to update information in more than one place.

2) Maintain an MIT domain name: See the MIT IS&T Knowledgebase for your options.

Student Group Merchandise - Online Stores

Every group has the ability to create an online store on SloanGroups. This is the recommended way of selling and tracking merchandise sales and inventory. Merchandise is a popular way to bring in income for your club and helps to generate interest in club events. Benefits of using the SloanGroups online store include accurate inventory tracking; ability to pay with credit card, cash, check, or club account; automatic receipts for customers; and ease of use (credit card transactions will be deposited into club account without further work on the part of club officers).

Note: never delete a store that has been actively used for purchases. All store data will be lost and we will not be able to attribute any collected funds from the store to your club account.

Closing an Online Store

After your groups merchandise sale is over, the best practice is to unpublish the store. It is imperative that you only unpublish the store, do not delete it, as it will erase important data and settings. To unpublish your store, navigate to your group, go into your store settings, and unclick "Published" so the checkbox becomes blank. You can access the store by using the link above while logged in to your group page, or go to your group settings dashboard, and click on stores.

Once you're in the store, unclick the published button to unpublish your groups store so it the box next to "Published" is blank. If there's a checkmark next to published, then your store is published. If it is blank then your store is unpublished.