A survey conducted on the Armstrong campus last week revealed that as little as 8% of students are opening and reading every single notification or alert that they are receiving from Georgia Southern University. A majority of students indicated that they received “many” or “too many” emails and texts from the university.

So if students aren’t reading all of the important information in these updates are they actually reaching their full potential as active, successful members of our campus?

It is a complicated question but the purpose of this small survey was to bring understanding about students’ interactions with university communication services, their social media habits, and their preferences about how to receive campus updates and event notifications.

Over half of the student body actively follow at least one official Georgia Southern University social media page, with 62% of students indicating that their primary social media platform of choice was instagram. However, the survey also revealed that only a quarter of students find activities occurring on the Statesboro campus to be “important” or “very important.”

These results leave us to question why there is no official (Armstrong) campus specific Instagram page where students can view the photos, updates, or recognitive posts that they truly care about.

With the majority of students indicating that they prefer email notifications, we know that this is the best way to reach students. The main conclusion of this survey was that students did not open and read all of their notifications and they did not care to receive information that did not apply to them. This could suggest that one solution may be to send only absolutely necessary information out through email to the entire student body, and information that may be considered elective could be circulated more successfully across other platforms, possibly social media.

Though this survey cannot provide an absolute solution to closing this information gap, it can help us theorize new methods of bringing students the information that they really want and need.

Survey Main Findings:
Only 25% of students found statesboro activities to be important or very important.
77% of students said they receive many or too many texts, emails, and alerts
Only 8% of students are opening and reading ALL texts, emails, and alerts
The majority of students (58%) subscribe to Georgia Southern social media pages
62% of students use instagram the most and 19% use snapchat most- together 81%
52% of students prefer email for campus updates and events