Live Session - Goin' for Engagement: Creating Student Communities That Actually Buzz

Bigger student communities should not get quieter. They should get louder.

When universities think about student engagement before arrival, the same concern often comes up: how do you keep a community active as it grows?

It is a fair question. In many digital spaces, activity fades over time. A group starts strong, then goes quiet. Messages slow down. Students lose interest. And what was meant to create momentum becomes another channel that gets ignored.

That was the focus of our recent Goin’ for Engagement live session, where we explored what actually makes student communities buzz, and why engagement is not just about giving students a place to talk, but about creating the right conditions for them to keep showing up.

The discussion brought together perspectives from recruitment, insights, and communications, and made one thing very clear: engagement is not a size problem. It is a design problem.

Meet the speakers

The session featured speakers with hands-on experience building and growing active student communities across different university contexts:

Maikel Boelema, International Student Onboarding and Partnership Project Lead at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, shared how Saxion uses community to support international recruitment, onboarding, and practical student needs before arrival.

Mark Aboagye, Senior Insights Analyst at UCL, brought a data-led perspective on student behaviour, peer influence, and how community activity connects to recruitment and conversion.

Robyn Allen, Social Media and Communications Editor at Dublin City University, shared how DCU uses communications, ambassadors, and events to keep momentum high across the student journey.

The session was hosted by Roy den Hartog, co-founder of Goin’, who led the discussion on what drives engagement in practice, what students actually talk about, and how universities can create communities that stay active at scale.

What you’ll take away from the session

Here’s a snapshot of what the session explores in more depth:

1. Bigger communities can drive more engagement, not less
The session challenges the assumption that scale kills activity. In practice, the opposite is often true when students have the right ways to connect.

2. Students talk about far more than visas and logistics
From housing and nightlife to Taylor Swift, secondhand bikes, and book clubs, the most active conversations are often the ones universities would never have predicted.

3. Current students are one of the strongest engagement drivers
Champions, ambassadors, and peer supporters help keep conversations moving in a way staff simply cannot replicate.

4. Engagement and conversion are more connected than they seem
When students feel informed, connected, and reassured by peers, it can directly influence whether they go on to enrol.

5. Communities become stronger when they feel owned by students
Students engage more when the space feels authentic, peer-led, and clearly distinct from official university messaging.

Watch the session on demand

The full session is now available to watch on demand.

If you work in student recruitment, onboarding, communications, conversion, or student engagement, this session is worth your time. It goes beyond theory and gets into the practical drivers behind active student communities.

It also tackles the real questions universities are asking:

• What actually keeps a student community active?
• Do larger groups become noisy or more valuable?
• What role do ambassadors and current students play?
• How can engagement support recruitment as well as student experience?

Watch the full session on demand here:

What came through clearly in the discussion

One of the strongest themes in the session was that universities often underestimate what students actually want from a community.

It is easy to assume that engagement before arrival will be driven mostly by practical concerns like visas, insurance, or course questions. Those topics matter. But they are only part of the picture.

In reality, students also use these spaces to explore identity, shared interests, and day-to-day life. They look for people like them. They join groups around housing, events, nightlife, hobbies, and niche interests they may not even expect others to share.

At UCL, for example, student-created groups quickly moved beyond the generic categories universities might start with. At DCU, students actively used groups around things to do in Dublin and nights out. At Saxion, even a book club became a meaningful point of connection, leading students toward a major local book market and helping them connect around a shared interest.

That matters because it shows that engagement does not come from pushing content into a space. It comes from giving students reasons to recognise themselves in it.

The myth of the “too big” community

A key idea running through the session was the myth that larger communities become harder to engage.

That may be true in unmanaged group chats or fragmented channels. But in this discussion, the examples pointed in the other direction: when communities are built in a way that helps students find the right people, larger numbers actually create more opportunities for interaction.

That can mean more practical support, more niche groups, more peer recommendations, and more chances for students to discover others with the same interests or concerns.

In some cases, that scale becomes substantial. As highlighted in the session, university communities can generate over 1.7 million messages in a single cycle, making it clear that size does not have to dilute engagement. Done right, it can amplify it.

Students trust students

Another major takeaway was the role of peer influence.

Again and again, the speakers returned to the same point: students trust current students and fellow offer-holders in a different way than they trust the institution.

That trust is especially powerful in areas where uncertainty is high.

Housing came up repeatedly in the session as one of the biggest drivers of engagement. Whether in London, Dublin, or the Netherlands, students want lived insight. They want to know what a realistic price looks like, which areas feel safe, how to avoid scams, and what options other students are actually choosing.

That kind of reassurance rarely lands in the same way when it comes from official communication alone.

The same applies more broadly. Whether a student is asking about budgeting, nightlife, a neighbourhood, or the best place to buy a secondhand bike, peer answers feel more immediate, more believable, and more useful.

Why champions and ambassadors matter so much

The session also made a strong case for the role of current students in keeping communities active.

At Saxion, current students help incoming students by sharing their own experiences and making the transition feel more manageable. At DCU, paid ambassadors log in weekly to post prompts, answer questions, and keep conversations moving naturally across groups. At UCL, dedicated spaces like “Ask a UCL Student” give offer-holders direct access to peer perspectives on everything from courses to city life.

The common thread is simple: students are more likely to engage when the conversation feels student-led.

That is not just good for activity. It is good for trust, tone, and authenticity.

Engagement also shapes recruitment

This session was not only about community management.

It also showed how engagement can influence conversion.

When students build early friendships, get reassurance from peers, and start to picture themselves in a place, that can shift how confident they feel about their decision. Not because the platform “sells” the university on its own, but because the student starts to feel that the university is real, navigable, and socially possible.

That came through in stories shared during the session, including examples of students arriving at offer-holder events already convinced because of the conversations they had been having inside the community.

This is where engagement becomes more than a feel-good metric. It becomes part of the wider recruitment journey.

What universities can learn from this

A few practical lessons came through strongly in the session.

First, promotion matters. Communities do not become active just because they exist. Students need to hear about them consistently across touchpoints, from offer-holder emails and webinars to fairs and social content.

Second, positioning matters. Students need to understand what the community is for, why it is useful, and why it is worth joining now rather than later.

Third, authenticity matters. The more a space feels overly institutional or controlled, the harder it becomes for students to treat it as their own.

And fourth, engagement needs pathways. That can come through champions, niche groups, polls, events, prompts, staff channels for important announcements, and the kinds of product experiences that make participation easy and rewarding.

Rethink what engagement actually means

A lot of universities still treat engagement as something that happens after students arrive. That is too late.

The institutions moving fastest are recognising that engagement starts much earlier, and that it can have a real impact on how students feel, how they decide, and how connected they are before they ever set foot on campus.

This session makes that case clearly.

If you are exploring how to build student communities that do more than just exist, and actually create momentum, connection, and confidence, the full conversation is worth watching.

Or, if you want to see how this works in practice, book a walkthrough of the platform and see how universities are already applying this approach.