How Universities Like TU Delft Use Goin’ to Turn Student Excitement into Real Engagement

The Challenge: Great Initiatives, Low Visibility

Universities put enormous effort into creating meaningful student experiences, from career fairs and cultural nights to wellbeing sessions and ambassador programmes. Yet even the best initiatives often struggle to attract the attention they deserve.

A 2023 study by Sheffield Hallam University found that many students simply miss engagement opportunities due to informational and structural barriers, not lack of interest. Similarly, U.S. research on student participation highlights how event awareness and perceived relevance play a crucial role in attendance decisions. Students today also face communication overload. Times Higher Education shows that many feel “spammed” by institutional emails, making it harder for key messages, like event announcements, to cut through.

As a result, important opportunities are often missed, leaving staff frustrated and new students disconnected from experiences designed to help them belong.

Where Attention Already Lives

Before students even arrive on campus, they’re already active somewhere else. For many universities, that activity already happens in their Goin’ community, where students ask questions, meet peers, and share excitement about what’s coming next.

That makes Goin’ the most natural space for universities to reach students where their attention already lives.

The Discovery Guide: Visibility That Feeds on Engagement

The Discovery Guide inside Goin’ brings everything students need to explore and get involved into one place, but what it contains is entirely up to each university. Universities can tailor the Discovery Guide to include Orientation information, student jobs, wellbeing resources, virtual campus tours, or any initiative they want to highlight.

This flexibility makes it a powerful, living extension of each university’s engagement strategy, not a one-size-fits-all feature, but a space that reflects what matters most to their students.

Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) is a leading example of this approach.

Their Goin’ community connects thousands of students from over 100 countries, generating more than 60,000 friendships and nearly 400,000 messages even before arrival. With that much activity, the Discovery Guide becomes the central place to turn excitement into action.

By using Goin’ as their go-to engagement hub, TU Delft keeps students informed through a vibrant calendar of activities, all within the platform.

Within their Discovery Guide, TU Delft highlights:

• Orientation & Welcome Info –schedules, registration links, and arrival tips shared directly with incoming students, boosting sign-ups and early participation.
• Events & Activities – overviews of key happenings like Science Day, Beach Animal Building Workshop, and Kitepower Tours, all embedded within daily community activity.
• Student Job Openings – TU Delft even reports strong success using Goin’ to fill student job positions directly through their Discovery Guide, turning visibility into real outcomes.
• Virtual Campus Exploration – short guides and local highlights that help international students get familiar with campus life before they land.

These inclusions make the Discovery Guide a tailored map of university life, integrated into the same community where students already connect, chat, and belong.

Other universities use their versions to highlight wellbeing support, ambassador programmes, or conversion webinars, but the goal is always the same: to make key information visible, timely, and actionable.

The Compounding Effect of Student Sharing

What begins as a simple event post often grows organically. Students who find events they like share them in group chats and one-to-one messages, tagging friends and generating genuine buzz.

That social proof drives curiosity, which leads to more engagement, higher attendance, and a self-reinforcing cycle that universities could never achieve through traditional channels alone.

At TU Delft, 97% of students said that using Goin’ made them more excited about starting their studies, with features like Events playing a major role in that pre-arrival enthusiasm.

In short: once students are excited on Goin’, they become your best promoters.

Why Universities See Results

• High organic visibility — events appear alongside daily community discussions
• Peer-led amplification — students share and spread events they’re excited about.
• Trusted context — announcements appear in a social space, not an inbox.
• Habit-driven attention — students continue checking Goin’ for “what’s on” even after arrival.

Across Goin’, partner universities like TU Delft, events posted inside the platform consistently outperform those shared only through email or social media.

Universities also notice a reduction in repetitive questions, since students actively exchange information among themselves, with 77% of TU Delft students reporting that Goin’ helped them get answers they would otherwise have asked university staff.

Many also see a measurable increase in Orientation Week sign-ups, as promotion happens directly where students already engage, creating a smoother journey from awareness to participation.

Turning Engagement into Insight

Beyond participation, Goin’ also helps universities understand what students are talking about, without ever compromising the safe, peer-led nature of the community.

Through topic-based sentiment analysis, staff can see when certain themes, such as upcoming events, wellbeing, or orientation, are driving discussion and excitement across group channels.

Rather than showing individual messages, the feature highlights where the conversation is happening. This gives universities a high-level view of what captures student interest and when, helping them adapt future event communication, timing, and design around the moments that matter most to students.

The Takeaway

Universities don’t need to create more noise; they need to meet students where their attention already is. Platforms like Goin’ show that when event discovery becomes part of everyday student life, attendance follows naturally, not because students are told to go, but because they want to be there.