Wow! It’s incredible to think about how much our team at Roompact has accomplished over the past year. As our clients just finish closing their halls for winter break, it’s time for us to reflect back on 2017 and look forward to 2018 in our annual “State of Roompact Address”!
Door Decs submitted for our Door Dec Contest still hang in our office today!
Looking Back
Earlier in 2017, we released upgrades to our Schedule tool that improved performance and added the ability to trade shifts in our system. This past summer, we made back-end upgrades that improved our automated roster update system — this is something that clients are not able to “see,” yet it has improved roster updates across our entire system.
But the highlight of 2017 was our newest feature, Forms. We started planning Forms in January, spent 6 months building the first version, and then spent about 4 months gathering client feedback and making upgrades. Forms has quickly become our most popular feature. As of writing, nearly 200,000 Forms have been submitted in Roompact!
This past year, we welcomed Ann Trachte to our team in the role of Institutional Success Manager. Ann’s primary focus is ensuring each one of our clients has a delightful experience using our software, which includes leadership of our client support system. Since we’ve made a switch over to new support software this summer, our team has helped with over 1000 questions our clients had, and 97% of follow-up survey respondents said that our support was awesome!
In 2017, we doubled down on providing free, useful content to our field. We published both a Residential Curriculum eBook and a Residential Curriculum Self-Assessment Instrument, and continue to publish valuable content on our blog. Whenever I go to conferences, it’s really delightful when people tell me that they’ve found our material to be helpful. At Roompact, we strive to help advance our field as much as we can, even for folks who are not clients!
As a company, Roompact has grown monumentally. Over the past year, we’ve added more partner institutions than we ever have, all while proudly maintaining a 98% retention rate. Ultimately, we share the same goal that each of our clients does — advancing student success. In 2017 the number of students using Roompact has nearly doubled and we feel greatly privileged to have an impact on the education of so many individuals.
Roompact’s Crepe Truck at ACPA’s 2017 Residential Curriculum Institute in Norman, Oklahoma
Looking Forward
On the software side, 2018 will be another exciting year for Roompact. We are working on upgrades in several areas of our software: the performance and flexibility of Forms will continue to improve, with new question types and template layout options becoming available; the “campus layout” pages will see a complete overhaul that will bring both better user experience and new functionality, including tools for analysis and report generation; and later in the year we will be releasing improved data integration options, giving institutions the ability to use data collected in Roompact in other software systems. We’ll keep you updated of improvements to our software as they become available in 2018.
When we first started at Roompact, we only had one main feature–roommate agreements. Today, our software has grown to become an integral part of day-to-day operations at our partner departments. Since our software is now so mission-critical, we’ve decided to prioritize on-campus training with new partner institutions and will make an effort to do so as much as possible. We’ve also decided to focus even more on consulting services in the upcoming year.
In addition, our team will continue to traverse North America in an effort to connect with as many of our partner institutions as we can. Be sure to keep a lookout for our booth at conferences you attend in 2018!
Roompact team members Matt and Paul with Michele Lam from partner institution Rutgers University at the ACUHO-I 2017 Business Operations Conference
When we started Roompact nearly 5 years ago, it would have been overwhelming to imagine how much our software, team, and client base could grow. We are all tremendously thankful to work with each one of our partner institutions. At Roompact, we strive for greatness, and we’ll continue to do so in 2018. Thank you for your support!
