ResEdChat Ep 41: Roompact User Spotlight on The College of New Jersey

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat, where we talk with cool people who do cool things. And we talk about just generally cool topics related to college, university housing, and residence life. And so today, we’re doing a little bit something special on the podcast. We’re going to focus in on a school that’s used Roompact software for a while to highlight their good work. So I’m really pleased to welcome the College of New Jersey, also known as TCNJ, onto the podcast today. They have been with us for six years, since 2017, and we’ll get into it.
But what I want you to know about TCNJ and the staff there is they have been doing innovative stuff, particularly around curriculum, almost since the beginning, very early on adopters. And so they’ve got a lot of things to share about their journey, how they’ve used Roompact in that process and all sorts of things. So to start us off, I’ll just have you introduce yourself, and why don’t we start off with you, Tina. If you just want to tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe how do you use Roompact on a day-to-day as well?

Tina Tormey:
So my name is Tina Tormey. I’m the director of residential education and housing at TCNJ, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. And I was part of the group that convinced our institution that we needed to get Roompact, and we needed to not just get Roompact but start it in a timeline that maybe was not typical of technology at our institution. I think we rolled it out within a month and a half, and IT was like, “This is not normal. This never happens.”
But we made it work, in large part, because we had a director of housing who was really committed to the project Roompact was, and IT just rode along for the ride and was like, “Okay, we’re going to try this.” My daily use. As a director now, I don’t do a lot of daily use, but my use is more around advocating for our students and advocating for our department, and building campus partnerships. Chris and Seth, who will introduce themselves next, are really the ones who are in the day-to-day weeds in Roompact.

Paul Brown:
Great. Well, let’s move on to them. Seth, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Seth Zolin:
Yes. Hi, my name is Seth Zolin. He/him. I’ve been at the college since 2008. I just, what, came from a 15-year anniversary milestone celebration.

Paul Brown:
Nice. Congrats.

Seth Zolin:
Yeah. So I generally, my title is assistant to the director. I do a lot of with the data that we pull out of Roompact, so Chris and I will both develop the forms that we use and all of the shared living agreement updates and all of those things. And then when it comes time to see what the data is actually telling us, we’ll pull that either and do work either within Roompact or pull it into either Excel or some other program to be able to figure out what the data’s telling us.

Paul Brown:
Awesome. Out of curiosity, what do you get after 15 years at the college? Do you get…

Seth Zolin:
I got a beautiful lapel pin that they have shrunk over the years, but there they’re now a lot more fashionable I would say. The first ones were very big and were not exactly… they were very prominent. Now they’re more of a lapel pin. Nice, stylish. I was very pleased when I got mine today.

Paul Brown:
A little more understated.

Seth Zolin:
Yeah.

Chris Trautman:
Seth, do you just have 15 lapel pins in descending size over the course of [inaudible 00:03:40]?

Tina Tormey:
It’s like TGI Fridays.

Chris Trautman:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
That’s amazing.

Seth Zolin:
TCNJ flair.

Paul Brown:
That’s right. That’s right. Put it on your polo [inaudible 00:03:48]. Chris.

Chris Trautman:
Hey, my name is Chris Trautman. I am our associate director for educational initiatives and assessment at TCNJ. Pronouns are he/him. I’ve been with the college since January 2022, so I have a little bit to go before I get my 15-year, very fashionable pin. Seth really set it very well. We use Roompact basically every day. It’s become a huge part of our work routine, and we use it in a couple of different ways, right. We use it, I think, of it in proactive and reactive ways.
So the proactive ways that we use it are, we’re constantly thinking about how are we capturing data, how are we setting it up for our staff so that it’s ready for them to really implement on the strategies of our curricular approach to support our residents. And then also using it in reactive ways. So whenever I interact with a student of concern, I go back in our one-on-one record to see what has a CA said about them, what do we know about the student that’s going to inform the conversation that we have and possibly give us more context to support them. So we love Roompact.

Paul Brown:
Great. Great. Well, we love you. So it’s mutual. I’m going to start off by… This is probably something best to ask Tina, at least to start off. What motivated you to initially get Roompact? Because you’ve been with this… with us since the beginning, even pre-Roompact. You probably have the best knowledge of the history. What started that off for you? What made you go, “I think we need this.”

Tina Tormey:
When I started here in 2007, we were challenged to create a curricular model. So we had started building something that was a little bit resembling a curricular model, but not quite there, which we rebuilt over time. And as we were rebuilding it and really understanding what a curricular model looks like, I think we were recognizing that we did not have effective software or tools to use to really be able to evaluate efficiently and effectively whether we were doing what we said we were doing, whether any of our strategies were making the mark, whether we were having any impact and we knew that that was important in order to inform where we went.
So I remember going to ACUHO-I actually and talking with you guys at the conference one summer and realizing that not only would it allow us to do all of those things, but it would allow us to do some other things logistically that would help streamline our work, that would allow us to also devote more time to curricular work through the Roommate Agreements. And it was actually the Roommate Agreements that allowed me to sell the product to the folks who were making financial decisions and then able to say, “But we also have this huge benefit.” And so now, as a result, because we have those two resources, we’re pulling lots of data. We’re a very data-driven institution because we are able to really showcase our data to advocate for resources, or to build campus partnerships, or to enhance and change our program, and flex as the students change their trends, and their needs, and interest.
It’s been something that now would be very difficult to live without, and still provide the same service and resources to our students. Our vice president actually has access to Roompact and will use it when he gets a parent phone call complaining about a student who’s not being connected appropriately or who the parent perceives that, and he’s able to know in the back of his mind pretty quickly “Actually, this person has been meeting with their CA regularly. They have a Roommate contract in place.” All of those things that we know matter and are important when we’re having these conversations with parents.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. A lot of people don’t even know this too. You mentioned Roommate Agreements was kind of the selling point, but that is what Roompact core purpose was at the start, right. Our name Roompact was, in part, chosen because when we started, we were only about Roommate Agreements, and then, of course, we do so much more than that now.
But it’s not uncommon that a campus, when they’re looking to sell it to the people that hold the purse strings, find the one feature that’s like, “We need this,” that they can buy into. Sometimes it’s also text messaging. Our text messaging is another one that people will be like, “Oh, we can do the texting. And then we really want it for all these other things.” But that’s the shiny bit that gets [inaudible 00:08:16]-

Seth Zolin:
I was going to add that the texting feature, the rapid communication feature is something we’ve relied on heavily and usually at times that we’re not necessarily like, “Oh, we need a way.” When we had a campus-wide power outage, we had a water main break, not from the campus, but the town, where we were having to communicate with residents in large numbers very quickly and get responses. So being able to send a quick pull-out like, “Are you still here? Are you going home?” And just be able to do those things that would not have been possible without the software, and I would hate to have imagined what that situation would’ve been like if we didn’t have that resource.

Tina Tormey:
We would’ve been knocking on individual doors and chasing people down.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, you would.

Tina Tormey:
I can imagine it. It’s not pretty.

Paul Brown:
If we could handle fire walks with our software, that’s… I think we’ll need to figure that one out next because I was just at another campus. They’re like, “We’re doing fire walks, and they say it’s going to be another two weeks before the fire alarms are fixed.” And I’m like, “Wow.”

Tina Tormey:
No.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, don’t miss that. Don’t miss that. Well, how about some of the features? You started to get into this a little bit. What were some of those features that have been game changers for you that made you either think about things differently or do things so much more efficiently than you had in the past? What stands out in your mind about processes or features that you’re like, if I took away your software today, which I can, but I won’t, what would be your immediate freak out of, “Oh my gosh, we can’t do this now,” is I guess another way of saying it.

Chris Trautman:
I think for me what stands out with that is that if you turned off our forms feature, I think that we’d probably be a little heartbroken, and our whole process would collapse a little bit. So one of the cornerstones of our curricular approach is our one-on-ones. That’s something that we really emphasize in training with our staff of understanding the philosophy and importance of engaging with residents, especially really hard-to-reach residents.
But the follow-up to that is the assessment piece of, “We want you to have these intentional interactions with your residents and we want you to ask some specific questions tailored to our curriculum. And then we want you to record those conversations, not a verbatim script. But we want you to answer some basic questions” so that when Seth and I are looking at that data from thousands of residents, we can code it and make meaning of it, and that helps Tina advocate for resources.
It helps showcase the good work our staff does. It helps us really quickly identify trends and emerging needs in our community that are popping up in different areas are popping up for a lot of residents. The way that we do that is by having our student staff submit forms for Roompact. We would not be able to report on our data and make meaningful change if we didn’t have that feature.

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Tina Tormey:
I think a good example of that is actually, several years ago, I had a campus partner who said, “You need to stop one-on-ones because it’s increasing our caseload too much.” So just to be clear.

Paul Brown:
You’re being too effective. You need to cut that out.

Tina Tormey:
Roompact is not the problem. It was the one-on-ones. And so that year was the year I believe we started actually using the tagging feature so we could pull the data, and we were surprised that the number of referrals that went to this area that had expressed concern, which was valid concerns. Their demand on their office was outpacing their staffing at the time and was unanticipated.
But we were able to show that a very small number of one-on-ones actually resulted in referrals to their office, and instead, a massive amount we’re going to another area that we weren’t doing a lot of programming or communications around. So it allowed us to say, “Okay, so let’s do some preventative work around this area, and also let’s tell this campus partner, they’re actually only in fifth place, so they shouldn’t be too impressed with themselves.

Paul Brown:
That makes total sense. Go ahead, Seth.

Seth Zolin:
The other advantage of using Roompact forms versus other forms because of tagging it’s the combination of forms with tagging. So we could create forms in many different software. But like Chris was saying, if I know that I have a student of concern, I don’t have to dig through the form, open up an Excel, do an Excel search for that name, figure out what the data is. If I know that student’s been tagged, I can just look up the student, and I can see what forms they’ve filled out or been tagged in and get to it a lot quicker. So the efficiency of being able to not only have the form but the form with the tags is a combination that works really well.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. I mean, that’s really the key proposition. If folks are listening to the podcast today and they’re not familiar with what tagging is, it’s essentially when you fill out a form. If you are asking for, let’s say, a student name, you can also do it with locations like rooms. You can start typing, it will give you a dropdown, and you can select the specific student you want. And what that does is because unlike a Google form or a Qualtrics form, Roompact knows who your residents are and where they live.
When you make a tag, it creates a connection, and then you can pull that up in all sorts of different ways. So I can look at all the data in aggregate. I could look up a student and see a history of any time they were mentioned in something. It really is what… It’s that knowledge of who the residents are that makes those because some people say… Occasionally, we’ll get an objection if people are looking at buying the software I too will be like, “Well, we have lots of things that can make forms. Why is this any different?” And that’s the key reason why. It just completely changes the game.

Chris Trautman:
And I’ll also add one more thing, and I feel like we should say that we’re not sponsored by the forms feature specifically, but I think the interface too for our student staff who are the ones who really use… Seth and I work on developing the templates, but the student staff are really the power users in terms of submitting those forms. It’s incredibly intuitive for them, and I think that’s important because one of the things that we do with our one-on-ones, for example, is that not every residential student is going to have the same conversation with their CA.
We’ve got some special interest housing communities. We house our students by cohort. So freshmen live together, sophomores live together, juniors and seniors live together, generally. And so there are some different questions in those one-on-ones based on those cohorts and based on the needs of those specific students. And so it makes it really easy for the CAs to kind of sort and identify what form do I need to submit to keep our data clean and really allow us to understand the different needs of those populations.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. And there’s an art to that form design. I mean, my role at Roompact is usually to consult with people about how to build that. So we give you the tool. But there are good ways of designing your forms, and there are not good ways of designing your forms. Or if you want your student staff members to fill it out, the fewer questions you ask or the less involved open-text questions that you ask, the better. You’ll get better results. So there’s an art to that form design as well.

Chris Trautman:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
But…

Tina Tormey:
I would say one of the challenges also with doing a curricular model is that it can require additional time and effort for the residents directors. And that is sometimes a challenge when you’re faced with a lot of urgent and emergent situations that sometimes take priority. And when you have high staff turnover like a lot of us just experienced during the pandemic.
One of the things that we saw prior is that residents directors would have a hard time keeping up on some of their administrative roles because if you had multiple buildings, you would actually be physically going to each of your buildings to look at duty logs from the night before to do your staff communications log. And all of those things can now be captured in something that a residence director can access from their office.
Yes, they still need to do building tours. They need to be present and available in their offices. But it really streamlines some of their efforts in ways that increases their capacity to do the educational components. So it’s this nice bridge between administrative efficiency and then this educational tool that we can really take advantage of.

Seth Zolin:
And I know for Chris and I, it allows us to be better supports for them. So there’s some things Chris and I are steeped in data all day. That’s something we’re very familiar with.
So I… There have been a number of times when we’re in different parts of our curricular phases, like doing our strategies, where they need to know how many of their staff have completed something. And it’s very easy for me to just pull that for all of the staffs and then send it out as one email to all the RDs and say, “Here’s where all your staffs are in doing this work” so that they don’t have to spend that time trying to figure that out.
I know how to do it, and I can just shoot it to them. Takes me five minutes. And then they know, “Oh, well, during one-on-one season, hey, you have this one staff member who’s only submitted four one-on-ones out of 25 residents, and you have this other staff member who’s already 100% complete.” So that just gives them a sense of where they are in their process.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. And I’m going to give you a gift for your 15-year anniversary right now. So there is a software update that’s coming. I feel reasonably… I don’t like talking about software updates before they exist because I am not the person that writes the code, and things can go wrong, but I am reasonably confident that this will show up prior to the fall.
Insight reports inside Roompact, which allows you to pull your data in different ways. In the case of intentional conversations, “How many did we have? Which students have we met with? Which students have we not met with? How many did a staff member did?” Right now, that’s only available to people with higher-level administrator accounts. We’re going to release a feature that allows you to check a box that would then make it available to live-in hall director staff to pull those themselves and not-

Chris Trautman:
That’s great.

Paul Brown:
… have to go through you in order to do it. So that is our gift to you for your 15 years at [inaudible 00:18:08].

Seth Zolin:
Yeah. Thank you.

Chris Trautman:
You just broke some news.

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Chris Trautman:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah [inaudible 00:18:14]-

Seth Zolin:
When that was released to us that feature that, especially [inaudible 00:18:18] some of the… being able to pull the actual assessments out of the event data, so when they have submit events, they also submitted an evaluation of the event, and I know you know that originally we would’ve to contact you to get the… We could get the event information but not the event assessment information. Being able to pull that now makes our jobs a lot easier, and it allows us to give that to the RDs and say, “Here’s not just what your staff did, but here’s what they told us they learned by doing it.”

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. We released that in October, and I would say even my job has changed significantly because now there is so much more I can work with schools on to not just say, “Okay, here’s your data,” and you can manipulate it. But now I can say, “Here’s different reports you can pull. Here’s how you could use it. Here’s how I can even show you how this could go into an annual report.” There’s so much more I could advise folks on. Chris, I think you were trying to jump in there, and then I kept going. I got excited.

Chris Trautman:
No. So I don’t want to embarrass you, but this just reminded me of a really positive experience we had with Roompact. And so folks are listening who are considering or trying to advocate and make the case for Roompact at their campus. Seth and I had the privilege to attend ICA in October, the Institute for the Curricular Approach-

Chris Trautman:
Roompact hosted a mini post-conference conversation, and I remember that you all were asking us for feedback on product feature stuff like that and I don’t remember what Seth you suggested, but Seth suggested something that would make our lives 0.2% easier and would just make the software even more user-friendly. And within five minutes, your programmer was like, “Hey, it’s done.” I think that really does speak to the culture that you all have of being incredibly responsive and collaborative.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, Yeah. So you were the source of the Roommate Agreement by floor.

Seth Zolin:
Yep.

Paul Brown:
And I remember saying, “Don’t expect to get it in five minutes for any other feature update that you request. That’s a special one.”

Tina Tormey:
You set the bar really high, but I think you can meet it, Paul.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, luckily, I’m not the person that has to follow through on that, right. That’s Pat, who does our programming. It’s a benefit of Pat, who does… is our lead programmer has a residence life background. He understands what’s important, so I don’t have to do a lot of explanations, so he didn’t need to check in with anyone. He is like, “Oh, that makes perfect sense. That should exist.” And it was easy for him to do, and so he just did it, which is kudos to Pat on that.

Tina Tormey:
I think I’d want to say, though, that one of the things I have found in working with you all is that flexibility and nimbleness and creativity and innovation, we reap benefits from that just by remembering that you don’t have to work in a higher ed adjacent model in order to practice that. I think sometimes we criticize higher ed for moving too slowly for being dinosaur-like.

Paul Brown:
Mm-hmm.

Tina Tormey:
But that energy that you all have impacts us in that we feel like, “Oh yeah, what if we did this?” And I think the flexibility of the software also has allowed us to experiment, whether it’s one year we rolled out wellness plans and tried to see if we could get all of our students to set some wellness smart goals and follow through on them. It didn’t work the way we wanted to, and then other things took priority, so we were able to shift and be flexible in a way that was really efficient and that worked for our students.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Well, that’s great to hear. I like to hear that. That’s what I hope for with all of our schools. It’s fun working at Roompact. I get to experiment, and it’s like I get to work with be a staff member on all these different department staffs, which is fun for me, especially since I have a short attention span.
I’m like, “Ooh, shiny over here. Next thing.” Things like that. In terms of kind of maybe your goals for the future, what are you cooking up? Is there anything exciting on the horizon where we’re like, “We’re going to experiment with this next, or we’re going to dig into that next?”

Chris Trautman:
Yeah, I think so Seth can speak more about this too. I think one of the things that we are really excited about that we’re trying with Roompact is assessing new and other… new and different strategies in our curricular approach, I’ll say. So we collected assessment data through our one-on-ones, and that was really one of the main ways that we collected data through Roompact. This past year, we developed a new strategy after ICA, and we started assessing it through Roompact. It was called Explore TCNJ. And so it replaced one of the traditional events [inaudible 00:22:48] are… We call them CAs, but our RAs had to do.
And instead of them hosting an event that they’re not experts on and trying to drag people out of their rooms, which has become increasingly difficult, we gave them a list of some events on campus that other offices were hosting, and we asked them to take some of their residents and then to record and reflect how that experience was. And through Roompact, we were able to gather that data, and hundreds of residents were taken to events as a result of kind of that change in assessing that. So I think one of the things that Seth and I are really excited about is continuing to see what are our strategies, and as our strategies evolve, how can we use Roompact’s power and flexibility to continue to assess those?

Tina Tormey:
I would say another big piece is we have a… we just wrapped up year one of our campus-wide strategic plan, and one of the major goals is increasing and broadening our enrollment. And so I think that we’re going to see that in doing that, there are going to be different measures of support that we’re going to have to initiate in order to effectively support students and to maintain our graduation and retention rates. Traditionally, TCNJ has not had to worry about retention rates and graduation rates.
I believe right before the pandemic, the US Department of Education said that we had the sixth-highest four-year graduation rate in the country at like 75%. And as a public institution, we believe very strongly we want to reduce costs to students for higher education. So getting them to graduate on time is really important to us. How can we better understand our incoming first-year student population so that we can connect them with the resources and the tools, and the information that’s necessary to help them stay on track to graduate within four years? And I think that we are able to do so much with this software that allows us to do that rather quickly and efficiently.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Retention is one of those things that I’m noticing. I mean, it’s always been a focal point of higher ed, but I’m seeing a lot of schools that utilize a curricular model putting greater emphasis on that aspect of it.

Tina Tormey:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Right. So curricular approach is usually about what do we want students to learn and things like that, but in order for them to learn, we also have to retain them. And so that kind of case management closer, which fits well with some curricular pieces like intentional conversations and things like that. Getting better at that case management part is key to that. I mean, that’s where a lot of the note-taking ability in Roompact can help out and things like that. So I feel like I’m seeing that more and more kind of in the crosshairs of different schools.

Seth Zolin:
I think some of the other things that we aren’t… we started, and we’ll continue to do, is looking at ways we can capture data about things that we’re already doing, but we just weren’t capturing data about it. So we started our… [inaudible 00:25:52] schools do resident interaction logs, where it’s just, “Tell me about the day-to-day interactions you have that aren’t a planned event. They’re not a free thought-about thing. It’s just something that happened, positive experience. You and a couple residents capture this.” We created a form for that. And [inaudible 00:26:07] is not new work.
We’re not asking you to go do resident interactions. We know you’re having them. We just want to be able to show the rest of the school the work that we know you’re doing that would otherwise go unrecognized.” So I think we’re using some of those features that way. And then the geeky side of me is looking forward to figuring out how to use the new attendance feature that’s coming next year of being able to create QR codes for events and have people sign in so that we can actually get a sense of in vivo, for lack of a better term, what’s actually going on and who’s coming to what, and figuring out how we can play with that now that it’s rolling out soon.

Tina Tormey:
Seth, you say the geeky side of you like not all sides of you are geeky. This is 100% on brand.

Seth Zolin:
Wow.

Tina Tormey:
This is why we need you.

Paul Brown:
Those are the people you need in your department. Those are the best people to have, right. I want someone who’s a good data nerd to-

Tina Tormey:
Yep.

Paul Brown:
That’s golden. Yeah. There will also be so attendance, which came out end of spring in kind of a beta mode, but full on for the fall. There will also be some, they’re not in there now, but there’ll be some insight reports where you can then start pulling that data in new interesting ways of, my hope is, and I think we’re going to get there of a student engagement report, meaning here’s all the residents that live with you.
Here’s how many notes were left on them. Here’s how many times they were mentioned in a form. Here’s how many events they were logged in as attending. And, of course, it doesn’t give you the, well, you can have high numbers here, and that can be really positive. And you can also have high numbers here, and that could be not so positive. It won’t give you that, but it will give you some kind of gauge, maybe, to start with in terms of that. So that’s also kind of coming down the pike too.

Chris Trautman:
I love that because I think… just thinking about how we could use that of running that report and identifying the residents with the lowest touch points across all of our communities, whether positive or negative and maybe they have low touch points because all they want is to have a place to sleep at night, which is completely okay. But maybe they have low touch points because we haven’t found a way to reach them yet, and I think that could be really powerful for getting those hard-to-reach residents and pulling them in to support them.

Tina Tormey:
I think especially that parallels the belonging work that we’ve done and assessing which students feel like they belong. What are the conditions that are contributing to that, and how can we enhance that across our residence halls?

Chris Trautman:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
You just got me thinking. We need some… [inaudible 00:28:40] get our blog team on talking about sense of belonging. I don’t think we currently have a lot of content related to that and get that out.

Chris Trautman:
Well, Paul, if you’re soliciting, we just developed a homegrown sense of belonging assessment based on Terrell Strayhorn’s work after we [inaudible 00:28:54]-

Paul Brown:
Yeah.

Chris Trautman:
… it made us want to learn more.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, there’s some excellent work going around around that sense of belonging. I went to a NASPA session on that exact topic. The book that recently came out. Yeah, it’s really good stuff.

Chris Trautman:
Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Well, thank you all for joining us today and kind of just sharing your experiences. You’re great to work with, and I love working with people that like to experiment and try and aren’t afraid to be like, “We’ll give this a go. And if it doesn’t work, then we’ll just adjust it and keep moving.” And I think you really capture that spirit. And if you have any openings, I encourage anyone listening to this to run to apply to work with you because you’re a really awesome, awesome team.

Seth Zolin:
Careers.tcnj.edu.

Paul Brown:
There we go. There we go. All right. If I could be a hall director again, I would probably choose to work with you all. So thanks for joining us. I appreciate all of you, and I want to say thanks to our listeners. This is another episode of Roompact ResEdChat. If you have ideas for topics or things that you want to see on the cast, just let us know. Just reach out to us and we’d be happy to have those folks on. Thanks, everyone.