Website Features

Gumbo offers you all the standard features you would expect from a student website, all easily maintainable by your Association staff.

• News

  Publish News articles to inform your students about what's going on in your association, or to keep them up to date with current trends.

  News articles are linked through sidebars on the website, and prominently placed on the front page. By default the system will prioritise the most recent articles, automatically putting them at the top of lists, but you can override this and manually control which articles appear at the top of the page.

  Gumbo's Audience system lets you control access to certain news articles, so you can provide different news to registered students than to visiting guests.

  All News articles can also be connected to Issues or Campaigns, as well as having images, downloadable files or links attached for extra information.

• Calendar

  Calendars are central to Gumbo, and the system features a powerful integrated calendar which combines Ents, Clubs and Societies, Association events and personal events into calendars personalised to individual students.

  You can use your Association calendar to publicise meetings, events, fresher's fayres, club nights and more. All events are categorised and the system handles making sure they appear to the right people on the right pages at the right time.

• Mailing Lists

  Easily manage mailing lists of your students, direct from your website.

  Gumbo automatically gives you a number of built-in mailing list options, to email all students for example, or to email your Council or Executive members. But you can also add additional mailing lists to update students about Entertainments, News, Campaigns, Events or anything else important.

  Students can subscribe and unsubscribe to and from these mailing lists through their personal profiles, and a dedicated mailings screen lets you see how many recipients each list has, as well as viewing an archive of messages you've sent.

• Revenue Opportunities

  Advertising can be a powerful earner for your association, but it needs to be carefully managed. A website blanketed in flashing banner adverts, pop-ups and other intrusive measures can turn off a lot of students, or give them the feeling that they are being in some way 'exploited' by their own association.
  
  Gumbo is designed to draw as many students as possible to your website, principally to extend the reach of your association, and to encourage more of your students to take part. But from an advertising point of view as well, it's obviously essential to keep the site popular and heavily used.
  
  That's why Gumbo uses a number of more subtle, integrated advertising methods to provide genuinely useful advertising to your students, provided in an unobtrusive way, which still allow you to take this opportunity to boost your association's finances.

• Custom Pages

  Gumbo is built out of modules, designed by our in-house team to get information to and from students, and to provide them with services that suit them.

  These modules provide a lot of power, and automate a lot of the management of running a student website, but they can sometimes be a little bit inflexible.

  That's why Gumbo also includes online editors to develop custom pages. Anyone on your team with a knowledge of HTML can add pages with headings, links, graphics etc - all using the same stylesheets and design styles of your site. Custom pages can let you add pages for example to publicise things like your association shop, or to provide marketing information to prospective companies for your fresher's fayre.

  These pages can be linked from anywhere on your site, and even into your main site navigation if required.

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