Anchor Link Info

The Office of Student Organizations, in collaboration with Vanderbilt Student Government, would like to introduce a new online student engagement platform, called Anchor Link (https://anchorlink.vanderbilt.edu).  Anchor Link is a new initiative to help centralize and organize student involvement on campus, student organizations will have the opportunity to renew the registration of their organizations, maintain a roster of their members and officers, store their organization’s history through maintaining important documents, advertise their events, and keep track of their on-campus involvement–all within one vibrant online community.

What does it mean to you as a student organization leader?  Below you will find information on some of the functionality of Anchor Link that will be available to you once your registration is approved within the system.  Registered student organizations are able to take advantage of the involvement and engagement opportunities within the platform.

Anchor Link is a place for you to interact with your members:

• Maintain a roster of your members and officers
• Give varying levels of access to management of the site for different members,  officers, and the general public
• Establish meetings and events on the calendar and invite your members, a subset of members (particular committee, seniors, etc.), or the entire campus community with RSVP capabilities.
• Track attendance at meetings, programs, and events.  This will tell you who attends your programs and allow you to market to that specific audience in the future.  It will also allow you to track the attendance of your current members.
• Communicate via email or text message with your membership or subsets of your membership
• Hold elections and polls for your members.  This can range from your officer elections to the restaurant you want to cater your next meal.
• Form submissions: if there are any processes where you require members to submit a piece of paper, you can replace that by building electronic forms.  These forms also have levels of approval set by you and can be sent to specific individuals for review
• Members can record community service hours

Anchor Link is a place for you to store the history of your organization:

• Upload meeting minutes and set who has access to view the various documents
• Event details: you can upload budget information per event and go back and look at this information from year to year to help plan and allocate funds more effectively
• Budgets from previous years for both the organization and individual events
• Activity Fee and student organization financing: Anticipated to be run through Anchor Link next spring.
• Upload resources that can be used for officers, which can be very helpful especially at turnover or planning a program.
• Member contact information
• Membership Roster that will be uploaded to Alumni Relations so that we will finally be able to give student organizations lists of their alumni.  This has historically been very limited to Greek and a few other organizations.
• You can choose to share information with only your members or a subset of members.

Anchor Link is a place for students to get involved and build the involvement portion of their resume:

• Captures a student’s involvement and activities outside the classroom through all four years and creates a co-curricular resume.
• Suggests organizations to join based on a set of interests shared by both the student and the organization, personalizing the level of suggested connections on an individual basis. Example: Sarah enjoys Dance.  Anchor Link will suggest to Sarah organizations that include Dance in their profile

Anchor Link will work best with 100% participation by student organizations.  How will we make that happen?

• Student Organization Registration will be completed through this site.  During this process you will give us similar information as you have in the past, plus you will now include a roster of members that will be automatically invited to join your organization once they log into the site.
• Student wide elections will take place within Anchor Link—VSG Elections, Outstanding Senior, Honor Council, Young Alumni Trustee, and other special polls will be held inside Anchor Link.
• Student Organization and Dean of Students processes will be driven through Anchor Link (Ex. VSG Co-sponsorships, Activity Fee allocations and applications, Awards Applications, Greek Standards, etc.)
• Anchor Link will be in YES.  Therefore, Anchor Link can be found at the same place where you enroll for classes, transcripts, etc.

Our goal is for as many things as possible to be embedded within Anchor Link.

This will be one of your first tasks after the registration of your organization is approved.

Below are items requested in the registration process that will help bring your Anchor Link page to life:

• Current Org Website Link
• Facebook Page Link
• Twitter Feed
• Google Calendar
• YouTube Channel
• Organization Profile Picture