Greg Fegly is the Director of the IEI (Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute) Accelerator Program at Temple University. He has worked in the corporate world for over 30 years and has spent over 13 years in the university space, three of those with the IEI program. We were recently fortunate enough to hear Greg speak in our monthly webinar about his journey into using an all-inclusive platform to manage virtually all programming at the IEI. Temple University has now been using StartupTree for over two years!
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Running a successful entrepreneurship program requires time, passion, and the right people and technology in place to succeed.
Three years ago, when Greg joined the IEI program, there were a number of ecosystem challenges and limitations that he quickly realized needed to be addressed.
Challenges at the IEI Before StartupTree
Challenges at the IEI Before StartupTree
1. Providing a roadmap for learning
1. Providing a roadmap for learning
“We were suffering with the problem of students coming into the IEI looking for help, but everyone was coming at this from their own space. Every answer we gave needed to be very personalized, and we needed a way to be able to quickly communicate to students which programs, resources, and courses were available to them so that they could decide themselves where they wanted to get involved.”
2. Scaling and managing the mentorship program
2. Scaling and managing the mentorship program
“At the time we were using an Excel spreadsheet, like probably many of you do now, to coordinate all of the efforts of our mentors… The program [we used] had a lot of limitations, not the least of which was that it put me at the center of the program… I knew I needed some way of being able to manage and scale it.”
3. Managing competitions
3. Managing competitions
“We were using a third party platform at the time, and we were paying per competition. As we started looking at other opportunities for our competitions, we saw that the cost kept increasing. We knew we were going to need a solution to make it more cost effective.”
4. Matching students with one another to find partners/co-founders
4. Matching students with one another to find partners/co-founders
“My entire time at Temple, the single biggest question I heard students ask was ‘How am I going to find a partner?’ So we introduced our own home-grown, match-making program called Founder Finder. It worked great in the very beginning when we were talking about maybe 20-30 students, but as it started to grow, that program became unmanageable.”
5. Managing the Temple-made company directory
5. Managing the Temple-made company directory
“We had built our own directory of Temple made companies (a manual spreadsheet on Excel). But as this grew and we got over several hundred companies that we were trying to track, it became a very difficult list to manage. It was also a private list, and we felt that we wanted to share these success stories of companies that had been launched out of Temple, and wanted to make them available for other entrepreneurs.”
6. Centralizing resources
6. Centralizing resources
“We had a lot of centralized resources, most of which we shared in Google folders, and we were looking for a better solution to be able to share them.”
After taking notice of the areas of potential improvement, it became clear to Greg and his team that overseeing multiple software platforms was not scalable or effective in the long-run.
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Are you facing any of these similar challenges?
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Are you facing any of these similar challenges?
If so, you're not alone.
These poll results from our webinar provide insight to challenges that other program directors consider when deciding if an all-in-one platform will help their program.
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The transition into using a new software platform can feel like an overwhelming adjustment. Before deciding upon StartupTree as the new IEI organizational platform, Greg and his colleagues undertook a four month research phase to help ensure they were choosing the right platform. Greg decided StartupTree was the best all-encompassing software to employ for IEI.
During the research phase, they consulted with other organizations already using StartupTree and created dummy accounts to get a grasp on the reliability of the many features StartupTree offers. They also relied heavily on StartupTree’s published best practice guides.
Lindsay Clark, Associate Director of Events and Operations at the IEI, was a self-proclaimed “biggest critic of StartupTree” at the start. But at our webinar, she volunteered to share her personal experiences onboarding and getting settled into using StartupTree with anyone in our community who was interested in learning more.
“I was (in full disclosure) the biggest critic of StartupTree and the switch, because that was my 'role' in the transition to StartupTree. Greg was first one trained on StartupTree, so he would train me, and I managed the old competition platform, so I knew the challenges we had and what to ask about. Happy to talk through our process with anyone who wants some advice.” - Lindsay Clark, Associate Director of Events and Operations at Temple IEI
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The Road to Implementation of StartupTree
The Road to Implementation of StartupTree
To successfully adjust to using StartupTree, the IEI program incorporated StartupTree’s features with a crawl, walk, run approach. This gradual integration method allows for each feature to be secured and sustained before exploring other features. Since switching to a brand new platform takes deep trust and time, it is important to feel comfortable each step of the way.
“CRAWL. WALK. RUN IS KEY! When we first started using StartupTree, we did NOT use the competition portal right away. We held onto our old competition platform until we were VERY SURE that StartupTree could do everything we needed it to do for the competition portals.” - Lindsay Clark, Associate Director of Events and Operations at Temple IEI
Roadmap
Roadmap
When we polled our webinar audience, very few of them had noted making use of the roadmap feature, which was surprisingly one of the first tools that the IEI program took advantage of.
Before, the program lacked an efficient way to guide incoming students through their entrepreneurial journey. Now, IEI has set up a roadmap page that lists four stages of entrepreneurship, and provides different programs, courses, and resources (with links and pop-ups) that are helpful for students in each phase.
Mentorship
Mentorship
Mentorship has always been one of IEI’s most valued initiatives, so scaling and making the mentorship program more accessible for students was at the forefront of their decision to switch platforms. Since its implementation, the mentorship program has upgraded significantly:
- Students can scroll through the list of mentors and book appointments easily.
- Mentors can personalize their profiles and availability right in the platform. They can even upload their personal calendars and it will block off times that they are busy with other non-mentoring events.
- IEI has custom appointment booking settings set up so that students can only book as soon as the upcoming week in order to avoid booking meetings on the same day and missing meetings.
- The recommend matches feature is extremely valuable to match students with the right mentors who are knowledgeable in their field.
- Program managers and directors have direct, up-to-date access to mentorship analytics in the back end. They can assign tags to mentors that make it easy for students to see which mentors are available for different competitions.
- There are now over 100 mentors registered in the IEI program!
“We started with the ~10 "regular" mentors that Greg mentioned, with a lot of manual appointments. And then would get about 50-60 more for our largest competition, the BYOBB [Be Your Own Boss Bowl]. We wanted a way to keep those extra "competition mentors" on board year-round, without having to manually create appointments. StartupTree allowed us the chance to have these mentors create their own schedule, edit their availability and expertise.” - Lindsay Clark, Associate Director of Events and Operations at Temple IEI
Competitions
Competitions
Competitions were another important feature that needed to be addressed. Contrary to the previous method of organization, everything related to managing competitions is in the same ecosystem as their other program components on StartupTree. This includes:
- Competition event page set-up and promotion
- Communication to judges
- Management and visibility into judge assignments
- Direct sending of judge feedback to applicants
- Applicant history (at previous competitions, meetings with mentors, and venture history)
- Auto-saving of in-progress applications
- Competition judging, ranking, and analytics for administrators
With all of these factors held in one place, it allows for exceptional visibility and tracking into every one of their 6 annual competitions. Greg and his team use a separate dashboard for each competition, which allows them more accurate tracking of their data.
Matches
Matches
One of the most pressing questions we always hear from student founders is how they are supposed to find potential co-founders with specific skills to connect with. Greg greatly utilizes the matching feature to connect students with similar interests. This feature saves administrators a tremendous amount of time.
Directory
Directory
The directory and forum that StartupTree provides has been much more manageable than what Greg had previously been using. It establishes groups, promotes camaraderie, and keeps tabs on accelerator programs and competitions across the country to promote to Temple students.
Resources
Resources
Last but not least, the resources tab is also one of Greg’s favorite features on StartupTree. From this tab, you can find a curated list of resources that most startups would have an interest in knowing about or utilizing, many customly curated by the StartupTree team. University programs using StartupTree can also create their own tabs of resources for their students. It is a great place to send your ventures.
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And that’s a wrap! We hope that you leave today with a better understanding of how Temple University uses StartupTree to maximize efficiency and growth for its IEI program.
