K A LEO T H E
V O I C E
The University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Student Newspaper | Since 1922
Ka Leo Mobile App Strategy:
The Ka Leo increased adoption of our mobile app as well as increased revenue this last year at the same time. We worked closely with our New Student Orientation Department on campus to provide them with a custom solution for new students coming to orientation at the University of Hawaii. We were approached in May to discuss the New Student Orientation Guide that Ka Leo puts together specifically as a informational guide to help students navigate the University of Hawaii for all participates in the orientations. In addition to the NSO guide that we put out, we also help them print campus maps, schedules, and other materials that they distribute to students. This is when we were informed that they would not be printing the schedule as in the past, they attended a convention in the spring that had a presentation on customized app for orientations at universities and were looking at pursuing that route. However the cost to produce a custom app would have been in the range or $5,000-$6,000 dollars and was cost prohibitive. We offered to optimize our app for the new student orientations and have it available for students to use to get the schedule of events, give feedback, and receive more in depth information about the sessions that the University of Hawaii puts on for the students. This was a very big win for Ka Leo and the New Student Orientation department, and helped us both achieve our goals. We charged $1,500 to customize our app to offer three unique tiles that gave the information needed for the orientation leaders and it was wildly successful. Not only did we make enough to cover the annual contract fee of our app service provider, but we actually had more than 1,000 downloads during the orientation period. It also helped us solidify the usefulness of the app with the students that attended the sessions and will hopefully be something that they come to rely on as their evolve through their college careers. As we continue with this partnership, we fully expect to sell more advertisers offers on our mobile app, which will help them reach students at a critical new time in their purchasing careers and help solidify the places that they will patronize during their college years. We had amazing feedback and will be working with the New Student Orientation Department again to bring back the tiles and make improvements on what was offered and find more ways to work together to better serve our audience of students.