The app for student orientation and welcome week
Welcome week is the largest, most complicated event most institutions run, aimed at the people least equipped to navigate it: three thousand students who arrived yesterday and do not know where anything is.
A planning figure for a mid-sized institution's new-student intake. Note the ceiling: past 1,000 activated students the cost does not move.
Aimed at the people least able to navigate it
An orientation app carries the welcome week programme for new students, split by cohort, faculty and residence, with capacity-controlled sessions and push alerts when something moves. event67 provides that under the institution's own brand. It does not integrate with a student information system, does not track credits or attendance for academic purposes, and does not host course content.
One programme, forty different students' weeks
An engineering fresher in halls and a mature postgraduate commuting in have almost nothing in common in their welcome week. Tracks by faculty, cohort and residence let each student filter to their own path, star what they are attending, and see their day at the top of the screen instead of parsing a two-hundred-item grid.
Sessions that cannot oversell
Library tours, lab inductions and campus walks all have hard limits. RSVP capacity is enforced on the server, with automatic waitlist promotion when a student drops. That replaces the sign-up sheets, the double-booked tours and the coordinator reconciling spreadsheets at midnight.
A channel that reaches students who read nothing
Institutional email is not read in welcome week. Push notifications deep-link to the announcement itself, and scheduled announcements let the orientation team write the whole week's messages in advance.
Evidence for the review afterwards
Which sessions filled, which were rated well, how many of the intake actually activated. Orientation is reviewed every year on anecdote; engagement analytics and per-session feedback replace that with a number.
Offers accepted to first teaching day
Offers accepted
Invite the intake
Export the new-student list from your student system and import it as CSV. Branded invites go out with delivery tracked per recipient, which on an intake list built from application data is genuinely useful.
Uses the branded app and branded invites with delivery tracking.
Two weeks before
Publish the programme and open sign-ups
Tracks by faculty, cohort and residence. Sessions with true capacities. Opening early means students arrive with a plan rather than a leaflet.
Uses the programme.
Arrival day
Registration at scale
QR check-in at the arrivals desk with a live count. A repeat scan returns already checked in, which matters when a student comes back three times in a morning.
Uses check-in.
Through the week
Changes, reminders and the things nobody read
A room change, a cancelled tour, the deadline for enrolment. Push announcements are the only channel with real reach in this week, and they deep-link to the post rather than dropping a student on a home screen.
Uses push announcements.
After
Feedback and the album
Session feedback while it is fresh, an album of the week for the marketing team, and analytics showing which parts of the programme students actually attended. That is the pack the orientation review needs.
Uses session feedback and the shared album.
Setting up an orientation app
Six steps. The accessibility conversation in step one is the one that stalls institutional projects if it is left late.
Raise accessibility and procurement early
There is no VPAT. If your institution requires formal conformance documentation, establish that before any configuration work happens.
Create the event across the whole week
Arrival weekend through the first teaching day, so the programme reads as one continuous week.
Build tracks before sessions
Faculty, cohort and residence. These are what make a two-hundred-item programme usable.
Set real capacities on tours and inductions
Server-enforced, with automatic waitlist promotion. Enter the true number.
Import the intake and invite
CSV from the student system export. Work the bounce list before arrival weekend.
Write the week's announcements in advance
Scheduled. The orientation team will not have time to write good copy during the week itself.
What a 3,200-student intake costs
Thirty-two hundred students activate. Fifty are free, and because the per-event price stops rising at a thousand activated attendees, the remaining twenty-two hundred students cost nothing at all.
- activated attendees
- 3,200activated attendees
- billable, after the first 50 are free
- 950billable, after the first 50 are free
- for the whole event, at $5.00 each
- $4,750for the whole event, at $5.00 each
For an institution, the useful number is the ceiling rather than the rate. An intake that grows does not grow this cost.
What higher education will screen for and not find
Institutional procurement asks about these early. It is better to fail the screen honestly than to fail a pilot.
- No student information system integration. The intake list is a CSV import, repeated each year.
- No single sign-on with your institutional identity provider.
- No academic attendance monitoring, credit tracking or certificates.
- No accessibility conformance report or VPAT. There is a WCAG AA contrast check in the theme editor that warns and confirms before a save; that is a starting point, not a conformance claim, and higher education procurement usually asks for the latter.
- No course content, timetabling or learning management features.
- No payments.
Last updated
What it costs
- Free up to 50
- activated attendees, on one live event
- $5
- per activated attendee beyond 50
- $4,750
- the most one event can ever cost, whatever happens past 1,000
Activated means the person claimed their invite and opened the app. Not when you import them, not when the invite is delivered, and not if they register and stay home.
Questions people actually ask
Does it integrate with our student information system?
No. The intake list is a CSV import, done once per year. There is no live sync, no single sign-on and no write-back of attendance. For most orientation teams the annual import is acceptable; if you need a live integration, this is not the right tool.
Do you have a VPAT or accessibility conformance report?
No. What exists is a WCAG AA contrast check inside the theme editor that warns and confirms before a save, and never blocks one. Higher education procurement commonly requires formal conformance documentation, and we would rather tell you now than at the end of an evaluation.
What does it cost for an intake of 8,000?
The same as an intake of 1,000 activated students. The per-event price stops moving at that point, so every student beyond it is free. Students who never open the app are not billed at all.
Can departments run their own sessions without full console access?
Yes. Access is role-based across four levels, from super admin down to moderator, so a departmental coordinator can be given moderator access rather than the whole account. Team chat and billing carry audit trails.
Can we reuse the setup next year?
Create a new event for each intake. That keeps each year's feedback and attendance separate, which is what an orientation review wants, and each event carries its own free fifty attendees.
Keep reading
Other kinds of event
The features this leans on
Give three thousand new students their own week
Tracks by faculty and residence, sessions that cannot oversell, and alerts that actually get read.