St. Michael’s students are beginning to catch on to the convenience of CampusLIVE.com, a Web site customized as a homepage for individual colleges.

Jared Stenquist, Boris Revsin, and Jeff Cassidy created the Web site in 2006, in a dorm room at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, to enable students to navigate between educational and social online sites through one homepage. CampusLIVE originally linked students to local restaurants and businesses, and quickly became an access point for all social, academic, athletic, and educational needs, said Revsin, the chief operating officer.

Twenty dollars on advertising

CampusLIVE creators all attended the University of Massachusetts. (Photo courtesy of CampusLIVE)

“We spent $20 on advertising and said ‘come to CampusLIVE’,” Revsin said. “Within two weeks, half the school used the site.”

Once CampusLIVE became immensely popular at UMASS the creators rebranded it and built a system that could be adjusted to cater to the needs of individual schools, Revsin said.

CampusLIVE reaches 59 campuses, with seven full-time employees, 50 in house interns, and 12 campus representatives, Revsin said. All the employees are under 24-years-old, and the majority of them are recent graduates or current students.       

Revsin said what makes CampusLIVE unique is that it was created for the students by the students.

“Everyone is very young and in touch with the college demographic. It sets us apart from every company out there,” he said.  

From intern, to director of marketing

Sasha Grosman started at CampusLIVE as one of the first student interns, and is now the director of marketing “I was working at CampusLIVE full-time so it was a natural step when I graduated to become an employee,” Grosman said. “I have loved working here, it is everything I have wanted to do; the right work place, the right environment, it was an easy decision”.

St. Michael's is one of the 59 campuses that are supported by CampusLIVE. (Photo by Kayla Sibilia)

Grosman oversees the internship programs at CampusLIVE, and works directly with St. Michael’s sophomore Meg Delaney, a CampusLIVE representative.

“We run all of our ideas across our interns. They are the ones that defined what CampusLIVE is, what it does, and how it looks today,” Grosman said. “We are constantly looking for ways to better the Web site, so that every semester you can look for something more useful and cooler from CampusLIVE.”

Delaney said she was impressed when CampusLIVE appeared in “Business Week’s Top 5 Entrepreneurs Under 25,” and wanted to get involved in some way.

“My first job was to get St. Mike's on the CampusLIVE network by gathering information such as local restaurant menus, links to St. Mike's e-mail, Knight Vision, E-college, clubs and other student organizations. My on-going job here as a student rep is to get the word out about CampusLIVE to the St. Mike's community,” Delaney said.  

CampusLive starts to catch on at St. Michael’s       

Junior Emma Stenberg uses CampusLIVE as her homepage, she said.  

CampusLIVE fans show their support at a recent company gathering. (Photo courtesy of CampusLIVE)

“It’s a good tool for synthesizing a lot of information and making it available to a large number of students. I use it because I can quickly check the weather, before checking my e-mail or Facebook. I don’t know of another sight that combines campus and community links in a cohesive way,” Stenberg said.

St. Michael’s director of Web site development, Brian MacDonald, said CampusLIVE is well laid out and easy to find.

“It functions as a portal and it is nice that a solution like that is there. There is a lot of effort put into it; the people at CampusLIVE should be commended,” Macdonald said.      

Sophomore Mary Carney said she did not realize a site like CampusLIVE existed.
“Homepages can be so complicated to use, but CampusLIVE seems to simplify things and make them more accessible to college students,” she said.

Revsin said he would like to see CampusLIVE partner up with major news networks and reach thousands of schools.

“I have enjoyed overcoming the challenges, and I look forward to watching CampusLIVE grow,” Revsin said.

CampusLIVE has over 4,000 unique users monthly. Campuses can use CampusLIVE by filling out the request form on the Web site. The company is starting to contact representatives for some of the 100 schools that have requested that their campus get on CampusLIVE, Grosman said.

“From single-click access to college e-mail, athletics, news, Facebook and YouTube to local restaurants, weather information and entertainment, CampusLIVE has it all. It is virtually everything a college student needs all in one place,” Delaney said.