Coming to campus this fall, Fampus aims to change college events

As college students get back into the swing of things at school this fall, Des Moines-based startup Fampus is hoping to make itself a prominent part of their planning. Fampus is a social network that aims to be a one-stop shop for all the events happening on and around a given campus. …

Fampus, an event-based social network for college campuses, hopes to “do for the Facebook event … what Twitter did for the Facebook status,” according to founder Brittany Brody. Screenshot courtesy of Fampus.

As college students get back into the swing of things at school this fall, Des Moines-based startup Fampus is hoping to make itself a prominent part of their planning.

Fampus is a social network that aims to be a one-stop shop for all the events happening on and around a given campus. Created specifically for colleges and universities, it launched at the University of Nebraska on Friday and will roll out on six more campuses – Drake, Grand View, Iowa, Iowa State, Simpson and Wisconsin — in the coming weeks.

Fampus is the brainchild of Brittany Brody, a West Des Moines native who’s currently a senior at Wisconsin. When Brody arrived in Madison in the fall of 2008, she was overwhelmed by the myriad of opportunities at the campus-wide involvement fair and discouraged by the number of interesting on-campus events she didn’t learn about until after they happened.

“Just a lot of frustrating experiences for me kind of led to the evolution of this idea, which essentially would bring together everything happening on campus — so the clubs and organizations, the school events and community events — to one location,” Brody (left, photo courtesy of Fampus) said, “and then would be able to recommend students things that they were interested in based upon how they use it.”

Brody voiced her concerns to friends and neighbors and, eventually, her father, Brad Brody. Before long, Brittany, who’s studying journalism with a focus on strategic communications, had begun working on Fampus, her first entrepreneurial venture.

Fampus, like another social network that was exclusive to college students once upon a time, includes user-specific profiles, photo sharing and other social elements. But, more than that other network, Fampus really hangs its hat on the events.

“We’ve often been asked the difference between us and Facebook,” Brody said, “and really the best way I can answer that is we’re looking to do for the Facebook event what we feel Twitter did for the Facebook status.”

Fampus has no official relationships with the schools for which it provides its platform. Events can be submitted by users but are also generated by the Fampus team and through what Brad Goldman, Fampus’ vice president of operations, called a proprietary automated process.

“We have that human factor, you know, briefly reviewing every event to make sure that it has the data that we want it to have and that it’s accurate,” Goldman said. “It’s really twofold. It’s a little bit computer-automated. It’s a little bit people power.”

Fampus has a core team of 12 employees, plus 3-5 interns at every school where it’s operational. Goldman said the curation of event data made possible by the company’s presence on the ground at schools helps separate Fampus from other alternatives.

“We’re of the philosophy that if we go out there and accumulate all the data and clean it, if you will, and make sure that it’s all accurate with that very comprehensive list of events, we’re going to provide the best database of events out there,” Goldman (left, photo courtesy of Fampus) said.

In addition to its web-based platform, Fampus has native iPhone and Android applications. It has Facebook and Twitter integrations, which enable users to streamline the process of sharing photos and pushing notifications regarding events.

Fampus is free to use but will generate revenue from what Godlman called “hyper-local” targeted advertising. The company will analyze how early users interact with the platform to assess other potential sources of revenue.

“We want to see how people use the site,” Goldman said, “and know that there’s a lot of opportunities to find other revenue streams as we go as well.”

Fampus conducted beta testing last year at Grand View University in Des Moines and came away with the idea to make its platform more dynamic and engaging. “We kept the concept intact that we were going to be a database listing of events,” Goldman said, “but we found a heck of a lot more ways to make it, you know, a social network as well that people could interact in and play in.”

Added Brody of the beta testing: “We took the feedback that we learned from Grandview and we pumped it into this newer better version that we’re releasing this fall.”

Now, Fampus hopes it can become the leading name in event-specific platforms on college campuses.

“One of our biggest hurdles is convincing people why and how we are different than Facebook, because they are kind of the benchmark of social networking these days,” Goldman said. “We’re trying to take that events piece and really make that robust and its own improved experience.”

For more on Fampus, see the promotional video below. 

Video from Fampus on Vimeo.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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