The Alumni Affairs team within Cornell University asked us to create a trivia game on Facebook for the purpose of engaging alumni by testing their knowledge of Cornell. The game has been popular with alumni and has encouraged them to increase their engagement with the university and connect more with their friends in the alumni community!

Singlebrook worked closely with the Alumni Affairs team to develop the functionality they envisioned for the Facebook app. Cornell staff from many departments can submit questions, answers, and wrong answers to be used in the game. Members of the Alumni Affairs team select which questions to use in weekly trivia contests.

Utilizing Trends in Social Media Engagement

We took advantage of some of Facebook’s social features to make the trivia game competitive and engaging to players. Players are rewarded with badges and other awards for participating in the game. The game tracks every answer and shows leaderboards so players can see how they stack up to their friends and other players. Notifications are sent to all players whenever a new contest is published, and players can post their scores upon finishing a contest.

Technology

We built the Facebook application using Ruby on Rails, an advanced, open-source framework. Rails is a mature development platform that was designed from the very beginning to be agile. It helps us develop our applications faster because it handles of lot of the basics, freeing us to focus on implementing the overall behavior of our clients’ projects. Rails runs some of the most popular websites out there, including Twitter and Hulu. The Cornell Alumni Affairs Facebook app is hosted on Heroku, a cloud application platform that allows for quick deployment and scaling of powerful apps.