Welcome to Built In Chicago’s newest weekly feature, Tech Spotlight of the Week! In this series, we’ll be highlighting locally built tech apps and products at the end of each business week. If you’d like to be considered for inclusion in the future, send your pitch to [email protected].
This week, we’re zooming in on
, a former 1871 resident that wants to make life a little easier for residential life staffs at universities across the country. Roompact’s software helps resident advisors and directors streamline and centralize just about everything, from roommate agreements and surveys to conflict mediation, duty logs, and room condition reports.
That’s impressive enough (especially for the ex-RA in me), but the crux of their work is even more respectable. The idea is to use data collected by the cloud-based platform to predict and prevent roommate problems as soon as possible, keeping students happy.
And harmony between roommates, it turns out, matters. According to their webpage, conflict between roommates is one of the top five causes for students to drop out of college — and almost half of students have reported having issues with their roommate. For many students, removed from support systems they’d built in high school and burdened with newfound stress that college life and study often brings, roommate conflict could be that one straw too many.
It works like this: Roompact migrates the roommate agreement (a tool many ResLife departments employ) to a digital experience, surveying students on expectations and ground rules they both can agree upon. Roompact then checks in with the students from time to time to see how the relationship is progressing, tracking responses as the semester progresses. Using that data, staff members can better maintain records of relationships and intervene when a problem first arises.
Image via Shutterstock.
Know of a startup that we should be covering? Send us an email via [email protected].
