Elon Technology Blog

Tech I can’t live without: Grace Cahill

For junior Grace Cahill, quick and effective communication is key. As the president of the Panhellenic Council, Cahill needs to stay in touch with the executive board, the recruitment counselors chosen to help with Panhellenic Recruitment and others. That is why Grace Chaill can’t live without GroupMe.

 What is GroupMe

Developed in 2010, GroupMe is a free group messaging application that simplifies communication between groups. With the application, users add people to a “group,” and all text messages sent within the group can be seen (and liked) by the other members. The application also allows members to share videos and pictures. Since it is one running message, conversations between multiple people are easier to follow.

One of the GroupMe’s greatest advantages is that the application can be used on all smartphones as an application and on all other text-enabled phones. For smart phone users, the application controls the amount of messages coming to your phone and eliminates multiple messages hindering phone use. On non-smart phones, GroupMe functions through a single number from which messages are sent and received, which consolidate text messages to one place.

Why it works for Grace

“It’s a nice way to organize things,” Cahill said. “I can easily check it along with the rest of my applications [like Facebook and Twitter]. It acts like an organizer, because it keeps conversations with a group in one place.”

This past winter, Grace was a recruitment counselor for Panhellenic Recruitment, and she and the other recruitment counselors (or pi chis) used GroupMe to ask questions and keep connected throughout the month of January. They used two separate GroupMe threads: one for regular conversations and another one, called Pi Chi 911, to message about potential emergencies and other important matters.

Now that she’s Panhellenic president, Grace uses GroupMe to stay in touch with the rest of the Panhellenic executive board and keep everyone on the same page.

“It’s a good way to stay on the same page,” Cahill said. “People might e-mail me a question and I may not know the answer, but if they ask in the GroupMe, everyone sees it and someone else may have that information.”

As a leader of such a vast group, Grace recognizes how many ways people can misinterpret information. GroupMe works for her, because she can manage how messages are communicated and limit the number of messages it takes to convey those messages.

“I think it’s more manageable than a group text or a group message,” Cahill said. “[On GroupMe] people can like people’s messages. So, I can say,  ‘like this message if you agree,’ so I can cut down on number of messages people receive.”

 

Do you have an application, a program, or a piece of technology you can’t live without? Tell us about it in the comments below!

Supplemental image via Flikr user jdlasica / CC BY-NC 2.0

 

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