Posty Crumbs
For universities and colleges
Everything a first-year learns by October, on day one.
Orientation is a PDF map and a tour that ends at noon. The things that actually matter live in group chats nobody new can read. Which library floor is quiet at two in the morning. Which door is unlocked on a Sunday. Where the coffee is worth it.
Nothing to procure, nothing to install on a server. One society or one keen second-year can start this afternoon. Posty Crumbs is 18+, so this is built for higher education.
Your first week
Not a list of nice places — the order you will actually need things in.
by @ucla · 14 stops
Stops
- 1Room types: classic, plaza, deluxe, suite
- 2Meal plans: Regular or Premier
- 3BruinCard: it's eight things
- 4Parcel pickup at Sunset Village
- 5The Enormous Activities Fair
- 6Holding a table: the napkin rule
- 7Where meal swipes work on campus
Week one
How does a university use Posty Crumbs?
No pilot, no integration, and no student data leaving anyone's phone to make it happen.
Orientation as a trail
UCLA's is called Your first week and it runs to fourteen stops — the two decisions to make before you arrive, then the admin nobody explains, then the rules everyone already knows. In the order you need them, and still there in week six.
The stuff no campus map has
UCLA's own crumb on north campus versus south campus opens with this is the first thing to understand and no map will tell you. Ten minutes apart, different food, different buildings. That is the kind of thing that currently dies with whoever graduates.
Your hall, your seminar, your team
A circle is a group you name. Crumbs only those people can find — the study room you have claimed, the note left on a door, the meeting point before the match.
Departments and societies get a layer
The history department leaves the campus it used to be. The climbing club leaves the wall. Each one is a public profile with its own trails, run by the people who care, not by a web team.
Where to actually study
Powell is beautiful, which is why it is full. The eighth floor of Boelter never fills the same way, and the silent corner at the far end of it has carried a good share of this university's engineering coursework. That is one stop on a fifteen-stop trail.
It finds them as they walk
Nobody opens an orientation app twice. Crumbs can nudge a student when something they follow is near, so the thing they need reaches them on the way to the lecture they are already late for.
Already happening
Is anyone actually doing this?
UCLA is on the map today. Five public trails, sixty-one stops: Your first week, Where to study by what you need, Every building here is a person, The best things here are free, and Sawtelle in one walk. None of it was asked for by the university.
Start with the walk from the gate to the lecture hall. One trail, made by someone who already knows the way, is enough to be useful in week one. Everything else grows out of it.
Questions
What a dean and a student both want to know.
Does the school have to run or buy anything?
No. There is no server to install, nothing to procure and no contract to sign. A department, a society or one student can start with the free app. If a campus later wants its own official profile, that is still just a profile.
Who can see what a student leaves?
Whoever they choose, per crumb: public, private to them, shared with a circle they name such as a hall or a seminar group, or sent to specific people. Nothing is public by accident.
Is this safe for students?
Posty Crumbs is 18+, so it is for universities and colleges rather than schools with pupils under eighteen. For adult students, public photos are screened automatically before anyone else sees them, every crumb and profile can be reported from inside the app, and reports are read by a person.
Something is on our campus that should not be. What then?
Report it from the app and it comes out of view while it is reviewed. For anything urgent, email hello@postycrumbs.com and a person answers, usually within a day.
What does it cost?
Nothing, for students and for the institution. No per-seat price, no campus tier, no limit on how much anyone drops.
Start with your own first week.
One trail, in the order things actually happen. UCLA's runs to fourteen stops and was built by someone who had simply done it before.