With the pandemic, we’ve all been turning to the internet for connection since we can’t meet in person. From virtual conference booths to Teams holiday dinners and watching movies over Zoom, our new gathering places are online…at least for the foreseeable future!

We at Cayuse have really missed meeting you at tradeshows, conferences, your campuses, and research facilities since March. So this September, we launched an online community for anyone in the research field: Connect Community by Cayuse. You can read and share anything from news and trends to best practices, jobs, and product feature ideas. It’s free to join, and everyone is welcome, so check it out!

Why join another online space? Well, it’s unique in that it’s the only vendor-provided community open to the public to network and talk about research administration. It also covers the entire research spectrum—not just human or animal research. Here are what some of your peers are saying. “Professional organizations are very helpful in our overall research administration field, but it’s also nice to have a place that’s more focused on the technology and applications that we’re using,” says Jennifer Mills, Senior Grant Specialist at University of Alabama – Tuscaloosa.

“With everything going remote and not having in-person training, I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for training videos to onboard faculty and staff with Cayuse. I jumped right into the community and asked for help. Everybody was so helpful and provided so much information! It’s been wonderful. I look forward to engaging our principal investigators in the community as well.”

Here are a few of the things you can do in the community:

Get advice from peers

How do other research organizations do things? The answer is just a couple clicks away. Submit a question, read questions and answers, and view unanswered questions to share your advice and expertise with others. You might learn some new tips and tricks!

Find mentors and collaborators

When you join, you can fill out your profile with your bio, professional associations, Cayuse apps you use, certifications, areas of expertise, and more. (You can also adjust your privacy settings on any detail from public to members only, contacts, or just yourself.) You can view the member directory, add others as contacts, and send messages. 

You can also enroll as a mentor and/or mentee, see mentoring requests from other users, and find a mentor or mentee for yourself.

You can find a mentor or mentee based on topics (pre-award, post-award, professional development, vivarium operations, etc.), communication preference (phone, email, in-person, etc.), career stage (from student to retired), and region. Hopefully it’ll be the start of a great professional relationship!

Post or find a job

Are you hiring or looking to make a career move? Check out job postings, apply, or post your own on the research administration job board.

Share ideas and product suggestions

If you’re a Cayuse customer, you can suggest product features, see others’ ideas, and vote for the ones you like. Giving other people’s ideas a thumbs up is a great way to show us which feature ideas are the most in-demand as we plan future product roadmaps!

If you’d like to share longer thoughts and ideas, you can also write a blog post within the community, as well as set permission levels on who can see it (public vs. members) and who can comment on it (members or nobody).

We want to make this a useful and valuable place for you, so become a member and let us know what you think! We’re so excited that more than 350 community members have already joined since launching three months ago. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions to improve and our new community manager, Ena Bevrnja, is more than happy to answer any questions, too.

Hope to see you online!