Datamatch

Copywriting, PR Campaign, Design,
Social Media, Organization Development

Soo...What is Datamatch?

Picture this. A Buzzfeed-style personality quiz with campus satire centered around Valentine's Day run through a student-written algorithm to match thousands of college students for platonic and romantic love.

Datamatch is a free matchmaking service helping thousands find love and meet friends. Datamatch originated in 1994 by the Harvard Computer Society and is now at dozens of schools, including Yale, UCLA, and Wisconsin Madison. Due to WashU Datamatch's astounding success, we work alongside Harvard Datamatch to run the nationwide website, special algorithm, and more. We like to show them who's really the WashU of the Northeast...

WashU Datamatch engages around half of WashU students each year, even with the pandemic. I was a part of the first cohort of WashU cupids to help put this campaign together and create the product as a part of the Design and Question-Writing committees. Subsequently, I served as the WashU Supreme Cupid (aka president) for two years.

Datamatch Website

Datamatch Question Examples

Being Supreme Cupid, I managed 27 cupids across 7 committees in publicity, design, algorithm, events, writing, web development, and data visualizations. Much work and preparation goes into our massive two week long campus-wide campaign and creating the product each year. And no matter how much we prepare, a decent amount of last minute work to keep up with the fast-moving campus conversation.

It's been incredibly rewarding to give my campus something to look forward to, whether that's the prospect of love, new friends, or really successful questions. I've heard about many Datamatch dates, friendships, and successful romantic relationships. There's so much buzz about Datamatch for those couple of weeks that it's practically the only thing students talk about. It shows how successful our PR campaign is in creating organic WOM.

Datamatch Flyers on Campus

Beyond sending a school-wide email about the survey, we also put flyers around the campus like crazy. We'll rip off flyers from past events to make more room for ours on the bulletin board. We'll place them in uncommon, clever locations where many eyes will look anyway.

My favorite type of flyer placement is when the specific flyer interacts with the physical space. For example, placing the flyer that says "Cupples? We could put you in one, y'know" inside of a building named Cupples. This kind of placement adds another layer of humor and creates a topic of conversation, adding to the Datamatch buzz.

We also did a platonic version for first-years in the fall.

In terms of what the cupids do, it's the same process as Datamatch but on a much smaller scale. However, since the audience is smaller and more specific, the questions can be more specific.

The fun challenge for writing survey questions like these is the specificity. The goal is to be specific enough that every user feels personally targeted. At the same time, they need to be general enough such that users always have at least one answer they feel comfortable choosing.

Beyond the questions individually, we also need to consider the balance of the question set: Is it too focused on the pandemic? Not enough love? Too campus-heavy? Writing and editing with so many layers of objectives and personas in mind was a fun challenge.