Edit: Minor image changes

Websites are a core of digital identity, and different student associations do a lot to own them, both stylistically and literally. They can make your association look like a premier event organizer, like a newspaper or like an advertiser for a third party, among others. For some associations they can even look like a department of the university. Because the intent and purpose of web navigation, they are. They can also look like something that at first glance has no connection to your post-secondary institution at all.

One of the links above was to Georgian College’s student association. The website looks like it is maintained largely by the university for the purpose of telling prospective students the GCSA exists, rather than an area for the GCSA to interact with its members. The GCSA instead communicates primarily through its social media platforms, and there are a lot of them, a separate set for every Georgian campus.

Georgian isn’t completely alone. UAlberta and UCalgary‘s student unions have a subdomain of the institution that they seem to have substantial control over, as does UBC’s Alma Mater Society. This leads to functional control over the website, but still some direct association with the institution.

In our SLUGs sample, this is the nature of the websites.

Website Type	Number of Incidences
Fully Independent	24
Subdomain	3
No Independent Website	1

This isn’t limited to large associations either. A smaller federated institution like my university residence, St. Jerome’s can have a student union without its own domain, and we can see the same elsewhere too.

Is not having a website of their own the end of the world? What advantages do having your own domain come with? I argue there are three main ones, sovereignty, functionality, and identity.

Sovereignty

This is the main concern that applies to both the “no independent website” category and subdomain category. In theory, the post-secondary institution retains control over that website, even if day-to-day it never exercises that authority.

While student associations are sometimes co-operative with institutions, most have flare-ups in their relationships, and sometimes things can get ugly. Would it ever be ugly enough a university may cut off the website of an association using a subdomain? Probably unlikely, but not impossible.

The bigger concern is for associations with no independent website whatsoever. Maybe they have access to edit specific webpages via an institution’s CMS, or maybe they rely on institution web developers to put up information, and that’s where things get very vulnerable. Having an institution with the ability to manage what can be posted means that it might get very difficult or awkward to post certain things in a time of antagonism, as each piece of content is probably read explicitly by an institutional staff member. Something like an explicit call to action or unalloyed criticism of the university might get shot down.

These associations would obviously still be able to make use of their social media channels, but this is still a vulnerability that might merit the cost of owning your own domain and managing your own association website.

Functionality

One thing that is relevant for those operating completely dependently, not even with a subdomain, might be being severely hemmed in with regard to the options that are on the table for web design. Websites can do some pretty incredible things (watch your ears). But beyond the normal restrictions of designing for accessibility, associations might also need to rein in their design goals, either due to technical restrictions or web design policy that the institution imposes. This might cause clashes with either brand definition or getting the website to do things you want it to do, like host a voting system.

Identity

Having your own website, even just a subdomain, gives an ability for an organization to achieve both a distinct visual identity, but also the inherent branding that comes from not being visible as just youruniversity.ca/student-union, which implies dependence.

Coda

If you have the resources to have someone build you a student union website with a simple CMS, and you don’t have functionality that you depend on your institution to provide, there is little reasoning for associations to avoid having a domain of their own.