A raft is a community formed around something you care about. Rafts are places where members can see what events are happening when, find out what others are talking about, connect with people with similar interests, and join in on interesting conversations.
There are two types of rafts on Raftr and several different privacy settings for member management and content accessibility. The first type of raft is those that are curated by our team or the colleges we partner with (official) and the second type is those that people in the app create and curate (user-curated).
Official rafts are denoted by a checkmark for authenticity. They are loaded with interesting content and conversations. These are rafts that are generally curated by someone in the administration in your college or university, who makes sure events and content are complete and comprehensive. Students can also post and chat on these rafts, and also co-lead them.
Rafts are generally organized in the following way: they consist of a “Front Page”, that shows the rafts’ members (and admin) and recent raft activity. All rafts also have pages for messages, posts, and events; some official rafts also have a blogs page.
You can contribute content in three ways:
- Reacting to posts, either by selecting an emoticon, writing a comment, or up-voting or down-voting another person’s comment. These interactions all get tallied in our algorithm to surface which rafts, posts, and people are trending throughout the app.
- Creating posts and events. This is a great way to share events or your thoughts and ideas as the stories on your rafts advance each day. You can personalize and illustrate your events and posts with photos, videos or GIFs. You can also share links to external content by either pasting a link you copied elsewhere or, if you are on an iOS device, by using the share button in the app where you found the content and sharing directly into Raftr.
- Chatting live with other members of your raft by selecting the raft’s messages page, or finding its channel on the Messages screen (via the button in the tab bar that’s always at the bottom of the screen). Chat messages can include emoticons, pictures, videos and GIFs, too.