DSU & Bounce:

Society Leader & Dalhousie Student FAQ

This year, all DSU-affiliated societies will be using Bounce: an all-in-one social platform to build your community, host activities/events, and connect with Real Friends @ Dalhousie (details).

With Bounce, your group can:

  • 📅 Post events to a centralized calendar

  • 🚀 Boost your group’s visibility on campus

  • 🎟️ Use powerful RSVP and ticketing tools (like unlimited FREE SMS blasts!)

  • 👯 Attract new members and keep your community engaged

  • 📈 Maintain end-to-end control of activity and event pages, instead of relying on DSU admin for creation and editing 

Below you can find a list of frequently asked questions to ensure Dalhousie students experience transparency, clarity and confidence in how this partnership impacts them: 

  • Bounce is a Canadian campus engagement platform actively used by almost 1 in 2 Canadian University students and has deeply integrated workflows across over 20 of the largest campuses in the country (learn more). Bounce's mission is to support a generation in connecting and creating memories. Through partnerships with student unions, Bounce helps build a campus ecosystem where students can connect, engage, and build their community together. 

    Check out how Bounce helped societies like the Chinese Varsity Club achieve +42% student attendance, and +52% event proceeds, in their first year on the platform HERE

    For the DSU’s constituent societies and groups, Bounce will serve as the underlying event ticketing, RSVP tracking and risk management form provider for ‘25/’26. Bounce consolidates the previous assortment of administrative and communications tools used by the DSU (ie: Eventbrite, E-transfer, Outlook, etc), into one streamlined platform for society event management and communications. 

    To access the DSU’s society activity hub (link), and all constituent society and faculty society pages, students must verify their @Dal.ca email. 

  • No. Dalhousie students can RSVP and buy tickets to events directly from Bounce’s desktop or mobile website, as well as the mobile app. 

  • To gain full access to Bounce and learn how to use it effectively, your society’s PEO must:

    1. Complete PEO training and sign the PEO contract for the year 2025/2026

    2. Request to join your society’s organization HERE

    3. Review the society training materials for instructions on requesting event approval HERE

  • Societies are required to track RSVPs and sell tickets on Bounce after receiving approval of their Risk Management Form

    In line with the existing process for all events and activities, societies are required to submit DSU Risk Management Forms, in order for activity pages to be published on Bounce. If a society is selling paid tickets, they must add their society’s bank account to Bounce (details).

  • Society PEOs will require a Bounce account to submit event approval requests to the DSU Society & Events Coordinator. The Bounce account acts as the @Dal.ca email authentication layer, gates the platform from bad actors, and enables the DSU to understand performance of RMF completion/incompletion on a more granular level. 

  • Non-students are still able to RSVP to events. The new Bounce suite enables societies to:

    1. Have an active student authentication check in the RSVP tier creation settings, if desired. This helps organizations that host student only activities to protect their event and audience. 

    2. Have a student organization provide specific perks and discounts to their membership through specific organization gating on tiers. This mitigates the risk of discount codes being leaked or having to operate an overly manual system. Learn more HERE

  • Time Savings: 

    1. Students will get their events approved by the DSU faster: Bounce provides an easier and more centralized workflow for the DSU Society & Events Coordinator, which makes it faster for them to approve events at large (i.e. at the scale of 1,440+ event requests last year). 

    2. Students now have end-to-end control of event pages: Before, society leaders had to work through the DSU to get event pages created, and modified leading up to each event. With Bounce, you have complete control over your group’s event page, so you can easily make design and pricing changes directly. 

    3. Form fields get auto-populated for the student organization, reducing manual form completion time. 

    4. Payment insight and reconciliation can be done in a matter of seconds as opposed to a multi-hour process with e-transfers and manually building excel sheets. 

    5. Event performance is centralized to a single dashboard as opposed to needing to build custom pivot tables with a fragmented set of data pipelines. 

    6. Re-engaging past attendees can be done with 3-clicks, instead of starting campaigns from scratch for future events. Organizations will see 10-20% of their activity populate using Bounce's custom invite-back feature which can be complimented with other in-platform tools.

    Society Activity Awareness & Performance: 

    1. On average, hosts on Bounce have seen 16-30%+ lifts in activity attendance.

    2. Hosting your activity on Bounce allows you to display on the central Dalhousie activity feed for all public campus activities. This makes it easier for students you wouldn't traditionally reach to find your activity.

    3. Bounce's built in social notifications of which friends are attending what activities automatically support marketing your event, and help students discover events in a more social manner. This also drives more comfortability as they have a peer or someone they know that's attending.

    Event Safety & Reporting: 

    1. Bounce's custom safety ratings (like Uber) and post event reviews make it possible to drive event quality thresholds and review processes at the scale of 300+ societies.

    2. Society leaders will be able to understand if students felt uncomfortable at their events, and they can optimize for the future. 

    3. Bounce allows the DSU to understand risk earlier, and support societies with the material and processes needed to maintain high quality activities.

    The step-by-step instructional setup and onboarding presentation for DSU society leaders is HERE.

  • Selling memberships on Bounce are free for society leaders, and membership purchases. Bounce’s membership suite, including digital membership cards and real time member list tracking, incurs no payment processing or transaction fees. 

  • Free RSVP activities:

    Free RSVP tracking is free, and incurs no host or purchaser fees on Bounce. 

    Paid tickets:

    Bounce charges a $1 ticketing service fee, along with a passthrough 2.9% + $0.30 payment processing fee for each paid ticket. Event hosts (ie: society leaders) have the option to absorb the fees, or pass them on to ticket purchasers. For context, 99%+ of Bounce’s student union and society partners choose for purchasers to pay these fees.

    For reference, please see the comparison of Bounce vs Eventbrite’s fees here.

  • All paid tickets follow the same fee structure. For student organizations donating their event revenue to registered charities, Bounce typically offers individual society partnership opportunities where they donate the Bounce ticketing service fee ($1) to the registered charity, in exchange for product usage stipulations being met (ie: 20+ photos uploaded to the event page). 

    To learn more about service fee donation opportunities, contact [email protected]

  • No. Each ratified DSU student society already has a pre-created Bounce Organization. Once added to your society’s organization, you will have complete control to modify org elements like membership lists and branding (ie: display pictures). During year/year society transition, new society leaders will similarly be added as ‘Admin’ users, eliminating the need for password sharing. 

    You can join your society’s organization HERE

  • Based on Bounce's agreements with Canadian student union partners, student union user information stored on Bounce is hosted on Canadian servers in compliance with Canadian privacy standards and Bounce’s Privacy Policy. Bounce securely stores personally identifiable information (PII) on MongoDB’s SOC 2-compliant multi-cloud platform, and manages all payment data through Stripe, a PCI Service Provider Level 1 trusted by institutions like Shopify and Amazon Canada. Both providers use AES-256 encryption, multi-factor authentication, and role-based access controls.

  • Through Bounce’s partnership with the DSU, the DSU and Dalhousie students have a dedicated customer support team ([email protected]) to ensure user inquiries are prioritized within Bounce’s customer support queue within 24 hours.

  • Right now, the DSU’’s Risk Management Form workflow requires submission approval before each society’s event page can start tracking RSVPs, or selling tickets. Approval by the DSU Society & Events Coordinator, is required on Bounce to comply with the DSU’s policy for constituent organizations to be covered by the DSU’s insurance.

  • Please contact [email protected]

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