F-sektionen inom TLTH consolidates comms, bringing 90% of mission-critical data to Mattermost

F-sektionen inom TLTH is a nonprofit association for students in engineering programs at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. The organization is legally responsible for monitoring student well-being and optimizing the student experience, working with the university to address any grievances and also offer ideas to improve both academic and social life on campus. 

“We have the ability to change education according to our concerns,” says Victor Rasmussen, president of F-sektionen inom TLTH. “For example, if we have three lab reports due at the same time, we can get one due date moved to the next week. If we don’t like a textbook that we’re using or feel like a professor isn’t effective, we can get it changed.”

Additionally, the association also works to combat student loneliness, “which is a huge problem in society today.” Also known as F-guild, the organization has the ability to influence public policy by bringing awareness to important issues like research funding, workforce readiness, and education policy.

F-guild has more than 1,000 members and hosts a number of events throughout the school year, including ski trips, sporting events, and cultural activities. The association, which has no administrative ties to Lund University, is hugely important to the broader academic community and regularly conducts surveys to measure things like teacher effectiveness, lab safety, and course value. 

On top of this, F-guild maintains strong relationships with leading Swedish firms — including Saab, Volvo, and Ericsson — where many F-guild alumni work.

Communication everywhere: Needing to consolidate a fragmented, inefficient ecosystem

To fulfill their mission of improving student life, F-guild needs to keep members aligned and on the same page. The organization does this by maintaining open lines of communication and regularly pushing out new information to its community. 

After building a fragmented communication ecosystem over the years, F-guild leadership had been exploring ways to consolidate communication.

“We used Facebook, Slack, Messenger, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, our website, and a newsletter that was sent out each weekend,” says Victor Rasmussen, president of the organization. “We also had notice boards here in our buildings as well.”

This cacophonic communications landscape presented several challenges.

“We saw it as a big problem,” Rasmussen explains. “It was hard for our members to know where to turn to for the right information, and it was also difficult for members to know the appropriate place to publish information or announce an event.”

Ditching Slack: Centralizing communication with Mattermost 

As F-guild began looking for a solution to their problem, the team’s main objective was finding a platform that enabled them to make announcements, create public channels, and organize members into teams.

“We were using Slack but we saw a lot of problems with their platform,” Rasmussen says. “For example, you had to start different servers for each team, which caused problems with DMs, making it harder for volunteers to contact me or whoever else they wanted to contact. I could have three different DMs going on with the same person on different servers, which made it a lot harder to pick up conversations. So, many people used Messenger instead for DMs. Then we had our announcements on Facebook, so it just got messy.”

While researching their options, F-guild came across Mattermost through the recommendation of another similar guild at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the engineering university in Stockholm. 

“They told us about Mattermost because they had just started using it,” Rasmussen says, adding that F-guild has borrowed ideas from this guild before.

After investigating Mattermost further, the F-guild leadership team believed it could solve all of the communication problems they were facing. Liking what they saw, leadership approached Mattermost to apply for nonprofit status, which was granted.

“We had problems getting nonprofit status in Slack,” Rasmussen says. “We are a registered nonprofit organization at the tax authority here in Sweden, and no one who works here is getting paid. I’m not sure why we had those problems.”

Leadership deployed Mattermost in February 2024 and rolled it out to the entire organization six months later. 

“First and foremost, Mattermost helped us consolidate our information sources and made it easier both for us to reach our members and volunteers and for them to reach us — which is the basics of communication,” Rasmussen continues. “At the same time, we can have several different teams on one server, so we can have global DMs and not have three different conversations going on with the same person. This makes it easy to find information and share it.”

As an association full of engineers, Mattermost’s open source nature and deployment choice options were also appealing; F-guild was attracted to being able to self-host Mattermost, along with the platform’s complete customizability. 

“We’re actually developing a new website right now, and we’ve learned that there are many ways to integrate Mattermost with our website, which is a huge plus for us,” Rasmussen explains. “Everything is administered through our website, so if we can connect our website with Mattermost, it’s absolutely fantastic.”

Future-proofing communication: Increasing focus & improving operational effectiveness

With communication consolidated on Mattermost, F-guild has been able to increase organizational focus and operational effectiveness. Since they’re hosting Mattermost on their own servers, they also have complete control of their data.  

“I spend most of my time answering questions and trying to get the right information to the right person,” Rasmussen explains. “For me to be able to focus on one app on my phone where I know 90% of all the information I need is — it saves me a lot of time. For myself, the most important part is just the safety of knowing that I haven’t missed important information because it’s all in Mattermost.” 

By moving away from social networking apps, F-guild has also been able to ensure that members don’t miss relevant messages, helping Rasmussen and other leaders build a more cohesive organization.

“One of the most important things here is that we have a platform that’s divided from the rest of social life,” Rasmussen says. “If you get a notification on Facebook, it could be from us, but it also could be from a friend or family member. That made us very ineffective at getting information out.”

Saving time & moving projects forward

Members who are top contributors to the F-guild have to communicate with a lot of people every day. By streamlining communication, Mattermost has helped the team reclaim time and keep projects moving forward.

“Mattermost enables us to spend less time looking for things and more time on the actual work,” Rasmussen says. “It’s also so much easier to receive a response and keep projects growing because messages don’t get lost. I think our organization as a whole has become more efficient using Mattermost.” 

Controlling their data

By hosting Mattermost on servers they control, F-guild has achieved data sovereignty over its messaging data. 

“We liked the idea that we could manage our own platform, keep it on our own server, and moderate it ourselves,” Rasmussen says. “That was something that Facebook was bad at. They’d just delete comments or announcements that their algorithms thought were something else when it was just a normal comment on an event or something. We really like that we have announcement channels that we can moderate completely by ourselves so that information or comments don’t get lost.” 

Improved mental health

As an organization run by already-busy engineering students, being a member of F-guild requires an additional time and energy commitment. With Mattermost powering communication, the F-guild can ensure that members use their time efficiently, making that commitment easier to bear. 

“Mattermost has also made this work a lot less stressful,” Rasmussen says. “I know it’s had a great influence on many of my closest coworkers’ mental health because there’s a lot of stress involved. Almost everyone has expressed their happiness that we have changed to Mattermost instead of all these other channels. Personally, I love using it.”

A platform built for engineers

More than a general collaboration platform, Mattermost was designed to support the needs of technical and operations teams — a major selling point for the association.

“Our programmers want to build new stuff and try new platforms,” Rasmussen says. “It’s fun for them to integrate as much as they can and see what they can do to make Mattermost as efficient as possible.” 

As F-guild continues integrating Mattermost and its website, the organization is aiming to ensure that announcements can be posted on both platforms with just one click — and automatically translated, too, using artificial intelligence. 

“This project has really caught my attention because I know how much time we spend posting on different platforms,” Rasmussen says. “And being able to translate our announcements into different languages to reach everyone is great. I think that this will save lots of hours each week for very many folks in our organization.”

Would Rasmussen recommend Mattermost to other organizations?

“I’ve actually already tried to get the other guilds at Lund to make the change with us because I really love using Mattermost and I’ve found it very efficient,” he concludes. “I would absolutely recommend it.”