Transformation of a Notion workspace for student life at a business school

Student life is a core part of the EDHEC experience: the school has 87 student associations, more than 430 events organized every year and over 2,800 students involved annually.

Across the Lille and Nice campuses, these associations cover a wide range of fields: sports, culture, arts, entrepreneurship, environment, inclusion, health and civic debate. Together they turn student engagement into a hands-on learning environment.

This operational intensity requires continuous coordination between student associations, BDE teams, the Student Life department, Corporate Communications and internal EDHEC stakeholders, with strong requirements around validation, visibility, accountability and yearly handovers. At that scale, designing a custom Notion workspace is less a tooling project than an organizational one.

The brief at a glance

• Centralize requests
• Clarify validation steps
• Improve data reliability
• Give each stakeholder the right view at the right time
• Reduce dependency on informal exchanges

At EDHEC’s scale, student life is not simply a sequence of events to approve: it operates as a dense, recurring, multi-stakeholder system. With dozens of associations, several hundred events per year and stakeholders spread across campuses, student teams, Student Life and communications, the core challenge is not to document the existing process more thoroughly, but to turn a fragmented workflow into a reliable coordination infrastructure.

Each event request moves across multiple tools, files and communication channels, weakening visibility into the real status of preparation, approvals and responsibilities. Teams compensate for this fragmentation through manual reporting, repeated follow-ups and cross-updates, which increases administrative workload while reducing the reliability of the information available.

From a business standpoint, the objective is twofold: secure the organization of a high volume of events while freeing operational time so teams can focus on student support, project quality and continuity from one academic year to the next.