Dive Deeper with RNL: Conduct Your Own Slate Assessment to Optimize Your System

Hi everyone, welcome to the dive deeper webinar today with RNL. This one is titled conductor own Slate assessment to optimize your system we have Rob Tallarico here from RNL and we also have John Messina from university.

Montana will be presenting today.

Before they get into their content, we do just want to review a couple of housekeeping tips and tricks for using share. So first and the one that everyone wants to know is this webinar being recorded in that is, yes, so you will be able to view it later on. Share it with colleagues and will be available on our website.

If you'd like to enable closed captioning in the top right corner, you've got your different share buttons. The CC button will turn on closed captioning within that chat window.

You can also enable full screen with the button in the far right corner and you can even turn off that chat window if you want to really just focus on the presentation. Click those two speech bubbles and it's just going to tuck that chat window out of the way. If you see any issues with audio or video, we suggest just refreshing your browser window. Usually that clears things up and that will smooth it out and then use the chat for any questions throughout the webinar.

There is going to be a period for questions at the end as well, so post those there and John and Rob will will help you out with any of those questions you have.

So with that, I'd like to hand it over to to Robin John. Take it away guys.

Alright, thank you Hillary. As Hillary said I am Rob Tallarico I am the vice president for CRM solutions at RNL. Welcome to everybody. Thank you for taking time out of your afternoons. I know it's a busy time of year for everybody so thank you for taking some time out and joining us as we talk about conducting your own slate assessment. And I'm joined today by John Messina who I will let introduce himself now.

Hi everybody, I'm John macina. I'm the director of admissions at the University of Montana.

No problem.

Alright, So what we're going to do today? We are going to talk about conducting your own slate assessment and we're going to kind of break things up in phases talking about. How do you get started? Where do you know? Where do you? Whenever you think you might want to spend some time reviewing your system to make some changes to enhance and optimize your system? Where do you start? And John, I'm glad to be here with John today and John especially. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule.

You know, being in, you know in the director's chair at the University of Montana, this is an extremely busy time for you and I'm glad to be here with John, because what, we're what we'll do today as we go through talking about getting started can actually conducting the assessment. What do you do? Once you decide you want to do that and then talking about outcomes and next steps is we're going to John, and I will basically be having a conversation, talking a little bit about John's experience at the University of Montana and John you implemented Slate or Montana implemented Slate.

A couple of years ago, right?

We did. It was before I arrived at University of Montana. I think we're probably going on two years when the implementation started. I think the team at the time took the normal six months or so to get everything kind of up and running. And then we've spent the last.

Basically year to year and a half.

Uhm, getting things in place where they should be.

Perfect so just to kind of get started. Will talk about you know when is the right time to begin a slate assessment or to assess your slate instance. So First off, just a couple of thoughts that I want to throw out there and that really is that your CRM is the most in my opinion the most important tool than it than an admissions office has. I say that and there's lots of things, lots of tools that admissions offices use.

So why do I say that the CRM is the most important and it's really because nothing else ties everything together, everything else that it admissions Office is doing. The CRM slate ties it all together. Your communications, your events, your student engagements, everything, your your applications, your reviews. It all goes through the CRM and so that really makes the CRM kind of the heart of the Admissions Office. And because of that, it's really important that you spend as much time making sure that.

Yeah.

You have everything running smoothly in your CRM just like you would anywhere else. I know a lot of schools and Jon. Feel free to jump in and share any additional thoughts. A lot of schools spend time, you know making sure that their communications look perfect, right? They have them the right message, the right look. You spend time. You know how many hours do you spend planning open houses and events now that we're backing, you know, live on campus, planning those events. But how many schools actually spend time thinking about, you? Know the CRM? And how is how effectively is the CRM.

Functioning.

Yeah, and that's something that you know will discuss today. Rob, but uhm.

For us, it's you know it's always looking that over and over again too, and I think that's a point that I'll probably reinforce there. At this conversation. The CRM is never perfect, it often quite good for a lot of institutions. It's often getting quite good, but as soon as I get something to the state of perfect, it's time to change something. Whether you know were thrown for a curveball by COVID or just the ever changing world of admissions so.

You know, we're constantly assessing will talk some about, you know when I first stepped in the front door and when Mary Creed of my AVP before me about a year ago stepped in the front door to assess and and kind of what we applied to that in order to come to some conclusions. But you know the other thing is, serums are just never done. That's that's how I see it. At least maybe some of the rest of your like. Well, listen, I don't like that John, I need it to be done, but it it it has to.

It's always has to be improving and part of it is because visits change. We're using it for visits or the way we're working with housing changes or the way we're working with student success or advising. Or all these other little little. All these other gigantic departments that work with us and often have sometimes have their own systems feeding into us. We're just constantly meeting and assessing and improving so.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that's a good point and and you'll see I even have kind of bulleted at the bottom here. You know, every institution is in a different place with slate and you have a lot of schools. Maybe that just implemented their slate instance and are newer to it, but then you have those schools that that think you know. I've been working at this for awhile. I just need to have. I just need things to be done. And John, I think your point is a great one that you know. Things are constantly changing and and you know something you just said. You know I wasn't even thinking about. But when the you know how quickly does the admissions world change, you know two years ago.

Yeah.

Yep.

Right before COVID and COVID itself put, you know, drastically change things, but some of the things that have changed because of COVID like test, test, optional. If you would have asked me two years ago, you know two years from now. Do you think the majority of schools in this country will be test optional? I would say no, there's no way, and I know there's a good. There were always a good number, but you know, would the change happened that drastically and so I think you know, being able to know where you are with your CRM and have a plan in place.

To know how can you change things when we need to, I think is essential so so tell me go ahead, John.

Oh no, you're fine.

Yep.

So tell me a little bit you mentioned before a couple years now with Slate at Montana. Your team implemented. It was an internal implementation. It's been about six months before you took that year, year and a half to really start changing things. You know what was the state of your slate instance? Where were you?

You know, I'll be honest, the state of our slate instance was not ideal, it was.

You know the the team that set it up. I like to say to people they kind of set it up in a box, which is not how slate should work. They really weren't talking. I mean in some instances they weren't even talking to admissions, but they certainly weren't talking to those other important offices. We work with housing, student success, financial aid and so when they they got through their implementation time and got everything set up.

It hadn't been done ironically enough, as I'm doing kind of the history of what kind of what's been happening at University of Montana, it hadn't been done in a way that was very enrollment minded. And I I'm talking capital. E enrollment. Not just admissions, not just undergrad or grad admissions, but that big capital E. What about retention? What about persistence? What about how we're going to eventually fit in with other groups? And when Mary Creedy my boss here at University of Montana arrived about a year ago?

Uhm?

You know comms were going out, but not as efficiently as they should. There are a lot of the things that you would want Slate to fix had been taken care of because they hadn't upfront the teams. The team had been putting it together hand up front. Probably ask the right questions and follow the right path. So in some ways, uhm, not an ideal instance of slate. That being said, Mary and I when I came in later both saw the incredible potential that we're going to get out of slate.

So a different CRM team was built out and they immediately started. You know, kind of fixing some of the basics that come.

Should have been done in the first place or weren't done as well. I'm just saying they weren't done, they just weren't done. I say I would say with an admissions mindset, our enrollment mindset and then began working on very quickly on all the wishlist stuff. So when I say it's been taking us about a year, year and a half, I just mean you know some ways we are rebuilding a few parts of the implementation system while aggressively building out in comms and aggressively building out internal systems and trying to pull in these other teams who had not been included in the conversation. My view with a CRM like slate.

Is that it should almost feel open source to the other users to any users and it's one of the reasons I really like Slate. I don't have to be an IT guy to figure it out. I think that's a pretty well known thing about slate at this point, but it's pretty refreshing stepping into University of Montana and I've worked with.

Well, several uhm. What compared to what I'm working with now? Felt like maybe wood burning versions of CRM's.

So getting in there and immediately seeing where we could, we could change some things and it wasn't going to take months. It's not going to take us years to fix, you know, if I have an issue with how I want the calm flow to go, you know we're we're diving in and teams are being trained on it constantly. We're in a phase right now, or we're just making sure all of our teams that are kind of the admissions, financial aid, kind of upfront enrollment part of the conversation are well trained in it, so that if I have an admissions Rep who needs to make a change on the road.

To something they can. They're not going to break anything as far as we're concerned.

Yeah.

It is.

Yeah.

Yeah, and when you and I were talking about this topic and talking about your experience at the University of Montana you, you talked a lot about that. That's late, really is ideal for this type of evaluation, assessment and optimization because your team can do it. But we also talked, you know, that's that's kind of a double edged sword in a lot of ways, because because it's so easy, right? One of the questions is, well, you know, where do you start? How do you? How do you begin? Where do you start?

Yep.

We did.

We did.

And I know for your team, even though you know we all agreed, and I think you know many people on the on the web and are today, I'm sure would, it would agree that slate really is one of the most user-friendly CRM's that's out there, you know. And your team could make a lot of these changes on their own, you and and the University of Montana did decide to to bring in additional help, and so you've actually partnered with R&L on this process. And you've been working with some of our CRM. One of our CRM consultants really to help you to drive that process.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Talk to me a little bit about what, what, what was your rationale. Even though Slate is so easy sometimes to work with, why did you still choose to go with a partner?

Well, partially it's because we wanted to speed up a lot of admissions. People can become pretty impatient, and so can my boss. We want to speed things up. We want to get things right as quickly as we can, so part of it was speeding up any repairs. We wanted to make with the implementation and get up to speed as fast as possible. We knew that, you know, once we even once we got stuff kind of fixed with some of the basic issues we wanted to see. Fix that growing out and.

You know doing portals better or getting Archon flow setup and flowing with the correct queries was going to be. It was going to take a bit of a lift even with a lot of us learning it and getting in there, we wouldn't have the right standards we wanted to. And we also want to be able to talk to somebody. When we were confused about what choice to make. So we were talking the other day.

Sometimes you just get to the point in the road where you kind of looking. You say? Well, I could go left here and that looks right. Or I could go right here and that looks right too. I'm trying to get.

Here.

It looks like both roads go there. Which one is going to be more efficient for me and my team so to have RNL in there?

You know to have our consultant in there and frankly other voices at Arnell who would jump in.

And give us advice as well. We did some com flow work on top of that with RNL directly into our slate system where they helped us build out some com having them there to help keep us focused on best practice to get things set up securely.

Was incredibly helpful. In fact I I think I don't think you're gonna find anyone at University of Montana who who would feel otherwise. I mean, it just got us light years ahead of where we could be on our own so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good to hear, so let's talk. You touched you started touching on this a little bit and we're going to talk about now. Kind of what is it that you did at the University of Montana? And I know the other the other day when we were talking you talked about this idea of figuring out what does normal mean. And then what does excellence mean and that that was really. Those were some of the the things that you were thinking about as you were engaging your teams as you were. You know, beginning to explore your system. Evaluate your system. These were some of the things that you really wanted to find out.

From your teams, from the system to help drive this process of assessing the system.

Yeah for me. Yeah the assessment happened first. Kind of departmentally sitting down and saying what departments are in in the CRM. What are they doing?

You know, kind of where they at are all their teams trained correctly. I mean, there was a lot of just having conversations with both people who are internal to the admissions office as well as to the closest partnering offices that we have. Again, the financial aids in the housings and student success is to figure out first what kind of access they had. How are they using it, whether they've been trained so pretty simple.

Assessment up front, but then immediately once we get that figured out and a few brief conversations were trying to figure out. Then you know what's normal look should normal look like? Is just logging into slate and checking a number. All we you know your team really needs to be doing. How can we help you know the financial aid in like build out your columns, build them out in slate so that you don't have some student worker or you don't have some you know professional employee over there like trying to make sure an email goes out through outlook.

Or something clunky like that. We want to make sure that you know part of the assessment is also offering help in training and then asking them what they would expect. So if you think about it, you can admit student checklist, for instance, which is something that I think is one of those topics where things are always should be improving. Every year. Take a hard look at it here at the University of Montana. We've called it bear tracks in the past and and you know, as we're looking at it this year, you know, I'm just asking teams like what's your ideal?

Here's what we had last year. It worked, but what's your ideal? So financial aid? Should they be able to see the full award in Slate? Should they be able to, you know, pay their bills. Should they like? What's the ideal? How do we make that happen so?

You know, just across the board trying to both come.

See where immediate improvements could be made, as well as kind of saying what's normal. Going to look like for us and normal at University of Montana should really be what is best practice. What is the current best practice? Not just does it work? Does it send an email doesn't work? Can I track something? And then once we feel like we're at the state of normal, are we meeting those best practice expectations? How do we monitor that? How do we teach others who may not be as.

Data driven or goal driven as an admissions office to think about like looking at things like open rates or even click through rates in an email which could be very new to some departments or at least offering to look at the at such things with them and then see where we're falling short and what we can do to improve that. 'cause that that actually is again, you'll hear me say this a lot. That is the beauty of this system to me is I could be in a meeting tomorrow and we could identify something that none of us like and we want to improve.

And there are pathways to getting that done.

In our work with our and ally, our consultant got a lot of that, like hey, we're seeing this. I want to see this, but for us at University of Montana, our goal is that normal would be best practice and then we want to get hum and we want to get scrappy and with our CRM and we want to get to excellence which is how can we bring in other areas of the institution that needs to be in slate so the honors program or certain faculty or recruiters from other departments as well as.

How can we get even more creative and then just what best practices best practice is always a foundation we want to build on and we want to be at and its ever changing in some ways. Just like everything in admissions. But I want to, you know, eventually down the road. I want my teams to be proud that they're that they're showing other people. They're showing other teams in Slate what best practice could be here. Here are easy fixes you could do, so that's how we all of that's going on in assessment. While you're also, you know, assessing the people that work there, and.

You know how they're going to be able to engage with it?

And we're always kind of aiming for.

Uhm, what else could we be doing better? And that's in every team we work with our processing evaluations teams, the visit team, the recruitment team, our data teams, our CRM teams, which are different than our data teams. You know, it's just every department needs to be seeing it as the hub that they're pulling out of.

Yeah.

Yep.

Miller

And one one thing, you know, a point that you made is that it's not just you know what are your processes. What are your teams doing? It's also you know you made the point before that you know you think about a CRM and I mentioned before a CRM tool, right? And and colleges purchased their CRM. They purchase a tool with expectations in mind. I want to be able to do this and you made the point that you know with a CRM like slate that has the reputation that slate does.

Yep.

Yep.

You just you have certain expectations. You know those best practices, for example that hey, uh, CRM like slate should be able to do these things, right? We're doing them this way, right? This CRM is really going to allow us to do with them that way, and so it was kind of brainstorming right for you and your teams. It was brainstorming and thinking about, hey, let's step outside of ourselves here for a minute. Let's think about not just how we're doing them, but what is the ideal situation. What is the best practice? How would we love to do those?

Yep.

And I think another important thing that that you really talked about and that you were able to do at Montana and you've touched on this already, is that you actually went to your end users. You went to your teams. It wasn't just looking at your system. It wasn't just looking at Slate, but you engaged the folks that were using the system and even thinking about those external offices as well.

Yep, yeah, 'cause we're in the end. We're not going to get anything out of it if my users aren't going to get anything out of it, it's just going to be yet another CRM sitting out on a server somewhere sitting out there that we pull some records from every once in awhile. I can if I want see numbers, I can just pull in a spreadsheet. That's not what we need to be looking at our CRM for. We need to be thinking about how this is going to, you know, evolve us as an office.

I I remember when I was sitting down with teams saying, you know, having conversations with him and saying.

Especially some of them been there for awhile. Like remember when you first started this job and you had like excitement about all the things you could do and now you feel you have no time for it and all the systems and stuff kind of clogged everything that you would want to do and you don't even think about it anymore. We gotta get back to that a little bit. We're going to get to normal here. You're going to know how to use this really well, and then I need to hear those ideas we need to hear when the evaluations teams or the processing teams have an idea that's going to save everybody time, and so we're always pushing for innovation.

Uhm, and trying to dare I say be excited about the potential of a CRM, which sounds still sounds weird and higher Ed that you'd be excited about a CRM but but genuinely when we talked to our teams they all see the potential of it.

Miller

yeah.

Yep.

Sure.

And one of the other great things again. You know, we've already talked about how great slate is, what a great system it is. Another thing that's really nice about Slate and the the tools that technicians provides within Slate is that there are some tools even within Slate, that technicians has provided. That really can start helping you to evaluate your own system. And so I do want to kind of show a few of those places where you can go in slate, define some built-in tools. Now this is aside from anything.

That you did with your teams and that that that that that your RNL consultant was working with you on. But you know these are some some really quick steps. I know that a lot of schools when you're just starting when you're just trying to think about. OK, how can I start? There's already some tools that are built in slate for you, and one of the first places you can go is in the database. Go to the database and under the query section sleep provides for you the standard query library and you can see on the screen there's a number of queries.

That are kind of built in that give you a high level view of your system. So I've pulled out one here. One that's highlighted is the field configuration review, and this is a report that tells you of when you have all your fields of all your custom fields. Are there any that have configuration settings that look off and you know this is a great place and these other queries are a great place just to kind of really at a high level. Start looking at your system to say like OK, let's start looking at our fields. Let's go here.

And check that out. So a number of great tools within the the standard query library. And as I work with schools you know. I know a lot of schools know that this exists. I know that a lot of schools know this is here, but you'd be surprised at the number of schools that don't know that that's there that don't know that's late. Kind of has some of these built-in tools already.

Yeah, you know one thing that I think a phrase that comes up a lot at Montana is like can we do this? Can we do this? And the answer often is we. We may already be doing it like let's look and see if that's I'm assuming that's already in there. Let's go look something like the standard query library is a really great example of that where you know somebody says well, what about this sister this and like? Well, here it is. I mean, it's just it's just part of it so we don't even have to go out there and like make something special. It's just here.

Not every time, but often the questions we're getting, especially from other offices, are pretty.

Standard is a great way to put it since I've seen that word in front of me too. So my brain is probably going there.

They are pretty standard. They don't speak the complexity complexity of our languages. Our internal admissions languages yet. So usually like when housing or student success. Ask me something. It's pretty easy lift 'cause it's already part of it.

Miller

So another tool that I know that schools always love when when when they first find out about it and again I know some schools know it's here. A lot of schools don't. It's the field search tool and again you go to the database under the diagnostic section is field search and this allows you to look up any of your custom fields and you can see where in your system that custom field is being used and this can become helpful, especially down the line. If you do make changes to your fields. If I'm going to talk about in just a moment some of the.

Yeah.

Some of the ways that I look at a system that I evaluate a system. Some of the areas and that's going to include your data architecture and that might mean looking at your fields, looking at your props, looking at how your how they were structured, how they were built, and sometimes you do need to make changes. And you might say, OK, well we were using this field, but now we're going to move that data over to a new field or to a slate standard field and you have to figure out where is that feel being used. And this is a great tool that you can that you can use to find that so.

Definitely more and actually, as I was kind of building creating these slides for this presentation, I even saw a few new ones, both between this the sleek, standard queries between this diagnostic section and then there's some other places in the database. Just some other options, ones that it looks like technicians is just added or just recently added some ones that I wasn't even aware of. So so again some great tools right within.

Really.

So as you begin diving in and I know John you talked about before, you know all that work you did with your teams outside of Slate, even before you even dive into a slate, you know, looking at the system itself, and I think that's a critical point. I think you know a lot of times the work does begin outside of slate thinking about, you know, planning, spending time just to plan what that assessment is going to look like. And I think if you try to dive straight into the system straight into slate that you are making a mistake that you aren't kind of, you're not.

Creating that foundation to really allow the actual assessment of slate to be as successful as it could be. But once you do dive into Slate, there are. There are definitely some areas that I think are really important to be taking a look at, and you can see some of those high level areas here and each one really has some you know underneath it has a number of different components that you can take a look at, and I'm not going to walk through every single one of these, but just, you know, I already started touching.

Millimeter.

On the the data architecture looking at fields and prompts I love. I'm a data guy. I love data, so this is one of my favorite areas to look at, but I also include you know your data imports and just making that you're consistently importing data. You know how many different sources do colleges receive names from purchase names and application names and everything else, and really making sure that you're consistent on loading that data in the same way every time regardless of the source tide closely into that are is.

Is your reporting right and making sure if you're not loading data in the the the same way? If you're not loading data inconsistently, your reports aren't going to be accurate the way that you look at the data isn't going to be accurate, and so I think some of these do tie together pretty well, and you know one can affect the other, you know.

Oh sure.

I don't like using the term garbage anywhere related to slate because it's not, but you know, there's that old saying garbage in, garbage out, right? If you're not bringing you know the data incorrectly then you know what you what you view is isn't going to be accurate either.

Yeah, I think it's a really good point, Rob, that you know one of the mistakes I made early on coming to Montana was like why aren't we doing this as this? This needs to be done right now and the answers for why it wasn't being done was not because people didn't want to do it. It's because we need to take a hard look at areas like this and say what's holding us up from doing that you know, was there their connection somewhere wrong is that is the data not coming in correctly? Is the data bad? This source is really good. This source isn't how do we? You know some of it was just taking a step back.

Instead of trying to run before I could walk, making sure I understood the basics of it and that my teams did. 'cause you know, one person could understand it.

Arguably I can understand something, but the whole team needs to understand it and so taking a step back and looking at it and making sure I think this is a great list actually.

That these areas are are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely yeah, uhm. Another one I think is important for me anyway is this is the the rules and automations because again you purchase a CRM for a particular reason and one of those is to save your team time right? And so you want to make sure that you're taking advantage of all the automations all the time saving tools that a system can have. And I know sometimes because of the way that slate works with rules with the exclusivity groups and the priority numbers and everything.

Right?

When you're first building out a system, it can sometimes be different. A little different way of thinking of things than you know. Then some other systems, some other CRM's, and when I work with schools that are brand new to sleep, that's always an area where we end up spending some time just kind of reviewing how do rules work. How do exclusivity groups work, and thinking about that to make the the automations. The rules as effective as possible, so that's another one, and that's kind of, you know, John, as you were saying before, you know you've got to learn to walk before you can.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Run and before you can spend a lot of time like, hey, let's really make our communications our our emails. Let's make them look snazzy. Let's make them look as clean and polished as possible. It doesn't matter if the rules that are our guiding your communications aren't functioning appropriately anyway, and so you know when I when I think about delivering communications and reviewing that area, it's not just the email, so that is certainly a big part of it. It's looking at the populations that you're using. It's looking at the rules that are determining.

Yeah.

Student records are being placed in those populations and it's kind of doing in each area. This deep dive really not to say like is the end product. We want it, but are all the steps along the way to get to that end product you know? Are they all in order as well so that we know that everything is running as smoothly as possible?

Alright, so after you kind of look at the system and you identify you know.

Yeah.

Where, where can we make those improvements? Where do we know we we know that we're not doing this well or when we're not doing this well, maybe we are doing this well, but we know that there's still even more that we can do. You have to prioritize those. John, I think you said it before. You know, there's never enough time. You know you said like you, you have that excitement that that enthusiasm and you you know you for the CRM and you want to be able to do everything. But then you also have to do your your your real jobs, right? You have to recruit the class and and so prioritizing always is going to come into that so.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, as you've been moving along in this process, how did you prioritize at Montana? You know what you were going to work on?

Well, you know I've talked a lot about getting us to normal, getting us to a place where I feel like we're kind of at best practice. We're doing things well within our CRM, but you know, layered over all of that is, are we making it easier for students to navigate our weird and sometimes archaic processes in higher education? And here we, you know, if we just use freshmen as an example, which often tend to be most institutions biggest populations that we're dealing with.

Every fall, UM, you've got all these great 1718 year old kids and they know some of the terms that we use, but I I mean, just like I'm sure a lot of the participants on our webinar today, I've seen like there's always stuff you're finding coming out from an institution that speaks only in the secret internal language of the institution. So it's some of it's that. And just making sure that we're using a speaking in a voice that can be heard and someone is making sure that.

We're not building stuff for ourselves.

Uhm, sometimes I mean slate makes so many things more efficient and easy. A lot of Syrians have that potential, but I'm not building. That's not the only goal. My my primary goal is to serve students to move them through our funnel, to help them to help qualify them to help them understand weather were the right institution for them or not. An ideal world. And if I'm not making you know if I'm not working with the CRM with those needs in mind, then I'm failing those students.

Uhm, and that's not where I want to be. I'm not interested in doing anyone to failure bringing them to campus when they shouldn't be here because we oversold or miss sold the institution, and so we're keeping that over everything that we do, which also lets us pivot into some of those things I mentioned earlier, where where you can kind of remind people. Remember when you were new to this job and you were excited about being able to do this and then you got too busy.

Me.

What if we think about that now? What if we think about like we should be? You know if we say things like, well, we should be doing that for students, why aren't we what's keeping us from doing that? We want to keep that in mind throughout the priorities of getting things to normal and then getting things to excellent and then training teams and users is almost constant. You've got to set up.

You know, I I'd probably quarterly we actually do a BI weekly meeting with our CRM team. That's OK, that is for kind of associate director and director levels that are using it so that they can.

Take that information back to their teams as they do their internal meetings, but you also probably need to be thinking about quarterly doing larger meetings so that teams are talking to each other once he might be saying one thing, one team might be seeing another, so training is also needs to be a priority because things change too. I mean you were saying you saw some cool stuff when you went into slate the other day. That was new and it was nice to see it. Like might miss it if you're not jumping in there together to see it. And we're, you know, if I get anyone that works.

For me, if I get to the level that you're at rabos late, that'll be wonderful, but usually for my teams that means getting a few extra eyes on it.

But always, we're trying to make these improvements with the student at the center of it, or it's worthless to us. I mean, there's no reason to. I don't care how slick our emails are or how well they execute. If they don't serve the student what the student needs to be doing, we've missed the mark there. So yeah, I mean that that's our primary priorities, really. To be honest with you.

Yep.

And I think I mean that that is a really great point because I know, you know, as admissions professionals you know in my background. I came from admissions as well before joining RNL. And you know, in so many different ways we always ask ourselves, how can we make it easier for our students, right? How can we make it better for our students? And that is sometimes I think something when we're working with a CRM, especially kind of like the behind the scenes pieces of building a CRM.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Enhancing a CRM sometimes. I think it's easy to forget right? The whole reason we have this CRM is to make our admissions processes easier, not just for us, not just for our admissions teams, but for the ultimately the students as well. And so I, I think you know the fact that that you mentioned that the fact that that was kind of on the forefront for you at Montana. I think that's an incredible point. I think that's something that a lot of schools a lot of teams sometimes forget about when they're thinking about building out their CRM you mentioned.

Yep.

Before you know, sometimes you know teams can get stuck in the the internal kind of, you know jargon that they use the way that they do things well. This is how our you know our our institution does it, and you know, I get that. I know that there are some things that are out of our control, but ultimately I think you're absolutely right that you know in some ways we just need to throw that out in a lot of ways and think as we're building this out. Is this going to make it most easy for our students?

To apply to learn about our school, to apply, and ultimately find the right school for them.

Yeah, we have a haven't associate director Josh Hovis, who is, well, he's kind of a master at all things. He's a wonderful human being. Loved the guy. He's also incredibly funny and witty, and he it constantly in meetings, especially when it comes to naming things. They're gonna be student facing. Reminds us that because here at University of Montana, Montana, where you know where the Grizzlies but everything doesn't have to have a bear name. Just like you know, whatever schools are friends on the web and R might be at everything doesn't have to attach back to the name of the sports teams.

Or the institution he's always reminding us that we need to name things like Arnold Schwarzenegger movies be like Arnold. You know what it is? You know what commando is. You know what Terminator is when you see that advertised, you know what an Arnold movie from the 80s is gonna be twins. I wonder what it's about. Kindergarten cop. Oh man, I wonder what it's about and we need to keep that in mind when we're naming things when we're working with students, these kinds of principles of not getting caught up in our.

In our jargons, which is I've worked on a few campuses and jargon is everywhere and it's it's horrible. I mean I'm not a big fan of jargon. If you hadn't noticed, so yeah.

I I do appreciate you pulling out all those 80s and early early 90s references there, yeah?

I'm trying I'm trying.

Yep.

Yeah.

So one thing that you touched on and actually I will admit you know, I'm gonna admit to the web and R here. This isn't something that I was that we had on the agenda, but you mentioned it and I think it's a really good point. And you talked about how your CRM team is different than your, your team, your processing team, right? Like who's on your CRM team like? How did you decide who's going to be responsible for maintaining for leading this process?

It's.

Talk to us a little bit about that, and I know we probably should have talked about it at the beginning, but better, better late than never, right?

Yeah, so much to talk about. Uh, you know, for us at University of Montana, UM?

Actually, Mary Creed again did this when she came in. She wanted to expand the CRM team because we're gonna, you know, we're gonna do other instances grad instances and we have a Community College on our campus and we're trying to do an instance for that, and so she's looking years out to how do we need to build this team now so that we don't? You know, we're not hiring somebody, rise, we're doing something people are ready to build out.

So she worked with a.

RIT Department to create. You know, it's like a Venn diagram you've got, and you've got admissions. And right in the middle of their lives, the CRM team. They actually report hierarchically up to it. And then there's a very strong dotted line to Mary, and so we actually I'll meet with him later today. We we meet on a weekly basis to cover, just like official things that need to be changed. And I I think I'm in a meeting every day with somebody from that CRM team and and they each handle different areas. You know, there's a lead on the team that is.

Uhm, making sure that jobs get assigned properly and we have a whole process for assigning work, partially because it's really easy in the you know, in the land of teams and email and text to just like you know, promise somebody something. Hey Hannah, can you do this for me? I I won't bother you again for a week and take up peoples time when they're working on real projects are gonna make a real difference for us and our students. So we use a you know with our three CRM team members we use a full system.

To put in official requests, they are also if we if something is on fire, they're gonna help us put out the fire. But and then we've got somebody that's really that lives more in the realm of making sure that other, you know we use banner as an SIS that it's talking well to Slate. If you know star rez over and housing, it's talking, well that we're pulling our sources in from other places and doing correct, you know during our quality checks correctly and then we've got a third person on the team that.

Miss.

Log in.

You know she's the type that feels like she does everything. Her name is Hannah, but she also helps train and she speaks in a. I would say a non it language. I have a brother who's in it and him and I talk a lot about how hard it is for me to understand. Sometimes my IT department, since not because they're bad or because I'm bad. It's because they just have a different language than I have in my CRM team. Knows to live in that world, they.

You know they are able to apply enrollment and admissions principles to something that's a bit more it, you know the CRM and how to talk to my admissions wraps or financial aid reps or processing reps in a language they can understand about what's going on, what you know, when will this be fixed? Why did this happen, etc. They're able to like break that down for them, whereas I think a lot of us are experienced in the past with, you know, straight people is that it looks like some form of dark magic that we can never understand.

It's a hidden language to us, so it's been really great to have a CRM team like that because we're able to prioritize the just the CRM with that team. I don't have to wait for somebody in it to figure out what slate is and how it needs to be fixed. Having a CRM one or two, or three people depending you know you know, probably depends on the school size. I think it's key for this, but it's not something I've always had. It's usually had a nighty department and somebody in the IT department knows the system that I'm.

Using well enough to help me eventually when I have a problem.

Yep.

Free.

Yeah.

So as you were going through doing your evaluation and you identified the areas you wanted to improve, you know something that I've seen because I've worked with schools before on doing these types of evaluations doing full slate instance evaluations. You know, we we put together a list of recommendations. We prioritize them, and then it's sometimes tough to follow through again because you have to do your job right. You have, you know, there's so many.

Yep.

Other things that come up how at Montana? How did you make sure that you didn't just figure out OK? Where can we do better? But then you actually improved and you followed through on those recommendations and those ideas.

Well, I won't claim that we do it perfectly first, uhm. I mean, we're it's. It's a bit of a work in progress. The the weekly meeting that we have with the CRM team and a member of the IT teams. The leadership in those areas with Mary and I were constantly reviewing projects.

As a man.

As tickets innocence or put in for improvements and then evaluated for weather that improve, it makes any sense or not. Sometimes somebody puts a ticket in and unnecessary were were usually putting those in kind of tears. This is Tier 1 Tier 2 tier three and just constantly trying to stay on top of that. And and since project manage it, though, we don't have a we don't currently have a project manager on the teams. It's something we discuss a lot for. A lot of the projects that we're doing not just within the CRM, but how do we keep.

All the trains on the tracks because it is really easy. I mean I could be on campus tomorrow and something goes wrong. Visits and I need to spend all my time on visits and everything else be damned. I can't pay attention to it. I have to fix that and that happens a lot in the admissions world, so it's good to have. It's good to have regular meetings, which is the way we're currently kind of handling it to review in a sense of ticket system to say, does this need to be pushed up? Does this need to be pushed down? Do we have a new priority or not?

How are we doing on this wins out? What are our timelines? It does often feel like a lot of project management, and I think that's kind of how we look at it without having an official certified project manager in the room. So that's that's how we handle it.

And then sometimes we, you know Colin beg people because we're confused and get a little help on the side. So does that help?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's but there's a lot of great people out there that can that you can call and ask for advice on and.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So yeah, great, so now let's let's talk about the really good stuff. So you've mentioned now you've been working at this for a year, year and a half. Kind of, you know, re evaluating your system and working with RNL on making these changes. What are the results? What have you? What have you accomplished?

Or we had, you know, across the board our biggest class I want to say it was in.

5-6 years the freshman class was up. 30% transfers were up. Even our re-admitting students were up and it, you know, it's often hard to assess. Is that exactly because of this or this? But I don't think you'll find a person on our team who thinks it wasn't because we wrapped our head around. And again, we're always wrapping her head around the CRM. Getting working on being a campus that's using best practices and the way we communicate and the way that we operate so that we can work towards excellence.

That 30% of the freshman class was huge. I mean it. We are. We're all living in a time with COVID right now where we feel like. Well, maybe will be hugely up, or maybe that none of them will show up, because who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. The ground is always shifting underneath our feet, so you know where we made some really great improvements just in the class size. But it all it all goes back to stronger, more effective communications. Getting more information out there in the right way. So things like.

Application pushes and search programs and yield efforts and working on admitted student checklists and automating things throughout so that our admissions reps you know have to say to them like I need you to email all these kids. This, like we had already had. We were setting that up. We streamed lined our application review, which saved us a lot of time and it actually has empowered our evaluations team to continue to find ways to streamline. So actually.

We found something last week that just one of our new evaluators is like. Why do we do this? Why is this in the evaluation process and no one can answer the question? We poked around, nobody knows. Nobody knows why we do it.

And when you have 10,000 apps or whatever, and you're going to save 15 minutes by removing that from the evaluation process, we just saved a lot of human hours that can be applied somewhere else. Or maybe just give somebody a chance to rest. That's always nice too. In this day and age so, but we we got, you know, we tie a lot of our success in this last year to getting things to normal with our CRM and our communications.

Yep.

And I think you know you. You've made this clear with how you're handling this process. This the ongoing evaluations that this is not a process that I mean, you can have a process that starts and stops, but it really should and can continue to go on every year, right? And it's important you you mentioned just just a moment ago that your evaluation team just last week found something new that you wanted to, and I think it's it's. It's partially because.

It does.

It sounds like you've kind of built this mentality where folks are constantly now thinking about this and using this as an opportunity, but it takes time, right? And you have to. You have to be proactive about it. You have to be thinking about that building time in every year, taking that that opportunity to say we're going to do this right, and we're going to do it this way. We're going to think about it. We're going to be proactive. You know your. The weekly meetings that you mentioned with your CRM team, I think, is a great example of that. How you know we're going to? We're going to dedicate the time.

Mne

To make sure that this happens.

yeah.

Alright.

So that takes us pretty much to the end.

Do it, do it.

John, do you have any final thoughts about you know what? What I'm gonna? I haven't asked you this yet so I'm kind of putting you on the spot here, but I think I think you'd be able to handle it if you could talk to John Messina from a year year and a half ago. What advice about this whole process would you would you give to yourself?

Oh, it would definitely be. I made the comment about, you know, walking before you run it would definitely be, you know like I wanna, you know I want to see the output of of the CRM. I want to see things working correctly and timed well. In a sense I would be working my marketing department well to make sure that we're using. You know all the data we can find. All the best practices we can find to market well to the students.

And that's kind of. That's, frankly, that when I came in the front door, that was. That's where that's what I was really concerned with, and I had to stop a few weeks in and just kind of breathe and say, OK, well, I need to make sure all this is working. I can, I'm I'm going through a lot of effort to get this one campaign set up correctly, and I'm seeing mistakes. You know, things that are fixable. That's what's great. You know, it's all fixable.

But I need to slow down and now look back at the fundamentals so that list you put on that slide earlier. I'll certainly be when that slide that gets sent out. I'll certainly be making sure that we're hitting all those notes at Montana.

But a lot of it was familiar to me. Just taking a step back, working with my consultants and saying OK, I get that, you know, in a sense we're.

You know improving the airplane and building the airplane while we're flying the airplane, but I don't want to go crashing into the ground. So what are these fundamentals we need to be doing? What kind of do better?

That's a great analogy. I'm probably going to steal that.

Yeah, feel free, feel free.

So so yeah, that.

Feel free, I'm sure I saw from somebody so.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah. And so to your point John. We will. The as mentioned before, as Hillary mentioned at the very beginning, this webinar is being recorded, so this will be sent out. So if you do want to be able to look back at the slides and see those lists, see some of the things we've talked about. You'll definitely be able to do that. I do also want to throw our contact info up there if anybody has questions that you want to follow up with with either of us on how if there's particular things that.

You want to know how to do if you want to know more about how John has been working with his team at the University of Montana. Definitely feel free to to reach out to either one of us and we will be happy to to talk with you.

Sure.

Oh sure.

Uhm, John. There is a question. It looks like in the chat and Yep and it's it says, can you talk a bit? John, can you talk a bit more about the interaction between your CRM team and your lady director team? What do those meetings look like? Yeah, it's a great question.

You know, and and I'm assuming that's kind of a.

That might be in. We do a biweekly training where directors and associate directors are in the room, were usually setting actually a pretty broad agenda. Some little things might come up. We might stack a few things into a meeting, but typically it's like a review of of query making, which seems so simple. But man, if you get a new person on the team or they've got new people on the team, you want to make sure the people that you're training to train people are always saying on top of stuff so.

Last week we were. We concentrated a lot on some stuff we're trying to do and events. And what if we did this? What if we did that? And so we sat there with Hannah from our CRM team and she literally just pulls it up on the screen. Sometimes she makes a mistake in front of us, which is frankly when we'll probably learn the most like, oh, I totally would have done that to come. And and then we work through it and say OK, what's it going to look like in the end? What's our output? What's the outcome here? Those are our long meetings. We do every two weeks.

Uhm, sometimes they have a pretty tight agenda, but generally they're broader. Kind of picking a topic that's going to help somebody in the room, but everybody needs to be in the room for it, so sometimes it's a very valuations are process focused, and I'm still there, and our associate director recruitment. Still there and our visit person still there because we always end up finding out something that we're going to learn from because it connects. Everything connects so much in our office, so that's what those tend to look like. The weekly meetings that we do.

Come with a CRM leadership and with some IT leadership tend to be more big picture things. Hey, we've got this coming down the line. We want to get this ready for it. What's our timeline for doing that? Kind of you know project managing out bigger projects etc. Or coming in saying hey, I think we broke something or something is not working right for us. How do we get this going? We've got a couple of though. I have that meeting today and I have like three questions like that for them so.

No duplicate entry, I see that.

Looks like there is another question about Slate banner integrations and good luck at entry.

Yeah, that's, uh, Amanda, that's come up that was that's been an issue for you to receive Montana that is currently solved. You never know. Maybe we'll break it, but we use an axiom feed between banner and Slate, which means, actually, that they're one of the people on the CRM team spends a lot of time just making equality, checking everything, then, because we they were at a point when I first came in that the valuations team for part of the application.

Had to check and often double entry part of the app.

Matches, that's one of those issues where, UM, we had to step back and say, OK, that that's a waste of our time considering the tools that we have. And if that means pausing and fixing that for the you know, for half a day today we need to do that so.

That's we the double the duplicate entry speed you know got coming from CRM to SIS is not an unknown Fang in CRM worlds. It's one that we've we've conquered. I say that and probably one of my employees is on here and I'm gonna get chewed out and we didn't conquer it here, John, or that we can conquer if there is one. So they use I data. I see that. OK yeah, it's an integration piece.

Millimeter.

Yep.

Miller

yes.

Yeah, I I did as a similar company to Axiom they do the same sort of thing. But Amanda I think to your point, you know thinking about that the data flow as well, not just looking at Slate but house late is talking to other systems. How is that that data flowing? Or most? Ideally, how would you like that data to flow? And I know when I was at one of my when I was at the.

Yeah.

The last institution I was before I started working on the on the consulting side, we actually tackled this project. We tackle this and and we we were a slate school. I was a slight captain at my previous institution and we had RSI S we had slates. We had a document imaging system at the time and when I first got there the data integrations were just kind of all over the place and it just made our team's life a nightmare. Honestly, because because of what you're talking about.

Yeah.

Having a double enter things in multiple systems, such a waste of time, right? And that's something you definitely want to be able to think about. And I think part of it is just kind of stepping back and and beginning to identify. You know how do you want that data flow to look right when you first get names whenever you first get the data? Where's where do you want to go first and then knowing OK if we put it there first, where else does it need to go? And then you know, since you're using I data that should be a great resource for you and I would engage.

I data once you kind of have that ideal dataflow figured out, engage them and say, hey, here's what we want to do. We want the names to go to sleep first, and then we need to push them to banner or vice versa. I think that makes more sense putting them into slate and then pushing the banner at some point. And John, you can you know, jump in as well, but.

You know, I I say it's funny, that's a that's a you know we worked with our consultant to fix that exact issue where incorrect data pieces sources are good example, we're feeding into banner, then coming over to us, and that was causing us problems because sometimes the data was shifting and then we're spending a bunch of time trying to unshift data or figure out what happened when it really is easy as taking a step back and saying just 'cause we've always done this this way.

That's not that's not involved in our philosophies at University of Montana, we're always looking for people who say that so that we can unravel that and then try to get stuff. You know, in that case, get fed into Slate first, then go to Banner later.

Miller

yeah.

Yeah, and and one of the key things when I when you know when we're thinking about when I think about data integrations and John I'm with you. I I was an admissions person, I'm not. I do not consider myself a technical person, but just from my background I've kind of had to work and learn all of these these functions. But one of the things I always try to stress is you want to make sure that you have one way data flows, and that doesn't mean that slate is only talking to banner that banners never sending.

Yep.

Yeah huh?

Get back to sleep, but what I mean by that is is you want to try to make sure that data points the same data point like a student record, for example, is always created in one place and pushed to the other right? Because when if you have some records being created in Slate, some records being created in banner and they're both kind of going both ways, then you start getting these syncing issues right. The duplicate issues and you know getting just the two systems to match up and so one of the most important things. And this is one of the things we did at my previous institution.

That I started talking about was we had two way data flows and you know we just said no that that is causing a lot of our headaches. We need to just have data going One Direction. Certain things start in Slate moved to banner. Certain things start in banner and move to Slade but that we tried. That's what we did and it it ended up working so much better.

Yeah, that's yeah, I I. I bet in your world that's a common problem that you find with some of your clients. 'cause that was certainly we found that in minor and major ways where.

You know home addresses were being updated when they went One Direction or the other, and then everything was getting screwed up for my ability to syndicate a piece of mail, and that shouldn't be happening.

It took us awhile to dig in and figure out what's going on. You know, that's you know, it's it's issues like that, where sometimes we were really leaning into our consulting or really saying like hey.

Where we want. We know this should work right? What have we done wrong here so?

Yeah he.

Yeah, and Amanda, what you did? The comment you just posted there? That makes a lot of sense and I think that's really common, right? Most of the data is going to start in slates. Usually what I would recommend is that upon record creation or up on, you know whether it's the prospect record or or more commonly applicant record admitted student record, right? Your most schools will integrate at that point from at the point of application or the point of acceptance. As soon as that happens, you know I would recommend sending the record to banner.

Creating that banner ID and then immediately sending the the ID back and you want to make sure that you're sending the slate ID to banner and you have some place in banner to store the slate ID. That way when you send the banner ID back you've already got the Slate ID attached to it and so it's going to match up well, right? So making sure and then then for all integrations moving forward, any updated information going on? You've got the slate ID and the banner ID in both Slate and banner, which will help.

With the matching process.

Alright.

Square at time here.

No problem Rob, no problem.

I think we're just about time that's perfect, so hopefully so thank you again everybody for taking some time out of your schedules today to talk with John and I and John. Thank you again for your working with me on this and please feel free. You see our information up on the screen. Please feel free to reach out and hope that you your slating goes well and that you're able to to assess and optimize your slate instances.

Great, thank you everybody.

Thank you.