Admissions & Enrollment Management: Harnessing Slate for Optimal Communication

No, oh I see it now. OK, now staring at it.

Good afternoon everyone from the East Coast. Good morning to our friends on the West Coast. We're getting started in just a minute or two. We're going to a little bit more time for people to join the session so you're in the right place. This is the 2:00 PM webinar, admissions and enrollment management, harnessing slate for optimal communications.

Will just take a minute or two and get going.

Only through the participant. So many friendly faces. Hello everyone.

Save all my apologies. Good morning. Afternoon in the middle of the country as well.

Alright, we'll go ahead and get started. My name is Matthew Paris. I'm the director of innovation here at techno lucian's, and I'm pleased to it could be continuing our four part webinar series.

For virtual conversations for the slate community and beyond, this is our applied to alumni managing the lifecycle enslaved series. Last week. If you have the privilege of joining us, you would have heard my colleague Erin Gore hosting a session talking primarily about slate.org and the capabilities on the secondary school side. Today, we're going to be transitioning and talking about admissions and enrollment management, specifically harnessing slate for optimal communications. We're going to cover a little bit of everything, as you know, there's a lot going on right now in the world of higher education and ambition.

As we were putting together this presentation where you were just trying to figure out where it even whom, this conversation in 'cause we could probably do an hour on a whole lot of topics. So we'll see where the conversation takes us, where you got undergrad. We got grad, we got United States and international will sort of cover the gambit of topics as we go through this. But before we dive into the specifics of today's presentation, I just want to talk a little bit about some things for your information.

First, this web and R is being recorded. An will be made available for viewing. Following this event, you'll find all of this information on our website. Technicians.com closed captioning can be enabled simply by clicking the CC button in the top right corner of the share window. Full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button. Those four arrows in the top right corner of the share window and should for any reason you need to re sync your audio or video of simple refresh of your share window will take care of that. Feel free to use the chat feature on the left side of your screen. Questions can be posed in.

Chance and one of my colleagues were monitoring that and seeing things up for our discussion today.

So with those housekeeping notes out of the way, I am incredibly pleased to introduce to you today's panel. We have Brandy Benton, Associate Provost for enrollment management at Henderson State University. We have Jamila Jamison, director of enrollment strategies and operations at Scripps College and Johnny Johnson, vice president of admissions at Transylvania University. Before we get into the questions, let me go ahead and allow each of them to talk a little bit about their institution and where there AT, and then we'll get into the meeting.

Potatoes of our discussion today, Brandon, Let's go ahead and start with you.

Thank you Matt, so I'm at Henderson State University where a pretty small liberal arts college, public liberal arts College in Southwest Arkansas, Anna pretty rural part of the state. We are Southwest of Little Rock and we serve undergraduate and graduate students. I am responsible for the undergraduate admissions and communication pieces.

Wonderful Jamila.

It's not. Hello everyone, I'm Joanna Jameson. I work at Scripps College. Small private liberal arts, women's College and Claremont CA. About 35 miles East of Los Angeles. We are a member of the Claremont colleges, a consortium of five undergraduate and two graduates. Institutions all five undergraduate institutions are slate schools, which is nice to be able to have people to troubleshoot with just across the street. It's a great resource to have. I work a structure of enrollment strategies and operations. I am this late captain. I maintain our databases.

I work with campus partners an coordinating how data flows through the college and I also work with our registrar, financial aid and vice president from Roman on some recruitment and retention strategies.

Thank you Johnny.

Hello everyone, I'm Johnny Johnson. I'm VP for admissions at Transylvania, were in Lexington, Ky, right downtown Lexington. We have about 1100 students on campus and I work with our admissions team in terms of coordinator recruitment efforts, high schools, college fairs, application process operations and management, managing the enrollment through deposit, and then we hand them off once they get to campus. That cited to be here today.

Thank you also to kind of build our conversation. As you know, last week we were talking about slate.org and secondary schools, and as I think about pivoting to, you know it's September 1st as I think about my time when I used to work in admission. You know this would usually be a very quiet, peaceful time of year. Not a lot going on. It was an I can only imagine that this year is probably even more mellow. What would you be doing ordinarily this time of year? And what's different now?

To me, let's start with you.

I'm so normally this time of year we are gearing up to travel for the fall. Most of our inquiry numbers come from travel or on campus events on campus visits in the spring in the summer and the fall. Obviously because of COVID-19 we were not able to have on campus business over the spring and summer well into the fall would close at scripts through January.

And we won't have any will travel so different this year is really thinking about internal dagmar into this. How to virtually connect and create personal experiences with our students and families were not able to see them in person. We find that what are students really values or something? A small private women's College is really having those personal connections. So how do we create that connection in a virtual space is when something we've thought a lot about over the summer we've done.

A lot in terms of just wrapping up Ari Communications social media, one on one appointments. Just thinking excuse me thinking outside of the box in terms of how we can still have all of those touch points with their students were not able to have them on campus were not able to go to the schools and not just but not just. Students should say in families but also counselors as well. How can we reach out to counselors particularly as their caseloads are very, very changing in different and how they're having to communicate with their students and connect with their students and advise them differently as well.

So how can we help to support them? So those are a lot of the things that we're thinking about right now.

Julie Brandy are either of you doing anything? Do you have on campus visits going on right now? Are you doing any intentions of traveling this fall, or is a similar to what they are experiencing in scripts?

I'll I'll go in Kentucky. High schools would have started two weeks ago, so we would have already been on the road traveling. Of course we can't do that, so our high school visits and virtual. We're working with the state organizations to do a kind of a concerted effort for college fairs and so, but we are having on campus visits, but we're being very conscious about those things one family at a time. Our admissions counselors are doing visits virtually still, so they're not with the family.

Kind of in the room. They are either in their office doing a zoom visit or or. They're at home or doing those little visit the tour guide. So still ambassador still giving tours, but we've got faith screens and Max for them, and so we're doing kind of socially distance tour where were filled allowing families to get that that visual component of the visit. Because that's a big part that as similar said the small liberal arts colleges you sell the personal experience.

And that's really, really hard to do if you can't get him on campus and talk with them, so that's what they really one of the big adjustments that we've made for for especially for this year, the small game I will play with everyone every time you have word pivot, drinking, beverage, beverage of choice.

Yep.

Have you got a pivot a lot today?

At.

The word pivot, I think of wrath in France.

Brandy help up for you.

You sure? So I'll start by saying We are very new to slate, so we signed a contract with slate back in October and we immediately began building out our application for admission, which we turned on today. So yay so.

Charms

So our go live date for that application was September 1st and so we were able to meet that deadline and that goal today and and kind of you don't really flip a switch but flip the switch, update the links on the website but you know back in March when we first started to hear about Kovid we got sent home on March 12th.

And so we were working on getting our freshman orientation, which is a face to face series of events that we have on campus there 13 dates in the summer there full day events, so we began immediately to think about how what tools we have at our disposal and how we could leverage those tools to continue to do business, and so that was one piece and we were able to move all of the registration pieces to slate and we were able to build out all the content in canvas and then push those students who registered for that event.

Into canvas, have them complete the course and then then we also use the scheduler to then schedule their appointments with their academic Advisors an get their schedules, and so we were able to accomplish that in Slaton. Turn that on pretty quickly given how little we knew about slate at the time, so.

That was an awesome resource for us. The other thing that we did was we started to think about because spring travel late spring travel we do. We do here at Henderson, do some late spring travel, was interrupted. This tours were suspended. Really everything that we typically go to to do business when we're still trying to recruit and you know, kind of closeout. Close the deal on those students. We were still trying to do that, and so we again look to slate.

An we I'm pretty proud of this. We hosted 57 virtual events for perspective students between March 13th and start of term.

And I will say that they weren't perfect. We we had a format that we tried to use that students did not respond well to it first, so they might come, but then lose interest. We would see the numbers fall off in the participant list, and so we.

Assessed after every session that we hosted, we came together and we thought about you know how can we keep this audience engaged? And so we changed our format to be more of like a talk show we had ready ambassadors who had Internet access at home that we could bring in an they could help us in these sessions. And so we were pretty pleased that we were able to host 57 virtual event since late and they were not generic events. We gave programs an opportunity to present so we bought some.

Faculty and some. Even some Danes to work with students. And then we had our functional areas like financial aid, the business office, student accounts, academic advising. All the things really everyone we invited to participate and they took advantage of that. And so we really had a captive audience because everyone was at home and so we were providing them like Netflix, YouTube content and we were trying to think of anything that we could to keep them.

To get them to continue to connect with us and so we felt like that paid off with with enrollment for fall and getting students to do the things that we needed them to do so that they would actually matriculate this fall. And like I said, We are this fall, not traveling. We are having campustours, doing a lot of social distancing, but Johnny you might agree with me that in that students just really aren't responding well to that, so our volume of tours has decreased.

Significantly and obviously we are not doing group tours at all, so they're just one on one. A student can come and bring 2 guests, or two parents and so very limited in terms of the size of our campus tours. We're allowing students to schedule one on one appointments with their admissions counselors were using slate for that. It's part of their signature on their emails or the communications like hey, let's connect, and here's how you do it. Here's the link, hit me up and let me work with you one on one and now that.

You guys like at slate have added the functionality where we can do screen share so the students stuck with their application and like I don't really know what you're asking me here, we can assist them with that and so.

That's been really a good go to for us and then finally you know, in the spring and through the summer we were very reactive and creating content for virtual sessions. You know, getting together as a team everyday at 9:00 o'clock and thinking about what content do we think students will respond well to? How can we get them to register for an event and state throughout the event so it is very reactive and a lot of it was in response to the communications that were coming in. If we were seeing patterns and things that students needed, we would try to respond by.

Yes.

You know, opening up a forum for that this fall? We're being very, very intentional. We have built our content calendars through September in October in terms of what we're going to be offering in slate, and we are promoting those and having students registered for those events. So we're doing some things that are very different from what we would do if we were hosting on campus events. In that we are really thinking about these opportunities the same way I think a company would like a network that was trying to promote.

Yes.

A new series like how do you get them to come back to the next event? And how do you keep them engaged? Because right now they're not really looking for answers. They're looking to be engaged, and so we're really just trying to think about our offerings. 'cause that's what they really are in terms of the series that we're rolling out, and what they will respond to an we are hosting 5 preview days this fall through slate using related events.

So that's kind of the other piece for us, so we are leveraging all the tools in slate to do the work that we used to do very, very differently. And so there there's been a learning curve. We've learned a lot, but we feel like we're pretty positioned pretty pretty well positioned to move forward with this and just be some more success. Greater success this fall.

Well, that's fabulous. Like one of my question, my follow ups to each of you is sort of that. You know, we're seeing the trends, obviously globally, that in person things are obviously down for a whole lot of reasons. Virtual things are up. How are you seeing these kind of want to put this into two parts? Part one I would say is the virtual events piece. How are students taking advantage of that? Are you seeing similar numbers of participants that you would have had in person? Are you seeing an increase because we have somewhat of a captive audience?

And then kind of unpacking that a little bit more and then later in our conversation I want to get to other kinds of communication that we're using to kind of fill in that Gap and brand awareness. But we're going to start with this virtual piece.

I assume an I'm kind of posing the question with a lot of you. Is that what the primary function of your admission counselors are doing right now in terms of their day-to-day task? Is hosting some of these events? Are they smaller groups? Are they larger groups? Are you seeing hundreds of participants using dozens of participants? What? What is communication really look like on that virtual level?

Jungle.

Sorry.

Oh, I'm sorry.

It's me, I'll go so I would say you know if there's a blend there because of course the students are also learning online so you can't just be in their face all day long because they're actually taking class. You know in school so you know the challenge for us is 1. Trying to schedule a high school visit when they're not actually in a class or supposed to be learning. And so we're working with our guidance counselors on what those time frames look like. Is it the 8:00 o'clock in the morning open period? Is it lunchtime?

Do they have an open period during the day? This Saturday's have been pretty good for us in terms of Justin admission sessions on a Saturday morning, because at least they're not in school now and I'll sleep more parents or no Saturday mornings, at least for us. And then during the week I will tell you our coaches have been very active in recruitment even though our seasons have been limited or cancelled in some ways, there still recruiting for the next season and there still being big. They still been connecting with.

With family, so I would say it's limited. We're definitely not seeing the numbers that we would see on campus, but we're seeing them where they want to be engaged. And that's just different. Now it's really just different. I could tell from March to may how virtually tired the kids were and they just didn't actually want to engage a lot this summer, even though we were putting some content out there, at least not the perspective students are admitted. Students are deposited students. They were engaged because they had a little different connection there trying to get enrolled there, trying to pick classes.

Things like that. I'm curious to see what that response will be for the fall, because, again, the rising seniors, even though they were virtual last semester for the last part of your junior year. This is a new experience for them and so they are now trying to see you know what colleges are offering what? Is there a preview day like Brandy said or is there a one on one session or are you doing something with the Theatre Department or as a music Department doing something? And so we're trying to meet the students where they aren't paying attention to those?

Emails that come back to us and say I really want to know this.

And the other thing I'll say just it's been really encouraging that I professors have been willing to engage even though they're teaching virtually, and I know that that's been a double bit of work for them. Trying to keep their classes engaged, but then also recruit for their majors. And I know that's a lot of work, but they have actually been really spot on in terms of helping us. So again, this meeting them where they at, where they where there are, and not trying to over engage them because they will give virtually tired and the numbers will quickly the window.

When they just don't want to turn your computer on, you know. This age group usually done in front of computer and their phones all day long, and now they're like, yeah, I need a break. So we have to watch that. That part of it.

Yeah, I would echo everything Johnny had said. I would also say for me it is been a little bit of a challenge to compare apples to apples. So to think about our numbers up or down because at Scripps we really did try to think about change how we were conducting business in a way that makes sense in a virtual world. So when we think about the yield component for admitted deposited students over the summer, we prior to this year we really didn't have much communication from the mission office in terms of what we were sending out to students over the summer.

Really was all coming soon's office this year. All of the department's on campus really came together for one coordinated effort. I do think slate is probably one of the best app databases that we have on campus to communicate with students, so we use late in a way that we haven't in previous years to connect with students to host events. Multiple events are hosted through zoom, but we use slate to read it. Pertains to register for those events an yeah. Like Johnny said, we have an amazing faculty. Have been willing to host those events, but those are things that I could say in.

When is up, but I don't really have anything to compare it too is we weren't doing it before. I assume that it would probably would be up a little bit more than unusual. I think over this somebody over the summer.

In terms of perspective students, I think we're also we changed the way that we are reaching out to students in the Times that we're connecting with them. So again, we're not only offering information sessions. Eight to five, you know at certain during the work hours, so to speak. Now we're offering them at 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM. Knowing that there are students who are, you aren't going to be able to log on if they're in Hawaii until after they get out of school, for example. And so we've tried to do some of those things, change our interview times, offering more things on the weekend.

And so I think I've been hesitant to kind of compare increases or decreases because I don't think that it's a fair comparison and a lot of ways. I I'm more interested in understanding how students are changing the way that they can act, so we're also seeing in the way that we did before students connecting with us through Instagram or we're using text messaging a lot more because we know that students are kind of tired of getting it. Just a bunch of emails. So I'm more interested in kind of understanding when looking at data of what students are opening and how they're connecting with this. I wish there was a way to.

Tracking slate Instagram so never a structure in amazement.

No.

Recommend that our feedback.

Yeah.

First one.

Actually the product.

Ties into an interesting question that Trisha Vrooman Blumenthal just asked in our chat, which is how are we getting feedback about these events? Is there? Are you doing surveys on virtual event so you know he was talking about emails that are coming in from students? How are we measuring the efficacy of these things?

So typically we would survey them after as part of the checkout progress process if they were on campus. So if they did a face to face campus tour or they came to a preview day or a different event that we hosted on campus, we would give them a survey, right? It's usually a digital survey and then we could look at that data and then kind of respond to it. That way. One thing about hosting events like this is you get pretty immediate feedback, right? So we're looking in the chat box and our people engaging with us. Are they signing up for the events based on the time that we offered them?

And so you get some feedback without having to do that. But we are certainly going to be sending for preview events as part of the follow up communications. They will get a response to or they will be get a request to complete a survey so that we can look at that and really kind of evaluate how effective we were. The other thing that you can use to really kind of judge how effective any event you're hosting is is if in your follow up communications.

Or in the days to come that they actually respond to those items and whatever that call to action was that you presented that. They actually do that thing. And so, to me, that's really the measure of success when you're hosting these events. It's not really the number of participants who show up, but of that number of participants, how many of them actually do the thing that we need them to do next?

Yeah, we're kind of surveying every event so you know, once we complete an event in slate, you know we've got that kind of communication built that a day after. You know it's going to go go automatically and we report it back to our ambassadors when we complete the visit, reported back to the coaches when they completed visit the same thing with the faculty and is asking all the normal things that you would do from a tour. But you do want to know, you gotta know, that's that's the only way I'd like to, Miller said. There's no comparison right now. There's no playbook.

For dealing with covid, we're all kind of feeling our way through, and so I agree with the panel in terms of, you know, surveying and asking those questions. Is there only way you gonna know if something is working moving forward or if you need to pivot to do something different because the the kids will tell you, and I appreciate that or you get no response that can answer as well, and I think we need to remember that if you get no response, that's also an answer.

They will tell you. I recall that from my years working in admission, they will tell you.

One of the things that each of you sort of touched on that I kind of want to poke out a little bit further is.

You know the in response to Covid and one of the ways that we've pivoted. I mean, excuse me evolved is that.

We're seeing where people working outside of the normal 8 to 5, nine to five business hours. How does that impact on your staff working outside of the normal day working on the weekends? As your staff experiencing zoom out is how. How is this all sort of playing into the greater ecosystem of morale and you know, I'm just imagining this time of going into, you know, as you prepare for reading season.

It can be daunting to have gotten through such a tumultuous time. How how is this impacting the day-to-day interactions with humans that are involved in this?

I would say you can't forget that your staff are are gonna react someone like their perspective families are gonna react. My staff has some of my staff has small children and now their work. Do you know they're teaching at home because there's no in person school so I've gotta be flexible with some of their work schedule to make sure that they're not zoomed out or worn out because you know you're already working 4050 hours a week, but you could be working 70 hours a week all at home when you think that's comfortable, but maybe not. Sometimes you need to get out of the house.

And take a break. So I have to be sensitive to that as a as a supervisor and tell some of my staff for all of us that hey, you need to take the rest of the afternoon and not then close your computer. You know, turn email off closure computer now and let's you need to work on other things. They no work has to be done and there's a constant communication between me and them, whether it's weekly or just through a text or GroupMe that says, here's what I need you to be focused on this week or the next two weeks so they understand what needs to happen over a certain period of time.

But I also have to be flexible, knowing that they've got house responsibilities with their spouse with their partner with their kids or their personal lives. They just need a break, you know. And so you have to be flexible with that understanding that this goes in place. But we can still get it done just with a different, with a different set of needs instead of means.

Brandir Jameel any thoughts?

I would just say here in Arkansas, public schools are open for face to face instruction so we aren't really facing the challenges you just describe. Johnny my team at many of them have school age children but they are here in the office most days because their kids are at school and now we have to be prepared for them as individuals to pivot if they need to. Any event that a public school needs to close or they themselves are direct Contacts and they need to quarantine for 14 days.

Or if unfortunately they were to contract covid. So how do we continue to do business? And again, I think the key to that is flexibility. One thing that we're doing as well, and it's because it's we're getting their requests. High school counselors are reaching out to us and asking us to set up virtual visits, and so they will bring in a kind of a captive group of students who are interested in the University. And so my admissions counselors have the opportunity then to create within us late share just.

Mark

I school visit for particular high school, so we're also doing those and that has been very, very popular and that helps too because we have that high school counselor there who has set it all up for us that you have helped us identify the students who are interested who want to come in for the event. But it also there's this opportunity there for students who have elected to for virtual instruction this fall because most of our public schools gave an option you can be face to face or you can be virtual.

So those high school counselors are also reaching out to those those virtual students at home and saying, hey, come in and with your classmates who for face to face an attend this virtual classroom visits school visit with Henderson State University. So we have. We've had a great response to that and that was not our idea. That was just the high school counselors asking us. Can you do this? And we're like, well, as a matter of fact, we can do it so and we are doing it, and so we're pretty excited about that too. It's just another opportunity there to just put to reach those students.

That right now we don't have any other Ave to really reach.

Yeah, I agree with everything. Everyone is sad. I think our senior team is really thinking about not even just being fatigued by being on zoom all day or in meetings all day but just the amount of work you know. We did add a lot of things as we moved to the virtual space. Like for example I can go back to social media piece. That could be someone's full time job to manage social media, but our staff member who does that also has a.

A host of other things that she has to do, so I think it's a great point Matt, that as we think about like we don't want our staff to be completely exhausted by the time they get to reading and we've had to remind ourselves or be reminded a couple times to that. You know, in a way in world where, for example, we have staff meeting once a week, I think all of our staff are trying to make sure they make every single meeting every week. But then we have to remind ourselves that that would be the case in normal years. You've been traveling so he wouldn't admit every staff meeting so it's OK if you need to instead skip that step in getting to do something else. And so we had to.

Have Grace with one another in ourselves and understand that it's OK to miss things or not be apart of some conversations because you have other obligations that you need to, whether personal or professional, to to address.

Obviously, with all of these changes that are happening, the presence is very different out there, like the name recognition might not be the same as it was, you're not necessarily at a college fair, you're not necessarily at a school, and so you know a number of you have touched on this already, but water, how are we filling in those gaps, and how are we trying to compensate? Or is it just an increase in communication? I love the idea of social media. What are some of the initiatives you've sort of taken on to?

To try to bridge some of those things that are missed in those day-to-day interactions, what are the sort of innovative new ideas that are that are starting to take shape?

I-1 would be new if I hate to say it, but finding more ways to buy names. Ann, I don't wanna buy names that are just.

Names you know, so you still try to qualify him in some way, but you've got to because you're not going to be in affairs as college fair space. You're not going to high school visit space like you want to. Like you said with the name recognition is not there. So you're partnering with some companies that you hope that you you got some familiar familiar early with, but also can say you know these names look like your current students, or what whatever relationship you wanna build. That way we are partnering for us with our lump to have some.

Name some name gives you know who your who's your high school kids alone so that we can get them in our in our system. Make those legacies come on here and then for us. Again, being in Lexington and being in a city for us, there are a lot of community based organizations that work with youth programs or have used programs that we've partnered with and that's really helped get our name to some to some areas. Whether it's in Lexington or you know 5060 miles out that is.

Given us some name recognition because of their. If the community based organization can be kind of A.

And stand on the mantle for us, and say this institution is worth you looking into. Then it gives us more recognition with that individual student and they feel a little bit better about at least checking us out and talking to us. So it's really been putting your hands in a lot more pots than you. Then you used too because you have to compensate for not being in a college fair where you got a couple thousand students are going to be on a Saturday afternoon, so we try to do a lot of those different things.

I would just add to what Johnny said. I think to you know prior to covid research indicated that most that students tended to go to college within most students tended to go to college within 90 miles of their home, right? So they were looking for something close to home and I think since covid I know for us it Henderson we're seeing more students who probably would not have chosen Henderson go to Henderson because we're local and because their parents felt better about them being closer to home.

Also, you guys remember in the spring when we shut everything down and students said, you know, we told students you know you can go home and so you know just being close to home. And so I think it's important that you not forget to reach out to those community organizations and to really look to them as a source to get your names. So I've always found those SAT&ACT names, but getting those local community organizations to help you with your leads. And I think that's going to be very important critical even for next.

Is this cycle that we're just beginning is to look? Don't forget to look at the kids who are closest to home, because that's probably going to be a large percentage of your makeup for your fall class for 2021.

You touched on the. You know, the idea of name buys obviously is always been a central thesis of college admission, especially in the undergraduate side about even on the graduate side.

Does this wave of moving tord testing optional have an implication for this name by process? And what are we going to do about that?

Great question.

Literally physically can.

I think it absolutely, I said Dications for the name by process as students choose not to test as students are unable. Potentially this fall to take the psat, not even if they don't want to, but they perhaps can't physically cannot go to take the test that will substantially change our 2022.

Enrollment process right. Because we're producing for next year, Anne, how are we going to then find inquiries? I don't know that we've had. You guys have a secret answer that that would be happy to hear. We don't have one at Scripps yet. I will enter it is Christine's question is someone she asked if a panelist have done virtual group panels. We have at scripts done that as a way to kind of get our name out there as well in terms of partnering with not just within Clairemont, but other national institutions, other liberal arts colleges around the country to do.

But I think generally would have been group travel, but just kind of group information sessions, fruit meetups, group school visits if your particular part of the country that you wanted to go over this together we've done. We have done that. We've split it up so that each member of that team, that Group One school host the registration page, one school hosts the zoom link or, however. However you want to do that. We are created the the power point presentation that they're going to share, so everyone kind of gets a job that split.

On the four, 5 or our many group members there are, so we have to admit scripts for Cena.

Yet the name purchase is A is a big concern, especially if you are buying a lot of acts names. Ann I you're not gonna find as many as you want for us, it's more of a concern of.

Our scholarship awarding we will test optional, so there was a portion of our missions before our top scholarships. We still needed to test and so we've got to do something different because not everybody is going to have some of those tough those top scores or we've got to evaluate transcripts differently or look at a recommendation differently. Or look at, you know things like that to pull more kids into that pool, and that is a concern concern of course, for your for your faculty who are so heavily.

Lenient on that's cool profile an when they don't see as many ACC that cities coming in they they think something different about your admissions process, but it's also you know this is also about access for a lot of students and there was always an issue there with students having access to take the test, whether it's once or 7 times and now with test being so limited that the question of access becomes even greater because every community is not going to be able to offer a test. And if you do offer a test.

Only 30 can come if they have 100, and so that becomes a huge concerns for our communities of unrepresented populations. For rural communities and that is that something that we we started thinking about. You know a couple of years ago when we went test optional, but it's of greater concern now because you can't purchase a lot of those names and those students don't have access to take multiple tests like they they used to in the past.

How are you communicating these changes? Obviously there's a lot of policy implications that you know whether your schools going test optional or whether you have application deadline changes or financial aid changes or scholarship changes. How are you going about balancing the like? I have to land of the class and sort of make it on budget on time and all of my different demographics while at the same time sort of communicating all of these changes on the fly is. It's how are you just going about doing that?

Tons of email.

Email Tom communication, but like for Kentucky, our state organization are a CAC. We do a lot of work in the state where the colleges communicate as a group of colleges to the high schools and back and forth. The high schools communicate how they're doing. Either high school visits or virtual visits to the colleges. And so we've been able to develop a lot of communication that way because without it, you're right. You're out fishing in the dark.

Trying to make sure that everybody knows what you're doing and of course, over 4000 colleges. We're all doing it differently. Nobody's doing it the same, so at least within our region, were trying to use our state organizations to get the information out there. And then Institutionally, it's an email or or text message, or billboard or whatever to your your major constituents, right there in your backyard to make sure they know. But you're always going to have somebody says, well, I didn't know that or I didn't. I didn't know you switch to that or something.

So you kinda over communicate hoping that you reached the masses, knowing you still going, you're going to. You're going to miss some individuals from time to time.

From my seat I can confirm y'all send a lot of emails. Miller with millions and millions of emails.

Am I a two that are state organization is really providing a lot of sports support to colleges and universities as well as the high schools in helping us kind of figure all this out together. So we have purchased as a state a. I don't want to. I don't want to say what it is. I don't want to give anybody kind of props there but we are working with a company to host and structure virtual college fairs. So we've all been working on that and then I don't know if this is unique to Arkansas or not that.

We have something every fall called articulation. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of that, but that's an opportunity for every college and University to send recruiters.

To a location to four different after their score, events in different geographic locations within the state an all the recruiters assigned to that that part of the state will have an opportunity to meet face to face with every high school counselor within that region, and so we're still doing that, and that is next week, and that's called articulation an it's it's really quite funny, but they found a solution. It's a drive through event, so all of the colleges and universities will have tents.

In a high school counselor will drive through, we will give them print materials, an contact information via business cards, and just for a few seconds have an opportunity to pitch the college face to face through a car window and then they will continue to drive through. So that's Tuesday through Friday of next week here in Arkansas, so that's kind of our one opportunity to be face to face with our high school counselors and kind of just remind them that were here. And you know if they need anything and this is how you get in touch with us.

So that's one thing that we're doing. The other thing too, is, you know, it's another kind of way to reach students, because there is this kind of Kovid and virtual fatigue that we're seeing is we're going back. We're sending print.

Listen stayed up black stuff in the Mail they do. I mean everything is so virtual and I think that there's just this screen fatigue and we found the thing. Appreciate getting a view book in the Mail or a postcard from the University that says Hey, we see you. And here's what we've got to offer, and so we're continuing to do that.

And probably will up that a little bit and trying to expand some of those campaigns. And we're doing a lot of Tele recruiting. So within slate if we need students to take an action that we think is critical, our admissions counselors are reaching out to them via phone and they're giving them a call. So they're just talking to him on their cell phones and say, Hey, what can I just checking in? How's school going? You know what are you thinking? And I know it's early, but we've already planned it out. We've written our queries in slate, so based on that population

or the action that we need them to take, they're going to have a call do so. We are already building all of that logic out, so we think will be ready, and that's something that we did last year. We call it Tele counselling in our old CRM. And that's something that we're going to continue to do in slate.

Yeah.

Yes.

I'm somewhat tickled that print is is making a huge comeback right now. Why? Because it's, you know, for awhile there during covid, the Mail person was the one other human you saw outside of your family, so they played an integral role in your communication with the outside world. And I also suppose that it's really lends itself to having just that brand awareness that name to stay top of mind by by having those print materials there, even if they're not necessarily reading it as soon as it comes open in the Mail like.

It's just on the coffee table. That is, it is. It's in the site Geist and that I can imagine is is only helpful in a waiting 15 minutes or so. Here I I kind of want to pivot and talk a little bit about the upcoming season of reading and how we're going to with all of these changes and.

You know, I, I know schools have to to this complicated line where on the one hand we want to be supportive and understanding of the complexities that everyone is facing. This has been a challenging time globally, while at the same time needing to land a class and needing to read and needing to be able to evaluate student versus student be and making some of these these comparisons. I'm sure these conversations have at least begun if not fully decided that I'm just curious how you guys plan on tackling the upcoming.

Reading and fruit. Many of our our partners right now. Our clients right now they're actively reading as well like they did. There is not necessarily a season, it just sort of keeps going and we have transfer students and we have graduate students and business students. And so how has reading evolved over the as we kind of gear up for this fall?

So we will start with you this time.

I think for us we are starting the conversation of how we're going to transition to reading, particularly being test optional. We are going. We were planning to go to socially before Cobit.

And an understanding how that's going to look different along with the potential of not having grades for a semester or maybe 2 if Sue Schools not having grades in the fall.

And what that means for an experienced after readers. I think in some ways it might be easier to train the new reader how to read without those things. That someone who's been reading for a couple years. It's my it's shift, complete shift and how you think about students. And I think we as admissions officers do certainly need to be intentional looking without scores, or it's not put something else in its place as a barrier, right? It's just not start counting the number AP or IB or advanced courses that students have taken as a way to try to to to understand.

Rigor or academic success or not, start counting the number of a is a student has versus the number of beasts and not just automatically put something in the place of test scores. If we're really talking about access and being more accessible to students.

And we've talked a lot about how we're going to train our staff. We were reading holistically before, but but reading it just in a different way and thinking about the challenges that families are facing in that you know Co curricular activities aren't going to look the same as they have in the past, and understanding that you're not going to see the same things in an application you're not going to see, you're going to see is talking about very different things in their lives in their essays. Recommenders are going to talk about very different things, and so understanding. How can we think about.

The things that we need in terms of academic fit and match for the community, but understanding that the world is in a very different space and how can we support particularly are more runnable populations that are really not getting. They weren't receiving a lot of guidance before, but are really not getting any guidance that this process now. And how can we support everyone through this and mean it makes being flexible? I would say is the other piece of that when things, while it's nice for example, to have a mid term report for transfer students.

To understand what they're doing this semester is not really we do. We need to have that for to make a decision and it is asking them to scan and send that mid term report to every professor that they're taking classroom. Is that really a good use of their time, and is that something that we can be flexible on? So understanding where in the process do we actually need something and where can we be flexible and work with families and students on?

Your point about not having grades, especially last semester is huge. Lot of kids took pass fail because that's they cut off in the middle of semester and they couldn't finish. So that's going to be huge in terms of evaluating these students. And then I think your other point about the stories or what we hear from students either in their essay or indirect letters of recommendation will allow. I think for.

A campus too.

Kind of wrap their arms around this new classes coming in, 'cause you might have to add if you can some functionality on your campus because this this this new wave students are coming in with different conditions versus those that came in years prior, so those two points that you just made right there they set out to me that I've got to have conversations with my team about.

And we're like generalist said we're just at the beginning of having these discussions last year to counter respond what we offer to students who did not have test scores was an opportunity to take a course placement test vertically and at no costs. And so we were able to look at their sub scores on those placement test and then decide.

And and kind of use that for admission after we looked at their transcript in conjunction with those scores. But then to make an admission decision, but also to make course placement decisions because knowing who needed like a remedial course. I don't know if you guys have students who have to take intermediate college algebra, but trying to determine where to even put them when we get ready to schedule them was problematic for us if they did not have test scores. And so we did take advantage of that. And we had a lot of students take advantage of the opportunity to receive a voucher.

Anne, Anne, and take that test virtually through our testing center, so we did use that, but we are at this place where we have really not really budged on our requirements for test. I think we're just holding out to see what's going to happen next. We have additional test dates have been added for that, ECT. We are face to face in our high schools. The testing centers are open and so I think until we see some kind of maybe second wave or.

Maybe that doesn't happen will continue to put forward our push forward and do what we've always done until we have to change, but I don't think as an institution we've reached a point yet where we feel like we have to change suggest. Yet I think that that.

Only the future will tell where we go next. We are also part of a system, so we're one University within a system and so a lot of the changes kind of come from the top from the system office and they said they advise this on what they think we should do next, and as it as a as a system we have not made a decision to be test optional. We're still requiring those tests. Those test scores for admission an for scholarship purposes and so here we are I guess. Let's wait and see what happens next.

I suppose that's all any of us can do. I want to open the floor up to sort of questions from our participants here, and one of the questions that stood out from Josh Gordon. You know what's funny about this? Is that, you know, we've talked a lot about Covette and pivoting and changes and all the things that are sort of upcoming. But there's also a lot of the core functionality that we that still has to continue happening. The role of working with other offices and integrations, and getting slate.

Fully implemented and taking advantage of all the features. And so this question. Greetings from Baton Rouge. I'm the assistant director of admissions at SVR. We're currently a banner 9 institution and getting ready to merge with slate if any of you have worked with both software before, what is your biggest takeaway and plus of using them separate or together?

New banner schools or have thoughts and inspiration about integrating with a campus Sias?

The only thing I would say is when we first implemented slate we ran both CRM's at the same time.

In our as we were implementing, so we kept. We were recruiting Revolution school so we kept illusion running.

As we were building Slayton running slate because we had to have some connectivity to the rest of campus or where Revolution colleague and so we had to run him together for about 8 months and that does require some work. But for about 8 months until we were fully ready to.

Do slate by itself and turn off turn off solution so if you're able to you, you might want to try and do two at the same time. I know that causes confusion sometimes, but it worked best for us.

See.

We are implementing banner and so we're moving from our current SIS 2 banner and our go live for the student section of banner will be December of 2021. However, we obviously are. We were using Slayton prior to using slightly used a different standalone CRM system and we've been running both of those at the same time up until today and today we turned off the old one and turned on the new one.

So to speak, or shut one down and picked and loaded one up to use for processing. And so I do suggest that while you can build out, you do continue to do that, but you know we're starting that new cycle. You really have to kind of turn off and turn it on, but we have not experienced really any issues with integrating slate or our old CRM with our SIS. It's just a matter of having some folks on your team who can set up those bidirectional.

Bridges for you those APIs not challenging at all. I wrote the extracts from slate to move the data over to our existing SAS. I had to put in a few tickets because there was a little bit of advanced. Kind of.

There was some advanced things that I needed to do, like the configurable joins thing so that I got some support from slate and we were able to. My team was able to build out those extracts and move those over and for those to import correctly into RSIS and so I found it to be pretty easy compared to what we did with our last CRM, but just a matter of having extracts and making sure that the you have people in your.

Department who work on your sic RP in place to help you kind of configure the the scripts that pick up those files and load the load them in to make sure that the data rules are in place in terms of field dominance and so it does require some support from your IT department, but I wouldn't say that building out the extract was that complicated. I found it to be pretty pretty easy. It did take us a few weeks and we had to rethink it several times but.

It worked.

Wonderful if there are any other questions, feel free to pose them in the chat as we could have come in for a landing on our hour here.

I just want to say thank you to the three of you for for joining us today. I mean, the I really appreciate your insights and appreciated sort of your perspective. I enjoyed working with the three of you to kind of put this thing together. It's an interesting time in our profession and it's an interesting time in higher education and I want to encourage these conversations to really continue and what I admire most about our clients and is this community is the fact that people are willing to get together and have discussions like this and share ideas and.

Frustrations and Curiosity is an innovations and I think that's a remarkable feature of our profession and so thank you for being so willing to do that. I was talking to a friend of mine at a conversational last week with another director of admissions and I asked her what the best thing about her job was and she said, well, I gotta admit.

And that's my joke for the day.

Thank you all for joining us before we close out. Just a reminder. We have a couple of upcoming events. Later on. We have one this week on Thursday, September 3rd. 2:00 PM EAB will be joining us in a session called turbocharging. Slate based recruitment marketing with advanced data science from EAB and then next Tuesday. My colleague Ken Higgins is going to be moderating a discussion. Continuing this applied to alumni series on student success, engaging with students to achieve results, so hopefully will be able to join us for those two upcoming events.

We're excited to continue to be doing these these conversations in series. Best of luck to everybody as you kind of go about your week, and I'm sure we will see you how under next session. Thank you all very, very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So we click off.

This is a click off.