Turbocharging Slate-Based Recruitment Marketing with Advanced Data Science from EAB

No snow.

There was no.

Beautiful thank you. Can appreciate the introduction and the opportunity to speak with everyone. Hope you're all doing well and safe wherever you are wanted to start off today just by talking briefly about EAB and telling you a little bit more about us. Some of you I'm sure, are familiar with us, but for those of you that may not know as much about EAB, which wanted to let you know that we help schools support students across the entire educational journey from enrollment to graduation and beyond, we do this in a very distinctive way. We're mission driven company and our partner schools are at the center of our work.

We apply the insights and expertise to your biggest challenges, enrollment, success where of course you're working on finding and enrolling the right students. Student success, supporting and graduating more students. An institutional success, preparing for the future. So these are common challenges. So what makes our approach different? Well, to start with, our work is rooted in research, whether it's through our research memberships, technologies or services. We are constantly finding and refining the best ways to solve problems. We also have the advantage of scale working with more than 1700 institutions and millions of students gives us.

Unparalleled visibility into what's really happening, what works and what doesn't, and we deliver results were proud of the fact that 95% of our partners continue their work with us year after year because that reflects the real world impact we achieved together at each school that we serve.

So now that we've talked a little bit about EAB, wanted to quickly outline the road map of what will be talking about today, three parts pretty straightforward. The first section I'll be talking a bit about the sort of yield challenge that many of you face, and obviously many of you know this very well, but I think some numbers and ways of framing it that might be helpful for you. Well, then, shift to a kind of talking about how slate and the yield IQ product that EAB offers work together and Mary and I will be kind of covering different parts of that and then maybe will go into a deeper level in terms of talking about.

Seeing his experience this year and how that all kind of come comes together.

So to start with, I wanted to just talk about the fact that this is increasingly going to area an era of uncertainty, as we're talking about here. You know, it's certainly been the case that for years and years, now longer than I've even been around in the profession, students have been applying to more and more schools, and so that is certainly not not a new challenge, you know. Certainly, you know, it's been a few years now since we've been able to have the faster rank order that we received from the Department of Ed. Obviously, this year changes in the nack, ack, CPP vote.

And then this year, of course Kovid Pandemic. And as we look ahead towards the future, you know we're really seeing and going to feel this year in particular, the impact of reduced test taking and what that's going to mean in terms of how we're building our classes. And of course, the changing demographics, which is many of you I know, ever have likely read Nathan Grawe's excellent book about this and sort of what's coming. And you know when he wrote it 2020, six 2027 felt kind of far off. It's still a little ways in the future, but getting closer all the time, so I'm sure that will.

You know, kind of be upon us before we even really, really can quite realize. And So what all of this means is that it's getting harder and harder and harder to predict the yield rate. And because of the way yield rates are changing, being able to understand that it is even more important. So what we're just simply showing here is just saying that as there's more and more, uncertainty in is more and more of these variables change the margin of error around any type of projection, or prediction that you might do is just going to keep increasing.

And you know, back in the good old days, which again is before my involvement and enrollment. You know when you had, you know, sort of 40% yield or something, or 50% yield somewhere in that part. If you went down one or two percentage points, it didn't make a huge difference on your overall outcome. Well, what now that you know, many yields are down in the in the single single did or you know, sort of low teens? And in that range one or two percent change in yield can throw the whole class off. It can be mean the difference between success and failure. So we sort of have two pressures here, one where it's getting harder and harder to predict yield and to wear.

Even small changes in yield have even more significant outcomes on on the on the class.

So into this wanted to talk a little bit more in depth about, you know, kind of the kovid part of the challenges that I mentioned before you know. So this is results from a survey that we had EAB do regularly. And here as you can see, we are comparing results that we had in 2018 versus results that we had from this spring. Sort of after the Kovid Pandemic had hit. And so we're looking at in this particular case, families that we'd call middle income, so not sort of low income families are real high income families.

And as you can see the question we ask them is, you know are are you willing to you know how much are you willing to pay for college and and in this case we're showing just the percentage of those that said that they're willing to pay $15,000 or more for college, and so you can see that that number has swung dramatically in the past two years where it was nearly 60% two years ago. And now we're down to 45% this year. So from above, hafta now below half that are willing to pay that, and for those of you, in case you're wondering, this is.

What they're willing to pay in total, including room and board. So this is not just tuition costs. This is all in what they think their family can afford to pay for college, which is a pretty sobering result when you when you, when you think about after room board fees, what that means in terms of net tuition, revenue from from any anyone of these particular students. So it's it's a real shift, and I think really speaks to, especially for really across the range. I mean, it's a similar result may be different magnitudes that we saw for the lower income families versus the higher income families. Directionally it was the same.

The same part I think, just speaks to the uncertainty that families are facing. They don't feel as confident in their own financial futures and so therefore are not as willing or not as comfortable spending on their center daughters. Education may be quite in the same way that they that they had before.

So if we take that forward and sort of see how that's maybe played out a little bit in this year in terms of the actual results of the of institutions, and in particular looking at it by family's ability to pay so quickly oriented to the slide, and then we'll kind of dig into the actual results with this so you can see here that we're looking at different FC Band. So basically your Pell students are basically at the top and then in bands going down you have different levels of affluence all the way down to sort of the most affluent students.

At the bottom.

And what we're taking a look here is really understanding. You know that you know, sort of. If you were running behind, and admits at a particular FC level, it was really translating into a change in deposit. So we're showing here, you know for eligible students, there were 3% fewer admits from 20 versus 19, but that resulted in 13% fewer deposits, and so you know, even even in places that we look at the most affluent families where there actually were increasing admits of those that were the most affluent families.

That the deposit rates certainly didn't didn't keep track. So even where there is some growth across our partners, there was not. You know it's it's half the growth of deposits that that was seen in terms of admits. So what this really tells us is that yield was such a challenge this year and that while it was maybe more magnified among those, those especially low income families Pell eligible and just outside of Pell Range it was really across the board that we saw, you know the lower yield rate. Then we then we might have expected.

So just a couple of data points in a couple of the things that were seeing behind the scenes in terms of talking about, you know, some of the challenges. I know many of you are feeling those very directly anan very, you know. Very social right now as students coming back to campus and you're really seeing all of that, so wanted to shift then an will start talking a little bit about slate and yield IQ and to kick us off. Mary is going to talk a little bit about a little bit about slate and some of the reasons why it's really worked well for Sienna.

Thanks, S just a quick little note on my background, so I have been with Sienna for 26 years. Before that I worked in public accounting. My undergraduate degree in accounting and very quickly realized that I much preferred the higher education space. So I work both in admissions and financial aid directly. Financial aid directly reports to me in in through mycareer in higher education. I've always had some responsibility for the operations that technology when we only had one or two computers on desks and things like that so.

You know this is a good marriage of of a lot of my background, and slate really became a tool that was obvious to me very quickly. That would be a game changer in the recruitment space in terms of providing really easy intuitive access to the information to our recruiters, you know the data analytics side, we could always have access to that. We would find a way we would work with our IT partners across campus, but really to impact.

The outcomes of the individual student level getting the information into the counselors hands in a way that was easy and makes sense. It was intuitive for them to use. Also allowed them to get more comfortable exploring and trying things which then allowed them to be better at what they were doing and then they were teaching each other. So you know it was really, really significant. Changed over my career time in terms of empowering the staff to contribute to the outcomes. Slate has done a fantastic job.

About constantly changing and upgrading, and sometimes I would. At the beginning. I honestly was a little bit worried because some other partners that we work with some of the tools we've worked with. Sometimes they would make a change or an upgrade and it would break other things or things wouldn't work exactly as promised or as expected. We have not experienced that with slate at all. There are very open to hearing from clients about this wasn't working as I thought. Can we try this? Can we do that? I think last year they announced 16 gnu gnu tools to help schools.

Their perspective is definitely from the student. Recruitment is designed specifically for this purpose. It wasn't something designed for a different purpose, so they understand what challenges and what information will be valuable to their users, so.

Things don't break, they evolve, they do it fast an they're really great about communicating, and the slate community is fantastic about supporting each other and then the other piece which I know is something that came up in some of the questions that were submitted in advance was about the integration with other systems and slate. It makes it very easy not only to get information out in any format in any way you want, so you can put it somewhere else if it's in your ERP system for your institution.

Or into an Excel sheet or a whole bunch ways. But also. And really importantly, for this exercise that we're talking about is to get information in. It makes it so easy. You don't need a programmer to be able to get new data, new files and file layouts, and integrated into the system. It really does work well. It works quickly and it is very, very easy. As I said, you don't need a programmer. I used to have programmers working for me because we needed to have data moving between systems.

Don't need to do that anymore, so huge huge benefit from that, definitely.

So a little more on the integration. I think that.

Expect specifically with EAB Aniele's IQ.

I don't have a LAX say on this because really, that are two partners couldn't have made this any easier. You know when when we decided to engage with slate? I think that people at EAB were jumping for joy because they knew they were going to be able to help us more tightly integrate our data more regularly. We used to have to run access databases connecting to Oracle and we would do it once a week to send the data to AB for the work that they would do and then they would provide data back to us that we would then have to deal with.

We're now to the point where our data is moving every day, so it's real time, so it's much faster. And really I didn't have to hire A programmer to make this happen really. You know, we do have someone on staff, that's our CRM specialist that manages slate worked with the EAB team. You know the hard part was the data mapping. We do some things differently, but you know, there is this core of slate that was built with the eye towards student recruitment. So they understood all that an it was much easier.

You know we didn't have the hours of data mapping, so it was not allowed to say here because it was very easy.

That's great to hear, and certainly I mean, I know the for those who that might be wondering, you need baby does have a dedicated team that can help set up this and make it make it happen and get all the SFTP. You know exchange is set up so that the data goes both ways so that it's both you know receiving the data we need to do our modeling and I'll talk about that in a minute as well as then being able to push through the results back to slate so that it gets into the hands of the counselors and the people who needed to use it to actually turn the insights into action and recruitment success. So just you know.

A piece about the yield IQ component of this, you know what were an important part of the yield IQ product? Is this sort of scoring about of students and will talk a little bit more about that later, but it's really taking just, you know, a lot of data. Big data, as we often hear about and applying some advanced statistical tech methods and techniques to it to be able to provide that scoring. And so you know it's just. But as you said, it's that daily update that makes it so so powerful because things change so quickly and so being able to.

Have that all set up and being able to refresh the models daily and and you know keep everything up to date. Make sure that you know you're not a week or two behind when these insights are getting too to the counseling staff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and the other just add one other thing. The other thing that was great about this integration was really it setup so it happens automatically like nobody has to babysit it. I don't have to have somebody remember to do it. If somebody isn't here or not available. I don't need somebody to deal with it. You know in both directions file gets dropped in a folder in the systems take over, which is exactly how it should be. Makes it so much easier. No babysitting.

Right, absolutely Yep.

So a little bit about, you know, kind of the yield IQ, product and kind of the different components of it. So one important part of that is sort of related product that we call deposit IQ that is always always part of the yield IQ experience and deposit IQ is very straightforward, it's communicated to admitted students and literally just says, do you intend to deposit? And because we've designed it to really be laser focused on getting an answer to that one question.

It does get a very high response rates and the results that students provide back are very indicative of what they're actually going to do, and so to put some numbers behind, kind of what we're talking about there you can see here on this particular slide, we're talking about the The five different survey responses that are possible done. Yes, probably, maybe and no. And then their ultimate deposit rate that they end up with, and so you can see that certainly you know students that are saying done, or yes, have a very high probability of ultimately enrolling.

The probably in babies are kind of the folks on the fence right in, right in the middle, and if they say no, they mean no. You know if they respond to know it, you know there's less than a basically a 1% chance that they are ultimately going to end up enrolling. And so as it's pointing out here, just even this survey by itself allows sort of staff to sort of scale their attention and focus on roughly 1/3 of the population because nearly half have said no, and so you can sort of exclude those, and there's another 20% or so that are highly likely to come.

And so you know, obviously important to continue working with those students, but you know where you can really make a difference in where you can really, you know, convert people is taking them from the sort of fence sitting category and and pull them up into the sort of you know, maybe or no part of it.

So this deposit IQ survey is certainly helpful, but it doesn't always tell the whole story. Anne, so for that is why we combine the survey results and add 150 or more additional data points that come both from the institution as well as sort of consumer data and other data sources that we have here at Abe. And so combine those two things together again using some of the fancy advanced statistical methods that we like to use so much, and from that create 10.

Likely to to yield category. So instead of just the five responses, we now have 10 different categories that even more finely grained allows you to understand student behavior and sort of which which category they are in. The other advantages that yield IQ can then be deployed before we send out the survey. Typically we found that deposit IQ doesn't really work to send before students have their financial aid packages because they just don't have enough information to make their their decisions. But as we all know, yield is now a 6 to 8 month event.

That's going on, and so we need to have these insights. You know, maybe before student has even been packaged, and so you'll like. You allows us to create these. These 10 des Iles even in the absence of the survey responses, but instead just just focusing on those additional data points that are there.

So these 10 yield IQ ratings that are then created. Obviously as you can tell based on this particular slide that you know sort of low, low, low yield IQ rating means they're not likely to enroll and you can see again sort of similar to the half of the class. That said, no through the deposit IQ survey you can see that you basically have 1%, maybe up to 4% chance of enrolling students who are in the bottom half, whereas you get up towards the top and now you're looking at some somewhere you know.

You know 75% are who are or scored in that in that top decile are likely to enroll and so it really, really helps. Kind of clarify where these different opportunities are. So at EAB we've taken these in. Broken these into four categories again and so we'll just kind of quickly walk through and sort of talk a little bit how we kind of see the world and kind of, you know where we're looking at it. So starting with the very bottom of the profile, you can see that we're looking at the ones, twos and threes in yield IQ rating.

It's about 30% of the admitted student population, likely a lost cause. These these are students who are very unlikely to to enroll and so really low priority efforts towards these students. Basically, if you're already sending out emails or other communications, certainly include them. We don't want to ignore anyone, but this is. This is not a fruitful place to be spending a lot of your high value high in intensity. Time for follow up.

The next category, you know, is sort of more in the middle of these are the force, fives and sixes. Again, they're pretty long shot. You know we're still talking to single digit deposit rates out of this group, so it's, uh, you know, they're not. Not not strong contenders, but there's still a little bit more opportunity there. And so again, low priority overall. Definitely still, obviously all the standard communications and then sort of as it works. You know, if there's a chance to connect with them or or there's you know some some reason to reach out to them. Certainly you can take advantage of those opportunities, but.

Don't want to necessarily focus your time and efforts there.

Next to the seven and eight switch, we kind of put as the highest priority, and again because these are the people on the fence and so we want to really make sure that these are the people you can really make a difference where there thinking about you. You're maybe one of the top two or three, and so there's a real chance to be able to tip them over and get them into the Yes category, and so this is where we certainly recommend the most intensive personal engagement, because again, this is where you can have that that biggest opportunity to kind of move them along. And as you can see, dip oset rates now are inching up.

Much more dramatically than kind of where they've been. Obviously not as high as in that in the highest style, but certainly a lot stronger.

And finally, it's just students at the very top in those nine. Who are, you know, nine in 9th and 10th des Iles these are students who are overall largely ready to deposit, you know, sort of more of a medium priority in terms of terms of follow up. You know. Again, I kind of go back and forth this myself. You know, obviously, in some ways, what we're saying is, you know, opportunistic personal engagement is 1 level. It just depends on your particular institution and how you're doing recruitment. Some people would want to be more intensive with these, but the idea is that these are people who are more likely in your camp, and so the heaviest effort should go towards those seven and eight. Those those students on on the fence.

So just a couple things. Then about kind of our models and a little bit about how our models might differ from, say, a more traditional type of scoring. The first is that they're dynamically updated, so it's very talked about before you know where where things are happening. You know things are happening in kind of a daily basis. Students get re scored on a daily basis, so as their behaviors and their Dan the data we get on them changes. Their scores are going to be updated daily as well so that you know that you have the most up-to-date part of that.

You, like you, is very, you know institution specific. So it's really focused on the particular data points and equations. An sort of needs of that particular institution, so it's not based on some general average across the entire population. It is done. You know, partner by partner, and certainly we're adaptable in Indiana in the input, some things may be more important for particular institution, so you have a Conservatory of music or a nursing program, or you know whatever the case might be, you know we're really able to adjust and make sure that the model makes sense for.

Your particular enrollment environment?

And the last point I'll make on this before we turn it over to Mary to learn a little bit more about that is that as we found out, it was really the predictive power of the model was very kind of pandemic proof, so it's a little bit maybe hard to see in this particular view, but there are actually 2 lines here that are that are overlaid. There's kind of a light Gray line. That's the 2019 data, and then the TL line is the 2020 data and this is just saying, You know, sort of the showing you the deposit rate by these different des Iles and just showing you that.

Even this year, with the pandemic and all of the changes, this model was still able to very, you know, correlating track very closely with prior years and also be very predictive where if you're you, know eight, 9 or 10 in R model year. Significantly more likely to yield and enroll than students who are in.

Do the ones, twos and threes.

So there was just a little bit about yield IQ an now wanted to have Mary talk a little bit more and in a little more depth about how Sienna fared this year and how the slate and the EAB yield IQ work together to help her with that.

Thanks after so little bit about. See Anna, I see some of the schools, some of some of you will know about Sienna, but some of you won't. So Siena College is an undergraduate liberal arts Franciscan Catholic College in the capital of Loudonville, New York, which is just right outside the Capitol, Albany so very essentially located in the state. You know, we tend to be a regional in terms of our reach. Most students come from a three hour radius.

Which does you know? Go into Massachusetts and Connecticut and New Jersey to some degree, but so that's where our students largely come from. We are about 27% Pell eligible of our students, so we have a reasonably hype eligible population on our campus.

Undergraduate we have a few Masters degrees. We have an MBA and a Master of Science in accounting, but we really are undergraduate focused institution. Most of our students are in residence on campus, usually about 85% a little lower this year, but not significantly lower. So you know, we're very traditional liberal arts college with strong business and science programs as well.

So let's let's flip to the next slide here. So I talked a little bit about this. You know, really, we've been partners with EAB for a very long time.

We have a very active search campaign, an activity that we engage with EAB on and really have always had great relationships and great partnerships. But the data was always a challenge. You were a banner school, so banner is our ERP system and everything is in banner. It's a good tool, but it's not very intuitive or user friendly as much training and time we spent with the admission staff to.

Have them understand the data and where the information was. It just was not Intuitive. It wasn't designed for them or to do their work. It was designed to store data is really what it was designed for you when we had used some different CRM's over the years. As things were evolving and really when we engaged in partnered with techno Lucian's in slate it was a game changer it really just.

Actually allowed us to explode in terms of our management in our communications in ways that were far more strategic, far more segmented, far more flexible and again as I talked about really empowered our staff to use the information in the data at their fingertips. You no longer wear these piles of files that we had to move around, and I'm sure people know remember those days. You know, we're not doing that anymore. Everything is available to them almost immediately in a way that makes sense and that they can use.

And for each other as well, you know.

Somebody wants to get input from another counselor and something it's very easy to do that. So these these two partnerships of the two things and then add on to that you know, EAB yield, IQ information and data. So how do you use that? How do you get that information into a place that makes sense so that information comes into our slate system?

I think every day if not every day, several times a week and as we get the information it's presented to our counselors for them to see as they are engaging with the student or a family or students record or family on a topic they can see what what has the student answered? Have they recently answered a yield IQ question? What Dessel are they in? What probability are they two enrolled at high, medium or low probability? But further it allows us to target our communications.

By using that data as selects as queries and then targeting the communication using liquid markup to maybe if this is a low yielding student, we're going to insert this paragraph not only to segment the populations, but to be more personalized, and that communication based on what we know about that student with all of this data so you know it's been a these the partnership of all the things together really have changed how we do our business in a way that's much more efficient without question.

And much more powerful in terms of engaging our students in our families. Let's go to the next slide.

So we had a great year, you know, 2020 wasn't isn't. Yeah, we're all anxious for 2020 to end. It was really hard and very stressful and scary we have. We had great growth in the beginning. You know? That was one of the things that we were focused on was to create a strong applicant pool to have a lot of visits during the fall semester to allow students to really fall in love with, you know.

And we did that Well, you know, we got great application pool. We were able to admit more students as a result of that application pool without lowering our standards for admission. We didn't make any change to our admissions criteria and increase our deposits. And you know that those things have a compounding effect. You know you have more applications which allows you admit more, which hopefully allows you to have more students in your class. We are going to have our largest. We have our largest freshman class ever at the college.

And last year was a record year as well, so we even exceeded last year's enrollment by a significant number. So let's go to our next slide.

You know, again, all around great picture, better revenue for the college, improve diversity significantly. Most diverse class. Maybe in the colleges history. I haven't looked that up yet. We did have a slight loss of our pal eligible students. 1% it was a small end so it's a small number of students. And again we are 27%. So it's very pretty significant commitment there and we're going to work on that as we move forward. All of this while holding yield.

So it was again that compounding effect of those additional applications. Those additional strong admits in terms of their engagement with us that really allowed us to achieve these results while holding yield. The other thing I'll note here is that we were able to decrease our discount rate while we did all this. That was a good outcome. It was we had planned to decrease it, but we decreased it by more than we plan to. You know, we're about 100 students over goal.

Even in this year, so it was really again a great year which we were very happy to be able to have had those results. Let's go to the next slide.

So most of you I don't have to tell this to you. We're all in the same boat here on this, you know, free suni.

Five of our top ten competitors are State University of New York systems, where, at least for the last several years, students could have.

Free tuition to those sooni schools and we have a lot of strong state schools in New York State. You know? We over just a little over a year ago, brother Ed Coughlan our president, beloved president, passed away unexpectedly. So this is how we started the 20 fall 2020 recruitment cycle. So brother Ed passed away unexpected in July. Presented another challenge. You know we're a very small community here and that was hard and challenging.

For us we have added more new programs in the last five years then we did in my previous 20 years at the college, which is contributed to our success without question. We've added nursing, we've added communications. We added a business major. So all those things have helped us, but it also presented challenges. You know, nursing students are recruited very differently. Their timeline is very different and we had some missteps in the beginning when we were trying to figure out how to do that and what they needed to know when we were.

Partnering with another school, so we had to workout those details so that you know wasn't was an added pressure as we went into this season. And you know, before all those things, was the net worth and act changes. And actually the nakat changes really helped us think about our strategy and approach differently to really push things earlier with the idea that if we could get students to engage with us sooner and really, deeply engage.

Not just transactionally engaged, but deeply personally engaged that they would have a harder time walking away from us.

Yep.

Yeah.

If another school tried to move them away right, let them learn about Seattle. Let them find out that we are the place for them or not. I mean, that's a reality too, but those students that thought we were the place for them. You know, do that sooner. So give us a longer time for them to understand how they fit here and how they can contribute and be part of our community. So lots of challenges. And then March it so we were already in a little bit of a box which was actually turned out to be a good thing.

In our case, because that pre planning and preliminary work helped us in March significantly.

So then comes the pandemic, so we are a college that has traditionally relied very heavily on our spring visit. Programs are. Students tend to be really relational in nature, soon as in very relational place. It's a very community oriented that people are the thing that makes the difference for both our students in our faculty and staff, so we rely heavily on those spring visits. 7 to 800 students we would have unique visitors. We would have in the spring and the.

Count on those programs was exceptionally high. You know well over 50%. Some would even reach 70% and all of a sudden the vast majority of those were going to be gone. And what do you do with that? You know we toyed with a whole variety of tactics, including trying to replicate our events virtually, but for what we do and what our students want, we knew we couldn't do that virtually well. We didn't have the time to develop the programs. Well, we didn't have the time to understand the technology they had and that we had.

To do that, well, so we said, OK, we're going to do 1 to one intensive recruitment and again this information about with the old IQ coupled with slate really allowed us to do that. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that as we go forward. So let's let me layout for you exactly how we did that. Let's go to the next slide stuff. So what would happen is?

The leadership team, which includes the director of financial aid, director of admissions, are marketing communications people on the vice president for role management. We meet would meet regularly, look at data, look at a lot of information and make decisions about. OK, what our priority is going to be for this week. Where do we see any weakness? Where do we see strength? What capacity to the teams have? We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to.

Attack this process, especially when our admissions team is used to working together again. Like our students, they want to be together and they feed off each other. They get ideas off each other. You know now everybody's home in their own space. So we came up with this idea that we would have teams our new president, doctor Chris Gibson named at Fight Club.

Oh we had fight clubs all spring and what they did was the teams got together 3 four counselors. We had three or four teams in in each team was someone that was a strong writer. I'll get to that why that's important in a minute. Somebody that has more of the marketing hat then necessarily the student recruitment or financial aid hat. So the leadership team would decide. OK, this is are these are our priorities.

Inevitably, there were too many students in that priority list, so we couldn't get to everybody, so that can feel overwhelming, and we certainly wanted to give the staff.

Groups of students that they can actually reasonably work through so they didn't get overwhelmed.

Yep.

Right?

So we would use yelled IQ to help us slice and dice, and it's as important to know who's likely to enroll. I actually think it's even more important to know who's not going to enroll. Because again, as Seth talked about, you can decide what you're going to do and how much resource are you going to allocate their and the other thing I'll note here is by studying our data, we knew we were actually underperforming in the highest decile, so in that end S I'll which I think is like 72 or 73%, maybe were 75%.

It.

Enrollment rate ours was a little lower than that, so we knew we needed to do a little more than we were doing. We probably were ignoring them too much. I don't want to say ignoring, but they were getting too much of our standard and not enough of the personal about them, so we knew we were going to feed some of those high decibel kit students in there. So when we had to get down to who are we going to talk to? That decile ranking was one of the things that we used to really focus the groups and through slate we were really able to.

Create queries for each of the teams by adjusting a few of those variables. That data was in Slaton, refreshed regularly that they were able to just click on the query and pull up their list for that week, and then they were tasked with working through that. So let's talk about that a little bit more.

Actually, before I get there, I think one of the questions that came in an advance was about what data points should admissions recruiters on the front lines review daily to shape their understanding and actions toward meeting their recruitment and goals? What tactics can we use to become more proactive and less reactive in our recruitment efforts? Yeah, and I think that's really challenging. I think you have to know your pool and you have to know your school. So I think it's important that the admissions recruiters understand what the goals and objectives are. So what are the priorities?

You know what's happening with nursing? Where are we? How many seats do we have? How many do we have left? You know what's happening in their School of Business? Where? Where do we need to have students from geographically what's happening so it's important for them to understand what your enrollment goals overall R and then again, given the environment we were working with in the spring, it would be easy for them to get overwhelmed. The numbers are too big, they just can't possibly manage the number of students in their region or their market and get through them all so.

The recruiters understanding what the yield IQ des Iles meet and having a really good understanding of OK. This is where I need to spend most of my time and you know, as much as I love this student, I really hope this student comes to see Anna. They're not coming. I'm not going to spend as much time on that student as much as I my heart wants me too. That's not really where I need to spend my time, so I think it's less about knowing which data elements to focus on in more about them. Understanding what the goals and objectives are.

Yep.

And then really providing them with the tools and in our case this year it happened to be lists of students where they would collaborate together on how to get that student to engage. So it was really a team.

Approach to OK help, let's find something about this student that will help us get them to engage. So let's go to the next slide, which this is where the the meat of the work, and I think the next.

Was the game changer for what happened with. See Anna this year. So one more stuff.

OK, so.

We did things like read essays and find out that the student always golfed with her Gran father in the grand father passed away a year ago.

And you know what we did, we sent them a Santa golf ball with a note from that Regional Councillor.

We did things like used parent information and called out.

Students who had parents who were first responders. While all this was going on, nurses, doctors, firefighters, law enforcement CNA's you know home health care aides.

And we again we used yield IQ to help narrow that list. But we sent all of those families Sienna branded lifesavers with a note thanking their families for the contribution that they were making to helping the their community navigate this terrible public health emergency. We did things like understand that the English was the second language for the student, and Spanish was the language spoken at home. And we wrote in Spanish to the families.

Either through emails or or handwritten notes. So we were able to communicate with them in the language their native language which made them more comfortable. You know, if you know those were fun things that we were able to do, that was all culling the data.

And what was integral in the success of that was?

In in the email communications, because it was.

Designed to get the student to engage right? All this is about calling the action and the call to action here was always to get the student to engage with the counselor.

You know, not going to the website. Don't follow this link and self serve. Get engaged with the counselor so then we can connect you to the next person on the campus who can help you better understand if CN is the right fit for you.

So a lot of those fun things, but the writing came in in terms of, you know, what do you put in the in the subject line?

To get the student 'cause we're getting emails like crazy so, but what do you put, you know, and I think on the Gulf one we.

We actually sent that. That was something we sent home actually so we didn't have A tag line, but we did things that would get the student to engage that let them clearly no.

That we knew who they were. We had a student who had a terrible story of having been bullied, and we have a program at Sienna called Upstanders and that is all about anti bullying campaigns in high schools and we reached out with that subject line for that student to talk about to open up the conversation about their experience and that we have a place where they can help students who are in the same position that they are they were in.

Right?

Make a difference and that led to a great thing that student enrolled. Now that student intends to be part of our up standard program which is trying to do some things virtually, but we were able to connect them with the president of the US standard club, which was the Seattle student. So the writing was really important because you know, hey, it's Siena College they're getting. You could put XY zed college, it could be anyway.

We wanted them to open the email and absolutely engage with that and then follow up again. We wanted the family to the student to engage. We wrote to parents to more about getting the student to engage. At this point we find that at this point in the cycle, the decision points are more on the students, but we did engage with their parents as well and sometimes found that it was through looking at the information in the application that it was better to contact the parents for whatever reason. We had a.

Yep.

Better opportunity there, and let's go to the next slide and one of the things that we did in this was uncomfortable at first, but we really got the staff to focus on.

Inviting the student to engage at a specific time.

Hey, are you want to talk about the upstander program Tuesday at 4?

I'd love to talk with you and it they were really uncomfortable with it at first. They did a good job and it's amazing how many people wouldn't talk at Tuesday at 4:00 but actually engaged because of that actual invitation for a date and a time. So that was another really specific contact that helped us with the students.

Yeah.

So that's kind of in a nutshell the see Anna Story, and that was the success and the combination of the information. In slate, the counselors being able to work seamlessly at home, the yield IQ data help us stay focused on who we needed to focus our resources on when they were extremely limited was really the key to the largest class in Siena College is history and an amazing execution by our staff. Amazing execution.

So.

Yeah Mary, I'm just going to say that's, you know, from my experience, those are the places that seem to have successful years when all those different pieces come together so that it's not just the you know. It's not just it takes the strategy. It takes the tactics it takes the frontline recruitment work. It's gotta be all the all the pieces of the puzzle coming together in order to have a successful year. So congratulations to do again. What a what a hard fought battle this year.

Fight Club.

Right by club I love that Fight Club so just wanted to wrap up with just a few kind of recap points for this. And then obviously we have some time for some Q&A as well. So the four key takeaways that we really wanted to leave you with our obviously preparing for the unprecedented deal challenges this year will be no exception. It's going to be even more challenging, even more unknowns in terms of this, it seems like every week we've covered some new something new wrinkle to kind of how all this works. So just being prepared for that.

You know, as as Mary, just so you know, I love the example of the golf ball and of the lifesavers. You know it's that intensive, student engagement, and so it's really finding those, though those parts of it, and that you know not all of the predictive analytics are created equal. And so it takes, you know, the right insights to be able to mine so that you can then do the right intensive student engagement from there and just number for pulling altogether. Although you know that these actionable insights really can move the dial and really can make a difference on the Roland outcomes. Again, I really like the quote you had there about.

The unfakeable person personalization. You know it's one thing to put someone's name in a subject line, but a whole other thing to pull out a little detail out of their essay and use that as a way to connect with them. And so I think that that's such an important part as well.

But

Awesome well yeah thank you so much for sharing Mary. You know we had talked obviously before the web and R live but just a great achievement that you you guys at Siena have done set to your point in these unprecedented times and they will continue to, you know get a little tired of saying the new normal, the new normal, the new normal but I mean that's that's actually exactly what it is. That's where we are. So many unknowns, kind of moving forward. So your recap.

No.

These key takeaways are really really valuable to continue to think about. So we have a couple of questions that have come through the chat which is great if you have questions at the moment, go ahead and chat them here and I've got some that came in through the registration process prior to set. This one is probably for you so it's a little bit more of a technical question, but a good one. I think that came through the chat. There was an assumption that the deposit rates you know some of the high end statistics or 30,000 foot statistics that you are advertising in.

Earlier slides probably averaged across your partner institutions. How do your analytics in yield IQ rank utilized? Both industry averages as well as like school specific history right? With the scoring if you want to maybe comment on that as deep as you'd like, that would be good.

Sure, yeah, and hopefully I understood the question correctly. I'd say two parts, yet the data we presented in this presentation is, you know, is the average across all of our partners, so we're kind of putting together the data across all partners. All students that we have have records for looking at it. That way when we're creating these des styles for you to individual partner that is based on their unique data set, there sort of, you know you need deposit IQ responses, and so each of those you know sort of equations that then power the scores that are created for each individual student. Those are unique and based on that.

In the individual institution, so there's no sort of global averages or sort of, you know, kind of you know across partner data that's used. It's all specific and unique to each individual partner.

Right?

Yep.

Sure, yeah, could gradients? I mean there's there's a lot of nuances to each, each individual institution, a ton right? Every school that you work with. This is different good follow up, follow question. Maybe both of you can respond to you know what's the what's the potential risk in saying, You know we're not actually going to actively seek out or actively try to recruit. I shouldn't even say, recruit actively tried to go in with this mega targeted recruitment of our lower scoring.

Yield IQ right? Is there a potential if maybe lose some by not doing that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure.

Sure.

I can speak to that, you know, in my perspective I get there is risk. I mean the risk in all those decisions, but I think historically we see that those lower ranked lower deciles overtime are very very close and very productive and at some point you have to make that risk calculation because you only have so many resources. So where are you going to go? But on the flip side of that, I would say that.

You know we made. We did do something different with our desolate ends this year because we didn't. We weren't where the EAB client base out bridge was, so we weren't doing enough. We, you know we were over performing in some areas, but we should have been over performing there. So again we made some adjustments to what we were doing based on that. So and that was a risk too because we had take resources from somewhere else to do that. If we couldn't move the needle, you know it's a much heavier lift to move the needle on those lower des Iles.

Yep.

Yeah.

There's no question about it and how much time and effort and resources can you expect to do that. So it is all risk equation.

Yeah, and you brought it up very eloquently earlier on. It's it's about making a data informed decision. You have limited resources in front of limited on them, certainly. So again, there is risk reward in any situation, right?

Right?

And can do the one thing I'd add to that is just, I think looking at the question in the chat, I break it almost into two parts. You know, the sort of yield IQ modeling helps you understand the probability in terms of where they might enroll, but doesn't inform the priority for you as as institutions. So there might be somebody who's low probability of enrolling, but if they're in an important population for you for whatever reason, you might still choose to go after that suited. And so I think it was. Mary talked a little bit about that. It's not just one filter of saying we're only going to look after the, you know, the Sevens and eights in terms of the.

Nestles, it's what are our priorities overall? Strategically, that's the starting point, and then it's the desol. Rankings are one of the later filters to say if that first list is too long, how do we want to prioritize within that?

Yeah yeah, now excellent point. Still have time for a couple more of one that came in previously. Then I'm going to combine it with Cynthia's question there, but let's talk.

No.

Right?

No, Sienna had a certain population of the admit pool that was, but let's say it's robust, right? What do we? How is it handled when the sample size is, let's say, significantly smaller and the significant isn't? Is a variable right? Whatever that number is, but let's talk about a small pool, right? How does that?

Alesis get get attached to that.

Yeah.

Sure.

Sure, you know in it looks like in the particular question from Cynthia here she's talking bout class sizes of 50 to 60. Our rule of thumb is we need sort of a minimum population size of 200 and that means 100 students that have deposited Anna hundred that if they have not deposited so sort of 100 in each category of our kind of Binary statistical population. In the case of populations where there there smaller like that, we can look at things like combining two years of data together or other things like that that can help us get enough volume so that we feel comfortable modeling on that so.

Yeah.

Absolute, certainly it's it's more challenging, and I'd say the models are somewhat less productive in nature just because you are dealing with a smaller number of students. But absolutely we can work with, you know, I'd say 100 is relatively small, at least in the in the undergrad space, obviously less so in the in the grad side, but even there there's ways of combining years of dating together. They can help us work with partners.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah again, kind of any any pool size.

Oh, what do you recommend? This came in Anne Marie two we talked about this a little bit before. Let's say you know, I said, well said I kind of want to see how this model works prior to the admit stage, right? Can we do this prior to admit stage in the funnel earlier on in the funnel to make some data informed decisions or predictions about who we think is going to apply? And maybe who we had the prospect level who we should pursue? Heavier to push the application once that you know if that call to action changes. Any suggestions Seth or thoughts about that?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know the yield keyword tool is focused, obviously by its name on on the yield part of that, but obviously you know it is possible an we do offer modeling that can happen in terms of, you know, looking at farther upstream pools of populations. I think some of the challenges there are that you actually know a lot less about a student before they apply, then then then after, and so it's a little bit harder to get a read on on some of that. And so I'd say certainly those types of models are available, but I'd use them more cautiously.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't. I be more inclusive if you will and sort of, you know, be more willing to kind of go after a little bit larger group rather than trusting the model so perfectly in saying, well, you know this bottom 20% is definitely not going to apply. You know big in. Maybe there's you know so opportunities for for some, some types of outreach there. So I think just it as anything. It's the context. And so you know the model is just just the model, it's it's how you use it and apply it and understand it that are the most important parts.

I think Ken just froze.

I think he did.

Not exactly sure where he was going, but I think he was talking about resistance to this approach. May be which would make sense so we didn't really. Actually, the staff was really anxious about Oh my gosh, how are we going to achieve our goals? You know, when the pandemic it? How are we going to do this? You know, we're a small look. We know how you know. Missing a class can have a significant impact on the college. And our team knows that and they were very clear on the overarching goals and objectives.

That we have, so they were anxious about it, and there were some things that they were resistant to it. You know the outreach on.

Yeah.

Can we talk at 4:00 o'clock on Tuesday was hard.

Yep.

Really hard to. They were like that. Same seems invasive, it seems it's crossing a line.

You know, if it's a student, they really know and it worked, but that's a whole different story, but that was there. But but again, I think they started to see some success. And now I think they would be huge cheerleaders of this, and in fact we've implemented something very similar to our recruiting process to get students to, you know.

Face to turn into applications.

So we're taking a similar approach because we're not quite fully back to 100% engagement and on campus and things like that.

Hi Sarah.

Out.

I.

I'm happy to talk to anybody if anybody wants to talk about slate or you'll die. Q my emails on the slide. I'm happy to talk to anyone about our experience or if I can help you and guide you in anyway as you're evaluating either one of these tools.

Add then just likewise. Yeah, if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to happy to have a follow up my emails there as well.

I'm back, the solar winds knocked me out of a knock me out of the competition here. Thank you. Seth, Ann Marie, and our platinum preferred partner EAB, fantastic data, fantastic presentation. Really, really enjoyed it. Thank you for your participation. It was. It was.

Great story, great use case so thank you for your participation. For all of those in the chat, don't forget that next Tuesday we are continuing our applied to alumni series next Tuesday. We're going to be focusing on some partners who are utilizing slave for student success and advising, so we hope we can make it to that one and everybody have a great rest of your week and weekend.

Bye everybody.

Thanks so much. Again, bye now.

I.