The Whole Picture: A Lifetime of Engagement, Supported by Technology

Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar titled The whole picture lifetime of engagement supported by technology. This is the first web and R in the technician series called dive deeper with slate preferred partners. This series is designed to highlight them. Anyways are platinum preferred partners provide value for the slate user community. The slate preferred partner program recognizes organizations that integrate with slate.

An offer implementation support while providing meaningful contributions to the higher education community.

Today's webinar is presented by RH be a marketing consultancy serving higher education that helps institutions maximize student lifetime value. A manifestation of their guiding principle of coherence.

A few things to note before I introduce our presenters. First, the web and R is being recorded and will make it available for on-demand viewing later. Close captioning can be enabled by clicking on the CC button at the top right corner of the share window next to the CC button. There is a full screen button, so if you'd like to make the presentation a little bigger, feel free to click there. If at anytime you experience any audio or video quality issues, we would simply recommend just refreshing the share window in your browser. And finally, if you do have questions for the presenters.

Please post them in the chat during the presentation. We will have some time toward the end of the hour for Q&A and we will get as many of those questions as we can.

Today's webinar is all about the life long relationship with our students in higher education. Student engagement is largely defined by the contemporary relationship a person has with your institution perspective. Student enrolled student or alumnus. How would your strategies change if you took a life long view of constituent engagement powered by your mission and slate.

Our presenters today from our HBREM chat founder and techno Lucian staff alumnus Alex Williams. We're now in higher education marketer rubs Lincoln and slate superuser Abraham Null presenters. I turn it over to you.

Outstanding thank you Dan. We're delighted to be with everyone this afternoon. We certainly hope everyone is doing well and staying healthy and wish you the very best with all your planning for the academic year ahead. All spurt by expanding on dans introductions just a bit first. A bit more about RHP. Briefly, RHP is a higher education marketing consultancy. Now our 30th year of solving the enrollment marketing an advancement challenges that institution space.

We've worked with more than 200 colleges and universities, helping them gain clarity for their market positioning and equipping them to confidently communicate their distinctiveness throughout the student journey. Thus, our work could entail everything from research to strategy to CRM Integration. Again, I've Robson. Can I serve as vice president of our HP and I lead our practice in marketing and communications, organizational development, and have the privilege of working with institutions?

And their leaders to dig into critical questions around structure or staffing systems and spend all aimed at maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing function on campus. I joined our HV last year after 17 years at Indiana University in a variety of advancement and marketing roles, including campus level vice Chancellor, an systemwide associate vice president for marketing, and as Dan mentioned, I'm very pleased to have two outstanding RHP colleagues joining today's webinar, Alex Williams and Abraham null.

Who will introduce themselves and provide a bit more about their backgrounds?

Thanks Rob. Alright so I am Alex Williams. I serve as vice president for marketing integration at our HB. I've been here for just under 2 1/2 years. I loved every minute. As Dan mentioned I came to our HP directly from technicians and I worked in the New Haven office working with colleges to implement slate. Obviously there should use of it and leading kind of a launch pad out of the New Haven office as well at times. So it's been an incredible experience to be here.

I lead our initiatives on the CRM front, most notably surrounding slate, so we do everything from expedited implementations of the system through advanced builds and things like portals as well. Strategic support on campus workshops and trainings, anasal of other services that surrounds late to really help institutions maximize their experience with this really powerful platform. We have a fantastic team on the all of our HB, but on the slate side of the house as well on Abraham Null is the newest member of that team and I'm excited that he joined us.

Just in time at the beginning of July to be joining us for this webinar, so I'll let him get a little bit of background as well.

Thanks Alex again. My name is Abraham Noel. I've been at RHP for less than a month so very very new. Prior to that I worked in the had the privilege of working at McAllister college for close to 14 years. Eight of those which was in the admissions and financial aid area and as part of that work I helped implement the slate system as well as provide some of the integration between it in some of the campus SIS systems. Mainly our financial aid environment.

Uhm, you know during that time I think I had the chance really to kind of learn slate inside and out and hopefully for on behalf of my institution at the time. Really maximize it's potential and I think you'll see, as we kind of talk through this.

Hopefully some of the things that both Alex I and Rob have learned as part of this experience. We can talk to you a little bit about today and we each come from different backgrounds, but the theme that is in this presentation, I hope comes out and hopes that are. I hope that my experience can potentially add it.

Great.

Great great thanks guys. Well I'll kick off with some thoughts and a story about the power of shifting to a mindset and culture of lifetime engagement and what it means to build life long relationships. An RH be our guiding principle is coherence. In fact, Rick Bailey, principle of RHP, wrote the book on coherence, the 2nd edition of which was just recently released and coherence is the alignment in the synergy.

Between customer expectation and authentic user experience and you can forward to the next slide. Alex thanks for thanks for running those but instead of coherence. There often friction points or points of disconnect across the higher Ed organization because colleges and universities organize themselves into functional silos for audiences who view an institution holistic Lee.

Again, if you could advance to the next slide, our communication and whether that's through personal interactions or CRM communications, and sometimes reflect the organizational chart of an institution when the audience only sees the institution so no matter our role or office, we are the institution to those were communicating with those were trying to reach influence and move to action in the ironic thing is about lifetime engagement that it should be everyone's job, right?

But who at your institution is thinking about the entire life cycle? Who owns that? What office owns that? And it's likely no one. So this is the holistic approach that we tried to take when I served as Vice Chancellor for External Affairs at a regional campus. They in the University and a bit of background about that. In that story, our division included three main offices, marketing and communications, alumni relations and philanthropy. It was an integrated.

Advancement model, but it's part of a realignment. We took integration a step further and did something unconventional. We brought in a fourth office campus life, so as a result we were then managing communications and to some degree experiences for the entire life cycle from grade school to Golden years. Marketing and communications was focused on brand building an enrollment marketing so perspective. Students for the primary audience. Campus life was obviously all about students.

Student activity, student clubs and organizations, student government and so on. And then alumni relations certainly focused on alumni and philanthropy focused on donors.

And we quickly started to see this setup as a competitive advantage. For one it put us closer to the student experience and student retention.

But most importantly, it put the students instead of the organization. It put the student at the center and we became organizationally structured to maximize integration and collaboration across the entire life cycle, including key transition points. And you can go ahead and advance to the next one, Alex, the next few, but this was less about structure. I want that to be clear less about structure and more about strategy. A people strategy, because this benefited students too.

Alex has a tough act to follow there, so I'll do my best here, uhm?

You know, I think my role in this conversation is to maybe talk about some of the possibilities of what potentially you could do with sleep, and I think perhaps where there are some areas of.

The ability to integrate the ability to grow it, the ability to maybe think about it is sort of a different tool set to be able to accomplish specific things for the institution.

So you know you kind of go back to some of the things that were said earlier.

Higher Ed, ultimately to a large extent, is about relationships. So when you start a relationship with a new perspective student, there is one set of things that you can potentially do and engage them in that relationship. Then you get to the point that they are in a place where perhaps they have applied and now you're engaging them slightly differently. And maybe there's some different forms involved. If you're using slate, and then finally hopefully you get them to the point that they have been offered admission and they deposit, and then that's where it really gets interesting. 'cause asleep product is it originally was sort of created was.

Is it a mission centric thing? Turns out, however, those slate is particularly good at a whole bunch of other things, because fundamentally the toolkit underneath of what's late is meaning things like being able to do integrated communications, analytics that are built in the ability to spin up forms quickly, the ability to build custom portals, the ability to do integrations for data, data that flows in and out, and things like the ability to have disprin datasets that sit outside the main data set. That's an incredible incredibly powerful package of tools to work with.

Uhm, you know. I think there are probably many people in this car that can give examples of real creative ways that how they put those things together. And I'm going to highlight a couple of ideas about how you might do that. So again, you know you're at the end of that final. Your perspective student has deposited. So now what happens? Well, common thing for schools to do is if there an international student, let's have a workflow that we can build that addresses specifically the immigration need. So getting visa clearance, collecting information around passport data.

Perhaps collecting fees? The beauty of what's late is it could do all that inside of it. Now, perhaps you want to pass that onto a sort of relationship with that student that is more of the new student experience. So again, not an unusual thing for schools to do. They can build a new student portal or an enrollment portal, and that's where it gets really creative, because that extends it beyond maybe what's late initially was built to do, but does it exceptionally well? So you think about the ability, perhaps? Do class registration? You think about the ability? Perhaps too.

Pass folks into a secondary system that collects health information. Maybe you don't want that health information. It's late, but you want to be able to get somebody from a slate portal to that health information system. And because slate does SSO and integrate seamlessly, that's a really nice experience in terms of the student experience.

Now you know and you can keep building on, and there's many more things. But if you keep moving into that cycle, at some point you have to say well. Are we added the admitted or sort of perspective student realm? What happens next? Well, for most of us, what happens next is we push that data into a secondary or primary SAS and they kind of go off in their academic career and do their thing, and hopefully they have a good experience with technology. There's certainly some fantastic products out there, but this is where you should maybe take a step back and think could slate do some of that work. and I think the answer.

In many cases, yes, and there's some great examples of where that has a curd, so this, for lack of a better term, I'm going to call this student success space in that student success space you have some basic things that are common to all. Sort of these products. One of the big ones is communication, so you need the ability typically to have a communication dialogue with the student back and forth, and you need to be able to see communications going out and also be able to track communications coming in. Slate does it exceptionally well because that's what you need to do to do an emission process.

So that's check the box for that one. How about we need to have the ability to perhaps have forms that we collect information. I'll give some examples. Maybe we're doing a creating a sort of situation where we want to manage conduct on campus, so you create a conduct manager out of slate, and then you're able to use forms to accept perhaps information around conduct issues, or Title IX reporting issues. Slate can do that potentially as part of its ability to build out forms, collect information stored securely, and that's really important. Security is a big part of that.

And then also you have this sort of ability to present information back to the student so that presentation could come from the deliver module and can take the form of email text, potentially print if you want to connect that as well social media, perhaps, depending on what the application is all the way to a very customized portal experience. So you have all the building blocks to be able to take what would have been an application portal in the slate application perspective, student world and kind of move it into the student success area where now have a customized view.

It's single sign-on integrated. It's aware of all the other things that the student potentially has been involved in and can be highly customized to that one very specific need. That's an incredibly powerful tool kit right out of the gate. Now you're getting into a world that maybe technicians wouldn't say that they perhaps sell the product specifically for, but if they give you all the tools and you have the knowledge to do it, then you're in a place where now you can do those things and you can do them in a very effective way and kind of going back to the theme of relationships and having a lifelong relationship.

You know, from a student standpoint, they don't see the Admissions Office of financial aid office international student program office, the Registrar, Office Office of student affairs. What they see as the institution. So when I communicate with you, there's some understanding underneath it all. Your offices are talking to each other perfectly. We all know that's a tough thing to do. Some of it is, frankly, political silos that occur just by the nature of the organization, which is a normal sort of human thing to have happen. The other thing though, our technological divides and those technology.

Logical divides can be caused by frankly just being on disparate systems, and that's where if you look at a scenario where perhaps you're using technician slate to kind of get at some of those things, now you're able to perhaps unify those different communication styles approaches you can see what each other is doing, and then you're in. If you go back to the student perspective, they're having a more unified experience. The relationships is better, our students have the expectation that when they communicate with us, they want a very quick response. I think that's a common thing that in.

The 14 years I was in higher Ed, I saw pretty consistently and with a system like ice late, you could potentially do that because it has the ability not only to use human beings to facilitate those responses, but also use automation. Now I'm a believer that you should use automation whenever possible from the standpoint that it's well suited for particular task and those kind of things are things that are very routine or require no special judgment.

Then if you give it over to things that really require human intervention, that's where you can use light, potentially to prompt people to take those, take those up, and I think specifically back like a workflow, I think. Hopefully many of you have had the experience of using a workflow, and slate workloads can be constructed where you have automation, then moves people along the various steps they pop out various messages so it takes a lot of sort of the basic administrative work off. I'll give a specific example, a common utilization for workflow would be.

Perhaps you have to do some sort of final Test review, where if you're a test optional school or school that accepts tester requires it as part of your program. Those test scores come in and you want to be able to then compare those to what the students admitted, perhaps as they did the application process. Very simple workflow. You could create student goes into it from an automated standpoint. Email goes out, ask them to take the steps to upload the test scores through an official test service slate, then compare those two things, and if everything is the same, it moves on and you may be sending a congratulatory.

Email or checklist. I know I like seeing my checklist items be checked off on my list and says you're good to go. If however, there needs to be an intervention or a conversation, then that's where you can build slate to perhaps building automated email that pops out of the system tells an administrator to take a take an action, and then that administrator can reach out and really have that human conversation. So the beauty of that, if you step back from it a little bit, if you let the computer do it, it's really good at, which is routine, regular and systematic things. And you let people do what they are very good at.

Which is interpersonal relationships and being able to do judgment calls. Ann Marie. In those two approaches together and sort of that student success environment, I think leads to a place that success. I think that's where students really see an ability to that the institution, frankly, has their act together and can really use the technology and the people they have on staff in the best possible manner to serve their needs, because ultimately, that's why we exist. We're here to serve students and have them learn in the sense that they come to our institutions.

And they want to learn in their degree or their major or their subject area, but also had the experience of being other institutions all the wonderful things that entails.

You know, be up moving beyond some of those things and maybe we go deeper into the student success experience. Let's talk about. Perhaps you have a student employment program. So I my career background as I'm actually an old HR person. Don't hold it against me please. No offense to the HR people on the line, but if you think about that experience when you do recruiting for a position, it's very similar to recruiting in some respects for the types of things that you might do in admissions, meaning that.

I need to communicate with applicants. You need to be able to essentially been a people of different statuses. You need to be able to sort through applications in different manners, perhaps core. Perhaps how the committee involve now if you kind of way that over the from the standpoint of the student employment experience where you're in a student employment shop, new students come in, could you take a product like a slight and do that kind of thing? And the answer, in my opinion, is yes. I think you could. In essence, you could build a seamless experience for when the person

Enters and deposits all the way to the point that they are offered student. Student employment is part of a package and then moving on they have to apply for a job that could flow seamlessly into a system like a slate and slate would do it exceptionally well and you have all the tools, the portals, the ability to connect things together, perhaps having it talk to an SIS system that would make that experience essentially seamless for the student, which I think is an amazing thing, you know, sort of other scenarios and the student success space that you might look at. I mentioned the conduct manager idea, so the idea that.

Uh, we're using slate as a mechanism to help our resident assistance managed conduct in the residence Hall deal with various incidents. Track them communicate. I think another thing that's no less important is that when you have those kind of things, there's a regulatory aspect around them. From the standpoint that your institution has policy about how you do adjudication, what's beautiful about slaves, you could have a portal where a result letter is posted to the student. The portal then tracks whether the student has seen it or not see it, and in essence, now you have a time stamp.

And then the student could take action immediately, whether they accept the judgment or they want to perhaps take it further and have others look at it as part of your adjudication process. You can think about that overlaid over an admission process. It's the same sort of ideas that can be used there, except you're now using it in a student success space. So I think these kind of things are this kind of takes it down to the level of specific applications, but this idea, that perhaps you can use slate to do these things, I think, is an amazing thing, and I think it's something that in the next couple of years will see even better examples of and it's something that.

Yeah, your institutions really. From this concept of the lifelong engagement, I would definitely recommend you look at now the final space, which is no less important, is that the alumni experience so certainly technicians has put slate into a place where they have a really strong product on the advancement in alumni side. So you think about that integration where now you have the admissions experience you have that sort of enrollment aspect. Perhaps it's center section where it's the student success.

Area and there maybe it's not everything is I don't, you know. We have systems at a very specialized for different things, but it's big pieces of that and now you have a final aspect, which is that advancement alumni connection and that relationship with the alumni office can begin from the minute the person is enrolled potentially, and that's the beauty of it. You know, I think some of you either have that instance or you have had that turned on the question of whether you need two instances or or you can do it in one is a really interesting one and it depends on the institution. But the fact that it exists at all is amazing.

And when you get to the point that you can now connect the dots and perhaps a look for relationships in a sort of automated manner, and then let humans engage. That's really where I think it's late is strong, and the ability to put all these pieces together really helps your institution. So I talked a lot there, Alex, that I kind of and Rob that I get it. Some of the things we wanted to address today. Or do we have any sort of thoughts about any of that stuff?

I don't know.

You can never talk too much. I get doesn't.

No, I I think that those are all really fantastic things to think about, right? I think when we are, you know, over the last couple of years, right? When I was leaving technical things, I was kind of on the client side of the advancement, launched there and so it was a really interesting kind of space to be in. There's been a lot of changes on that front since my time at technician. Certainly, I think we're really starting to see that uptick in schools really asking that question, Abraham, that.

Right?

Right?

Call out on that that can point it out in the chat, which is not just for success but advancement in general. It's that really important distinction of should I be in a single instance? Should I be in a separate instance right? And see that not even just when we're thinking about Tacking, Tacking on, but adding on these other constituents we see it when we work with institutions who are about to start with slate on their curious? Should I be in a single instance, or should I have one for undergrad and one for grad and to Abrahams Point? Just to reiterate it, it really is dependent on.

How well are your offices one working together? How similar processes? How can things be linked together? I think those are those important conversations that you really need to have before you really make a decision on where to go forward. Because I've worked with institutions before we have started in one way and end up splitting out their instance right or they start split and then they merge in the future. I think there are some things that you'll just have to uncover as you go through. It's not a one solution for every institution because as we all know, every institution is totally separate so.

I would just kind of I like that again.

Yeah, I mean I think a big part of that, Alex is the question of system of record and also sort of how you're built organizationally site. For me, I see.

Hi, this Maxim that I've tried to incorporate in my technology work and that is the best technology in the world. Won't work if you don't have the people that are able to use it so you can have the absolute top of the line technology system. But if there's not an ability for your users to understand what's going on with data flows and effectively engage with that software, then it's not going to be successful. So I think this kind of comes back to this idea of well, should we do one instance or multiple instances? That's going to somewhat be dependent on how your organization is built, how communication is occurring currently.

Maybe there's an idealized way that that could occur but we all know that to get from A to B to C. It's not always about the technology. It's also about bringing your colleagues along with you and then accepting sort of the ideas that you present and maybe, as part of that journey your ideas change. I've certainly have had that in my career. I went in Gung Ho on this is the way we must do it and it will work this best this way, and there's no other possibility, too well. You know, I didn't consider. This this and this maybe I should re evaluate and I think that's where.

This question of which way is best it it's very situational. It's also going to be somewhat based upon what are you trying to accomplish. So are you talking about a? You know I go back to that immigration example and I think that's a pretty common one that many institutions utilized where you're working with the international office. Depending on what it is called to kind of work through the immigration process, get visas. Some places that's in the admissions world and that maybe fits really nicely.

In that instance, but perhaps another institutions. There's a greater divide and you really do need to move that data, and there's SAS integration questions. I think those kind of things should way into the decision of whether you have a single instance or a separate instance. You know the other thing that comes into play too, and I think Alex can talk quite a bit about this is when you combine instances, potentially it becomes more complex because everybody then has to agree to play in the same sandbox. If you separate those instances, it's a little easier, but you might sacrifice am degree of integration.

So those are things to be wait time is another element you know. How quickly do you need it? So all those kind of things come into play. Slate is really good at security in the sense that it's able to use population controls and.

Various other technologies kind of segregate who can access what types of data, but everyone of those creates an overhead for security, so that's another piece that you want to think about. Are you talking about thousands of users or 10s of users? So I would weigh all of those different factors in terms of this is a very long way to answer your question. You can, but I weigh a lot of those things as part of the answer to your question. An evaluate them and try to come to a best conclusion before you made the decision about moving forward with an instance or not.

Birthday little bit Alex, I'm sorry.

I think it's great I I think we see some questions that are coming in kind of via the chat as well, so I think we'll do our best to address those as they as they kind of flow in.

Dan is back with us all, right? Uhm, OK, so the first one that that I'm seeing on here is do do any of you have from Stephanie experience using slave for athletics? Athletics does work with students in multiple stages, say absolutely, and I think there's a wide range of things that athletics can do in slate. This is oftentimes a question that we get with schools who are just starting with Slade and they want to have athletics kind of be more involved in that process. And sometimes there's a little bit of a strong arm right? That kind of goes out there because there.

Either an arms or their own front Russian so they're interested in integration and doing everything in there. Or a school is interested in pulling them in more to admissions process, and so there are workflows which are like one of my favorite things in the system to think about how you can creatively design those two kind of inform various processes that coaches may need to do in the system when they're evaluating applicants. But or maybe they're doing some pre evaluation before we get into the actual review of an applicant and we need to have a process that's kind of sending around that, but we want to lock them down.

To only see certain areas of the system where certain aspects of the student record, there are certainly things that they do at the current student level as well, and I think that because there's so much opportunity in the system whether it's via Workflow or via a portal, to think about what the creative options are there, there's definitely a lot of space to have on that front. Abraham, I don't know if you have anything to add from the athletic side.

Oh, this is actually one of my favorite areas. Lots of philosophical conversations about this on many levels.

Let's say certainly from the from the recruiting side, there's definitely a lot of connections. Slate has pretty robust capability around the sport. You know there's a sports area in Slaton. You can customize that you have portals, there's examples already, athletics portals.

Now, if you want to take it a step further, that's where it really gets interesting. 'cause you have options, right? There's some great products out there that certainly can do that work, but if you wanted to build it in slate in a student success world I think this is what it can look like. I think one of the big things for a coaches team management, so you think about it from the standpoint that you need to be able to know who's on the roster routine, what their statuses had they turned in their physical forms for the year? They attending practices, things like that, and it's very interesting, because what the introduction of.

Yes.

Entities, I think that ability to create the one in many relationships that you would need to be able to support that kind of data flow, exist down sleep. I think the other thing that has existed for a long time as the concept of secondary data set and the ability technicians wisely has created this ability where you can have an active data set and then have parents of those data sets so that inherent right out of the gate creates a relationship that you can then extrapolate into this realm of perhaps you want to do team management. I think the other thing that's interesting is the compliance aspect of it.

So if you get into the world of the things that you have to do every year for your team relative to being able to build forms, collect information that goes back to the NCA. Perhaps be able to do statistical statistical, but reporting, you know, we all know that's late, has that capability built into it, and the final thing is this ability to integrate the environment. So this is where you get back to the whole question. Should it be a new instance or separate instance?

You know, it all depends on the institution, but the ability to perhaps do it. Both ways exist, so it's a really interesting idea, and I would say to no less than that the texting capabilities built into sleep. So I put that as a big check Mark 'cause I know the coaches I've worked with love to text. That's one of their big things. I want to get the people to show up to practice is then I have that instant communication and technicians has wisely built that into their platform, so it's not a separate thing. It's not a pad on, it's just part of slate. It's integrated you by the credits and it works.

And it works every time. So I think when you think about this kind of stuff, these are the kind of things you should be considering relative to the athletics question.

Abraham, that's our great segue into question that came in on the registration forms before the web and R and the question reads. However, institutions using texting to connect with students. How are institutions engaging parents through slate? Anne, how institutions gauging or rather engaging high schools in high school counselors through slate.

Sure.

So many answers to those questions that there's a lot in there. Perhaps I can take one part of that, and maybe Alex. You wanna take the second part? I'll speak to this mean I think one of the things that technicians would talk about and then you can speak to this quite a bit is slate.org how useful that potentially is in terms of a tool to have the counselor side of it.

I do believe in one of the events that where that was rolled out there were sharks involved. Perhaps if some of you were at that session.

And Alexander Clark came onto the shore from a boat and slate.org was daughter Dumber. Remembering that right down is that is that that was that one right?

Yeah.

Uhm, but I think in terms of a tool it's fantastic because what it gives you is an instant platform where all the different counselors can already connect and it's universal. From the standpoint that it is, you know the ability that cancer is not connecting to my school and Alex at school and Rob School they're connecting to one platform that then is already integrated into all our schools. You know, that's really powerful now in terms of the communication aspect, to that you can generally with the data set, build any communication off of a data set records.

You want to send a text message to a data set record. You can do that if you want to send emails. That's pretty obvious. You can do that, so the full communication suite is available at your fingertips with this sort of counselor experience and then the final thing I think, which is no less important, is this idea that you can use external data sources to keep those up-to-date. So certainly there are companies that will sell you the counselor data, but you can also aggregate it from sources that are sort of sort of open. I think of the common app is one that was one that.

My former institution. We used a lot and we would use the recommender data, pull it into slate, set our data sets up. I think that's pretty common, but overtime you begin to aggregate that and then if you can leverage that in terms of your experience, your now have an open conduit of communication between you, the institution and the high school counselor with all the tools that slate has available, which is a lot.

That said, Alex, I think the second part of that was the student side of it. Do you want to take that?

Yeah, well chat a little bit about kind of the texting in the communication aspect from both the student and what we're doing and what we see schools doing kind of on the parent front as well. You know the question of texting is one that pops up almost at the beginning of every implementation that we're doing alright, great. How do we stand up, texting, enslave or prior to school? Signing up with slate? What is the texting functionality inside? Because that's the direction right that we're moving and so.

When we think about that right, there are some important questions that schools need to ask themselves. Slate is fantastic for texting. I think it does a really good job of that. It has improved over the years, but we want to make sure that schools are balancing right out of the gate. What type of lift is there going to be on the texting front an who is going to be responsible for managing that? So right now we have may have schools that come to us who are initially coming in and maybe they're on a platform that's fantastic, like Mongoose, which has an integration with slate.

And they use that really quick back and forth integrated kind of texting. Relational experience in slate. What we would recommend of a school wants the kind of trial that out kind of keep another platform that they may be using. Maybe doing integration is really kind of. Start with the transactional communications that might be centered around events or forms or system things related to the application. Which kind of quick things where you're not really looking for a response. So much for the student, but you want to ping them and let them know. Hey, we're here if you need us. Here's some quick information, and that's a good way to kind of dip your toes.

In the text module in slate, when it comes to parents, I think there's been such an advancement on the ability to have the relationship tab truly be relationship child almost records right of the actual record in slate to have their own timelines, and so we're seeing more and more schools and helping more and more schools should say, create flows that are dedicated specifically to parents, helping designing particular parent tabs on a portal to get that information for students where parents are getting their own experience. It still via the student.

But there's a lot of kind of opportunity on that front that would be particularly on the portal front, but we're definitely seeing more and more campaigns and developing those with parents as well, but that's definitely something that we focus on our HP, right? We're here we're talking about Slaton. Were talking about the entire kind of life cycle management, but RHP is a marketing from. These are the types of things that we work with schools to determine. Is it appropriate for this school to really have a parent can flow? If it is great cool will help build it, but it may not be for everyone and so I think those are the types of conversations that we have.

And also say just real quick and then you want to tell us another question. Now you know Megan Miller on our team was at Seattle Pacific University prior to prior to coming to our HB. We brought her in for a number of reasons and I think we're really grateful to have on our team. Her expertise is really kind of heavily in the communications aspect and did a really great presentation to some months ago on kind of what that experience can be like and how you can really segment those communications. and I know it's in the knowledge base, so I would say.

That's a good thing to check out there.

Thanks Alex.

There is another question in the chat, just sort of about student success. Functionality in insulate is this custar these based on custom initiatives or can you speak to sort of the student success functionality that exists in slate sort of already tuned just sort of ready to be used for anybody who wants to use it.

Dan, why don't you tell us that there's anything new that's coming in?

Your time.

I think that would be an optimal way to end this.

Well.

Yes, there you go. That's like that's like the launchpad. Take it, take it away down.

The hot seat.

It's all yours.

I'll let.

Yeah.

You know, I think here's how I would say in the game. Dan, correct me if there's something new I've had the experience of giving a presentation and then the information change in the presentation. So when I was done speaking it was already out of date. So that might happen here.

But the you know from the standpoint, does it have things that you can leverage immediately? Well, yes and no. The yes part is all the tools that we talked about. So you can absolutely send emails. You can send text messages. You have the ability to store data. You can have custom forms. You can potentially create a. You could take a stock portal and plug it in. On the flip side, is technician is going to say to you per say that this thing is for this one particular use that you pulled out. I'll just pull something out of thin air. So let's talk about that. Conduct management.

I think it's honest to say no at this point. That's where you have to kind of be a little creative an work. Either figure it out internally at work with a great external vendor like an RH beta kind of, figure it out, and use the tools that you have in front of you to create a very customized experience from the standpoint that you kind of put things together, they work well and the students have a sort of smooth experience. But the short answer is I think it's analogous to I like the I don't know if I don't use the medicine analogy because we're in the.

Hi.

Place where you are, but I'll I'll try. It's kind of using a very effective medicine for an off brand use prescribed by a doctor. Is that OK? Is that OK to say? Is going to get in trouble? Alex or Dan is that? Is that fair?

It's good analogy.

OK, so it works. It's not going to be on the label, but it definitely works.

Thanks Abraham.

And less than some knows something different, which he might know something.

I'll move on to another question, which is how do you build the? How do you build a student? Or rather, how do you build the right? This is back to sort of sports. How do you build the roster in slate custom fields on the sports tab or or a different way?

Let me take that one. I like that one.

To me, that's an entity record, so if you think about what entities are, they are one to many relationships where you can build out. Perhaps you have a tab somewhere, perhaps in the data set record, where you well, there's several ways to do it, but that would be one way to do it. You could then would connect student records inside those the other way to sort of flip it would be created data set where the data set holds the team, and then you use SQL to kind of connect the relationship between the student and that team, and I would put things in like terms.

Um third sort of way would be a hybrid of that where you're using the data set record and entity record, and then connecting all the pieces that way. So I think there's a variety of ways to do it. Again, this is not something that you're going to be able to necessarily to the knowledge base and read how to do, but it's possible to do an. It is something that I think.

Will definitely be there will be more examples of it as sleep matures and sort of that student success space.

I just want to pull 4 circle on that because I know we just have a couple of minutes left here. I think all of these kind of conversations in the particular things that Abraham has kind of called out here about these rosters and all this other functionality. In the end it comes back to kind of what Rob was talking about initially and then kind of what I say wait into which is opening these doors to have these conversations, but more importantly not more important than conversation itself. Apart of that, conversation has to be.

The setting of expectations as well, right? When we do an implementation, we have to set the expectation at the beginning as this is what is going to be a part of this implementation. This is what you need to be running in slate. This is what you need to be effective at your job. I think people cease latency. All the possibility with it. It can often times get lossed in that possibility, and so as the core team that is kind of making an effort to open this up across your campus. And when you're having these conversations with folks, it's to say.

This isn't an immediate thing that we need to do right now. Let's have some really smart conversations about it. Let's involve the appropriate parties on campus to make sure that they understand what we're trying to do, and that we understand their processes as well. and I think by doing that it really does help kind of breakdown those barriers for sure, and then once you've done that, were able to kind of pull things back in. I don't know Rob. If you want to add anything on that.

No, not necessarily. That's a That's a great summary. I was in scrolling through the questions, just wanted to add on athletics. I love that question from Stephanie because I think athletics is such a perfect example about the importance of thinking from this lifetime of engagement. Mind set an thinking about from grade school to Golden years athletics, again as a perfect example from. Obviously there's the student component. But thinking all the way to sports camps that.

Teams and coaches host all the way, obviously to the advancement side where you have donors and season ticket holders and all of that. So thinking of athletics along with admissions in academics and current students and an advancement is is a really critical element to that overall lifetime engagement mindset and culture, so really appreciated that question.

And with that, I think we have come to time. Everybody, please join me in thanking Abraham Alixan Rob for sharing all these wonderful insights with us today. As I mentioned earlier, today's webinar kicks off a series of events presented by slates, platinum preferred partners. Join us next week. When are NL presents a web and R and engaging students through video. You can register from your site homepage by clicking slave presents at the top and again thank you all for joining today and RHP. Thank you.

Thanks for having to stand.

Thank you.

Much.

Take care.