Slate by Technolutions Presents: Slate Print

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Hello.

OK, so just before we get started just to confirm you are using Chrome and received no weird error messages, right?

Nope.

Awesome.

I mean, yes, I am. You know, weird messages.

And just a quick reminder at the very end, just click the broadcast button again when we are done.

You know I forgot that right and when it first happened then I realized, oh, you can't see your slides.

No, I mean control slides. Actually, I had to turn off control slides like right now or you couldn't control them right?

Launch.

I can if I hit this fun button here, but as long as you had control, you're up first.

Well, oh I I gave you control back after after we finish.

OK, so.

What's up?

Basket.

OK, just my notes.

OK, and we have confirmed that everything is good on the back end. So far. So with that let's get started as if we have never done this before.

Alright Hello Everyone a Min Kathleen, if you would permit me I'd like to begin with a joke.

That's fine.

If I had known how many people would have been in attendance today, I would have rented a bigger apartment.

I thought

Hello Everyone, my name is Cody home and Gray and I'm an associate product manager here at technicians and in the indomitable spirit of the merge field, I would like to build you a good insert time of day here.

Uh, once again, welcome and thank you all for joining us for the inaugural event in our brand new webinar series. Sleep by technicians presents these webinars will focus on a variety of topics including highlighting members ever preferred partners program to be followed by a series of conversations surrendered. Centric around and apply to alumni theme for this event. We are pleased to be joined by executive vice president of Callum Scott. Edu Kathleen Cross, who joins us in conversation around the brand. New very exciting topic of slate print before we dive in. Quick bit.

Of housekeeping.

Hum.

OK, this webinar is being recorded and will be made available for viewing after in a knowledge base. Article closed captioning can be enabled by clicking on the CC button at the top right corner of the share window. Full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking on the expand button at the top right corner of the share window. Should you need to re sync audio and or video, please refresh your share window and of course questions can be posted in the chat. We will be taking those questions at the end as well as some of the ones you submitted prior to the web and R.

Uhm, I would also like to take this opportunity to say that I will not be apologizing if my cat makes an unsolicited guest appearance during this event. I would like to give a quick shout out to the technician staff who have achieved the impossible by stepping up on what was an already incredibly great game. Their commitment to all of you is truly shown during this difficult time and they deserve a round of applause. I would further like to thank one particular individual and that is the Queen of outreach. Ariana vax Renwick, who is joining me behind the scenes today to make sure that we get.

Any and all of your slate questions answered as it pertains to utilizing the new slate print functionality. So thank you very much, Ariana. Your support is greatly appreciated and of course big ups to Lisa, Leah and Sarah for helping getting the series organized. With that out of the way, what is slate print you may ask? Didn't we hear something about this at summit? For those already familiar or just joining to find out? Slate print is a revolutionary new platform that brings all of the dynamic content and automation capabilities of email communications in slate. Two print format slate print is a new feature within slate that allows you to seamlessly adprint components your existing communique.

Mission flows in just a few easy steps. Started a new mailing. Upload your design file. Pick a template. Income flow slate print is of course powered by our friends at Kelmscott. Edu. As I mentioned earlier, joining us today to discuss this new functionality is none other than Kathleen Cross, executive vice president of Callum Scott. Edu Kathleen is also the former vice president of enrollment and chief technology officer with a PhD in higher Ed Initiation. She comes uniquely qualified for her current role to work with our partners with an impressive 9 plus year background in marketing consultation.

Welcome, Kathleen.

Thank you so much Cody. And how everyone and thank you for taking the time today to join us and talk about sleep, right? So I'm going to give you a little bit of a road map to tell you about what we're going to talk about today. First, I'll give you a brief introduction, accounts.edu and talk about that. For those of you who are not familiar with counts.edu, then I'll share with you some of the challenges of traditional print and how we in technicians are working together.

To meet those challenges, uh, then I'll give you a review of sleep, print what it does, how it works, and I'll show you some samples from our betas.

And followed by a, um, a review of sleeper beta and how your institution can be part of bait. If you choose to do that.

So who we are count.edu is the Higher Education Division of material group, so we are a direct server service provider for recruitment and also a higher education marketing agency. So we serve only higher education. That's all we do accounts.edu in our team has deep experience working specifically with universities and Colleges.

In terms of the specific things that we do in counts.edu on the enrollment side, we do everything from enrollment consulting students, search mission, team training, calling campaigns, then on the marketing side we do everything from University branding to creative services. If you need copy and design, even if you need it for sleep, print or outside asleep, print digital marketing video ography photography, you name it. We also do.

Little bit of printing and fulfillment for universities. And as I mentioned before, material group is our parent company. We're very fortunate that they are parent company because they are a national printing and marketing company with 12 locations throughout the United States. So we got a big print powerhouse as part of counts.eduandcounts.edu itself has been doing print for universities for over 30 years.

Uh, so we have deep experience in doing print an fulfillment for universities and we are known in the industry for our quality print and that was one of the reasons that technicians approached us about sleep print in the beginning was that background we have with print. So before we get into talking about sleep rent, I just wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about some of the issues with traditional print. Just touch on these.

That we wanted to address a whistling print. Uhm, not only did we want to bring print into the slate environment between tech solutions, also wanted to look at addressing some of these longstanding issues, namely that you know colleges and universities want to have variable print, but for so many of them today, it's just been too expensive or too hard to add variable print into their repertoire. Same thing goes for.

Print in drip campaigns. Uh, it's just been too costly and too much work to export CSV files everyday. Import them back in, you know, just so much time and effort for that that it just it hasn't been a feasible thing for universities to do today. There's just so many manual steps in traditional print, I mean traditional print can be kind of clunky. Let's just let's just be honest about it.

So there are just lots of steps that lead to long lead times in to send to get print out the door and the other issue with traditional print is that it's not particularly trackable, and then there are the current challenges facing higher education. Right now, challenges with dealing with COVID-19 and universities needing to pivot really quickly. We actually started beta in the middle of COVID-19. Well, what right when it was?

All happening and um universities were closing their campuses and facing massive changes to the recruiting and recruiting messages and we had a lot of our first folks were needing to pivot really quickly and put out messages about virtual events, admitted student events and also that their applications were still open. Things like that and we were able to help those institutions get those messages out in two days. With slate print. We also have been hearing from a lot of our University partners.

About the issues are having working remotely without having a Mail room. Uh, a lot of our partners are talking about their Mail room is now the chunk of their car and they have big stacks of variable viewbook packets and admitted student packets, and they're going to the post office every day to get that print out. So that's definitely something that we can address an help help you with with sleep print. Also getting print out in a timely manner. It's just a big challenge right now.

For so many universities and budgets are tight as if they weren't tight enough already, and getting even tighter.

And then also the staffing needing to focus on bringing in the class and that not thinking so much about how do they get print out the door. So again, our joint goal with technicians has been to bring slate print into play to help address some of those longer standing traditional print issues, but also to address some of these challenges. You guys are not now experiencing in higher education, but enough about the challenges.

You guys are all familiar with the challenges. We don't need to talk about that anymore. Um, let's uh, talk a little bit about sleep front. Get down to it and let me tell you what sleep print is and what it does. So sleep right is a new feature in slate that allows you to add an automate print within your existing communication flows or as one time standalone pieces. So what that means is you can add print now to your drip campaign. So let's say you've got an inquiry campaign and you have.

You know someone's inquired and they immediately get a confirmation email and maybe you got, you know, day two or three. You send some more information about the institution will now what you can do with slight point is you can make day Seven and have that be an invitation to a virtual open house or a virtual visit or something like that.

So you can have the front of that say you know Cody, you're invited with variable print and then you could invite them to your event or whatever. It may be that you want print to be. You can also do one time sense, so if you've got some kind of event that's coming up, you want to get print out a month or three weeks in advance to get enough time for people to register for the event. You can set that out and send it out as a one time set. You can also have variable personalized praying insulate point. There is no extra cost.

For variable printing, so any variable fields or snippets you can use to add that and make your print piece feel more personalized. So for instance, if you want to use variable feels like first name, preferred name, major admission counselor if you have them assigned within the student file, the mission counts are contact information. All of those pieces could be variable within slave print in terms of snippets. If you've got a major and then you want a few sentences about that particular major.

You could add that as a snippet, um within sleep, print into your printed pieces to make them really personalized for your students. And we all know that our jensi students are looking for that very personalized kinds of approaches that we know who they are. And we're listening to them and were interested in them as an individual.

The other thing about sleep print is there are no minimums, so you can send as few as one or two a day as you would with potentially with Rep or 100,000 or more gay. We have a University right now that's setting up to send 130,000 pieces out and then we have others who are doing drip with us that maybe you're only sending a couple out of day. We love all of it. It's all fine, so no minimums and really know maximums either. For that we have multiple print sizes and formats. I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a couple minutes.

And then we also provide choices of different papers and finish options, which again I'll go into in a little more detail in a bit. But let me tell you first how slate print works. It's pretty simple to do.

On the sweet side, you'll go to the deliver area and query your database to create your list and you'll send that automatically through slate. Then you will upload your zipped Indesign file to slate, print up to sleep, print if you are an emission office or an institutional advancement office, and you don't have Adobe illustrator sweet, no worries, it's a zip file so you can easily do it yourself. Or if you prefer, you can have your marketing Department.

Upload that for you. Once it's uploaded, you can immediately proof the peace with sample data in the slate print side so you can look and see how your variable fields are fitting with your, maybe longer or shorter majors or.

Names so you make sure everything fits well. Um, even when you've got that variable front of different sizes, and then once you prove that and you go back to sleep side, you can proof that with live data.

If you want a physical proof, you can get that as well. That's also available in slate, or we can send you via ups. We can send you a proof. Either way is fine.

And then we get the peace out once you've approved the Indesign file and you send us your list, we are tracking in beta. Getting it out in two today in two days and we're looking at two to three days to get your print out once we're live.

So one thing you might be interested in pricing and payment. We have very competitive pricing in sleep print. It was another one of those issues that we were really looking at. We want you to do print with variable. We want you to do drip current so we in technicians looked at that. We really are looking at getting good pricing for you, so that's affordable for all universities. I think you'll find our pricing to be very competitive. Are betas have have given us good feedback on that and.

Feel that it were a good price point there, um, and you will be able to see that pricing, 'cause it's all transparent. In slate annesley print either side. We have them setup with tables so you can see with price breaks at each volume where there is a price break you'll be able to see that were also provide you with postage options of nonprofit or first class presort if you're in a rush and we know that sometimes that happens. So if you want to do that you can.

Usually choose either option, uh, how you pay is you pay with slate credits so there's no pose, no invoices, something like that, no contracts. You have to sign. There's no obligations at all in beta or after beta. There's no setup fees, it's just it's there like your email is there and your SMS is there. We hope you use it. We want you to use it, but there's no obligation to, so it'll be really like a feature like those.

Ah, so let's talk a little bit about the options for print in sleep right in, starting in beta, we have certain options and we are going to expand them and plan to expand them as time goes on.

So for right now, in terms of postcards and mailers, we have several options. We have your standard postcard size 04 and a quarter by 6 then your little bit larger postcard a little over size 5 1/2 by 8 and a half. A postcard or a 6 by 9 postcard. Then we got a Mailer or oversized postcard 6 by 11 and then a 9 by 12 flat Mailer and a 12 by 9 flat Mailer that folds to 6 by 9 so it.

Hold it is a 6 by 9 Mailer. We're also just about to add a trifle to this mix. Then in terms of letters and custom print, we offer eight half by 11 standard letter size. And if you want to go a little bit longer, we've got a legal format size of eight half by 14. We also give the option of a number 10 window or regular envelope. Different universities like different ones. So we were offering you both of those.

Uh, and then what's coming soon, which we're really excited about, is custom prep, and that is virtually whatever you want, and you usually send out in print, so that could include viewbook packets, admitted student packets, variable financial, a brochures, any other custom pieces. If you have special folds, or different types of paper as you want to use die cuts, anything like that would fall in the custom print. That's really.

The print that you're doing now in terms of like of you book packet. It's not something purse prescribed that you were telling you it has to be this in this. In this it's what you have in your normal viewbook packet. That's something that we've been doing for universities for a long time now.

It's just something that insulate print we need to do a little bit of development on the technician side and our side to get that set up so that is coming soon. So let me show you are sleep print template. The templates are for those standard pieces that I just talked about. Those postcards, mailers and letters and I kind of hate the word template honestly. So I always tell my team I don't like this work because template to me always sounds like it's restrictive and there's no restrictions.

In your copy or your design, or your fonts, or anything like that in sleep, right?

Really, why we use the template is to give you some places where, for instance, we're going to show you where the bleeds are. If you see the pink border there, that is your bleed. We like to see an eighth of an inch breed for slate print if possible, and then the area in the light blue is all area that you're free to add your copy and Design. An image is. So basically the entire piece you're open to your own copy and design. We do add some instructions here to help you with variable.

Thank you Kathleen. That was really informative and there are a couple of different things that you touched upon that I really like. I mean, for it's incredibly relevant right now given what's going on in the world. You know people can't get out to their male houses and everything is one stop shop. It can all be done from the comfort of your own home or you're off at.

It's really just easy to use and has a such a wide variety of options in terms of what you can do with more coming, which I know that we are certainly very excited to see and I know our partners are as well couple of things that you've mentioned in particularly our advancement schools. This is not just an option to be used by our admissions partners. Advancement schools can make full use of this, and we encourage that very highly and then also you talked a little bit about templates and I understand where you're coming from with that word, but.

The idea here is that the templates, like you are creating are their own, their own templates that are completely reflective of you and your institution, and you can have as many of them as you need to to capture those different facets. So while the word may seem like its prescribing you in one city direction, it's actually all your own stuff.

With That being said, We are going to do a little bit of a demo. It's going to be a little bit different than what we've done in past webinars. Instead of diving directly into an instance, we actually are going to go through it on a set of slides. So with that in mind, let's begin.

You should recognize this page as a standard slate home page. This is just the one that I have in my test environment, and from there you're just going to want to click the deliver section to bring you to the deliver tool.

From there, even more familiarity, it's all within slate. It all has the same look and feel of what you're probably used to on a daily basis anyway. If you are user who is actively working with different deliver campaigns or one half mailings, whatever happens to be so, you'll go ahead and enter the screen and you'll just be able to click on new mailing.

From there you'll get the popup. You enter all of the information that you need. Don't forget folder structure is important, and then the only difference here is that you will have a new method and as Kathleen mentioned, this method of slate print can only be selected once you have been registered for beta and just a quick reminder on that. The registration form for that will be included in the web and R afterward when we go to post it on the knowledge base article. It has been posted in the chat, but if you didn't catch it, don't worry. Haven't missed it, it's not gone forever. That information will still be perfectly available to you.

So we'll go ahead and select your method asleep print. This is where things get a tiny bit different. Everything seems to look the same, but you do see this little no template has been selected option and we'll see what that's about in just a moment. So you want to go ahead and hit edit message. Of course you might be the kind of user who wants to put together your recipient list. First, select all your merge fields. That's completely fine as well. You're not just limited to merge fields based on address, just like any other deliver campaign you can select.

Any of your fields and you can actually use those insight.

So go ahead, hit edit message.

Now you'll notice here that the first time you do this, it's going to be a little bit blank looking. We've got this option for template. We've got some of our address merge fields down here. If you built your recipients list first, you will see your list of merge fields on the side, but no template information.

Do about that.

Well, conveniently hidden under the Dropdown had is a managed templates button and this will bring you directly into slate print where you can start to begin the process of getting your indesign files uploaded. So would a slate print actually look like? Well, it looks a lot like slight. You'll notice everything on the top is kind of theme. Similarly we've got icons that match very closely to what we use on our homepage, and it just has that same nice lookin field. It's designed really thoughtfully and really well done to kind of give you that.

Comfort that you have come to love about slate. So from there you'll go ahead and you'll hit register.

And you'll be able to take it from there. Now. Kathleen, you had Mossad on the template slide that there's actually a fun check list of all the things that you'll need to do in slate print before you're ready to go. And one of the things that I really like about sleep print is that checklist is everywhere. It shows up in multiple different places. You cannot miss it and.

Yeah, I somehow they feel like it was designed with me in mind of like these specific things that I just really like to see. Like the repetitive. Don't forget this step that might just be my admission background now.

For sure, so we thought we would then kind of change gears a little bit and show you what does it actually look like in slate when you have these configurations made and all of the templates that you build will be available in that Dropdown Menu. Will see a little bit more of that next.

But this is another one from Binghamton. It's beautiful. It's exactly what's going to be sent out. You'll notice that we are making use of merge fields here in this case for a test record.

It's just really easy to see what it's gonna look like. It also importantly, really reduces the need to ever really use liquid markup for this, because everything that you're doing you're selecting your merge fields in slate and then you're using that with your already configured Indesign files on slate print side means you don't really have to change a whole lot. There's nothing super conditional about it that can't be configured in a standardized way. It's really easy to use, which is very important.

So let's take a look a little bit at that internal configuration again. So here you'll notice we do have options and again, any of the templates that you can figure will be available in this dropdown menu. You'll get a nice little visual of what it looks like and then here you'll be able to select the account that you want it sent to and all of your merge fields can be selected here.

And again, you can have many more merge fields that are about things like academic program or interest, and obviously we wouldn't use those in the address, but they will come in handy later on.

OK, so as Kathleen mentioned, we like to keep things consistent across environments. You can find out pricing information inside sleep print. You can also find it directly in slate as well, so if you go to your database tool and then navigate to deliver configurations you'll have that little drop down where normally you can select things like SMS. You will now have the options for slate print all of the different rates are for each kind of product. Are there you can just click into one and it will show you all of the different pricing information based on.

Different finishes papers, things that you would be selecting. It's all there. Very easy to use and it's a good reminder.

And without turning our attention back, tord interactions a little bit, so interaction data will live on the student record. And if you have interaction data, that means you can also query an report on that data to your heart's content. It will be there for you. This is just an example of one that's just our base that says yes, this late print mailing has been sent.

And that does it for my demo. Kathleen, you think you're ready for some questions.

I'm sure you are alright, so please forgive me if I look off screen a little bit to my other monitor where I have them. Let's start off with hopefully some easy ones for you. Can these variable snippets include photos? So what if I want to say these are the different photos of the admissions counselors? Depending on your area?

Very exciting, I see there are several questions here about ways to get samples. As Kathleen mentioned in your welcome kit, all of the different pieces of information are actually printed on different papers with different finishes. You will absolutely be able to see that a big question, and they know you touched upon this a little bit is to talk about any kind of added cost and postage rates. Is that included in the pricing structure?

Let's talk about envelope. So you mentioned that you can choose between the number 10 window and just your standard envelope, but is there any further customization of that envelope that people can do within slate print?

And what about our international partners? So we have a lot of constitutions from all over the world. But for example, let's say our neighbors to the North in Canada. Are they able to use late print within Canada? Can they use it to send things to United States? How would that work?

Downton now that one's a popular question, little bit of a tougher question for you, but I have a feeling you can handle it. You writing.

Are there any non UV coated paper options that are more durable than your current ones coming soon or do you foresee a more diverse array of paper becoming available in the near future?

I think you handled that very well.

I see it some questions here about sort of more technical aspects of the process, but one question that's come up is, can you use illustrator or PS or the files just limited to in design at the time?

Another good piece that kind of dovetails into a lot of people are asking to see sort of the upload process or what happens after you get through the slate side and into sleep print. Well, we won't be doing a demo of that today I can tell you me and some other members of the team have gone through this and it's really, really easy to do it.

Just kind of like upload your file basically and one of the things that I really appreciate an I know this is probably specific to me, but I think that your team said there's something like 27 different messages that can occur when you upload your indesign file based on common misconfigurations and issues to kind of help you along the way. Of course, if you need more help than that, the team is always there to support you. Just fill out that form, but it kind of speaks to my soul a little bit that.

You have such comprehensive considerations that you've made for the clients to make it just seamless experience from start to finish.

Another question that's kind of come through our sort of about.

You know, kind of customizing the address so it looks like the return address. I should say so it looks like they're coming from sort of, you know, the hometown of the institution? Is there anything along those lines? But it can be done.

Excellent, I'm just looking through some of our other questions here. I've got another one that is a little bit of a toughie, but given our current circumstances, it seems prescient. So again, I know you're prepared.

What business continuity plans are in place to ensure that slate printing could continue with the location was under a stay at home order.

Excellent as as we sort of come to the end of our time. Will wind down with a few last questions and go onto our final bit of housekeeping. But what is the turn around time? Typically from one? Someone approves that mailing insulate to when they can expect it's actually going to start going out and arriving in peoples doors.

And if you just touched upon it a little bit in your previous answer, this idea of QC and QA, can you talk a little bit about what that process looks like for slate print?

Excellent, well, I think we're coming toward the end of our time here, but I just want to remind people that this is really easy. It's actually really fun to do as well, but it really sleep. Print is a way to provide great service to people who would like to be able to send out mirror print Mail. Especially, it can be worked in with your existing campaigns for a little bit of email, little bit of print an. It's just an easy option that's already there within slate. And again, there's no obligation.

You can sign up for beta, you know, talk it through with accounts.edu's folks. Kind of go through, upload your files, but there isn't a commitment that you actually have to make to that. It is completely up to you to take kind of at your own pace.

And with that are I would like to bring us to clothes.

Um, thank you all for joining us. This has been a real pleasure. Thank you Kathleen. You have been incredible partner to work with both in the product and also putting together this web. And are we really appreciate it. And just for general community I'd like to say keep your eyes on the home page over the next days and weeks as we begin to launch the registrations for the next events in the slate by technicians presents webinars series. So thank you all and thank you Kathleen.