Portal Inspiration, Features, and Unique Uses

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Alright, you guys, so let's get started. Welcome to our slate stage session on Portal, inspiration, features and unique uses. Portals are hot topic, which I'm sure that's why all of you have registered for this event. We have about 2000 people registered, so that's super exciting and also speaks to.

How important this topic can be for your for your guys is organizations, so we'll get started. But before we start the actual content of the webinar, we have a few housekeeping items for you guys. This web and R is going to be recorded and it will be available for all Festival Passholders about 24 hours, 24 hours after the webinar ends and you can access that recording on your home slate page.

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Come today.

So for our sleep stage presentation, today we have Libby and Emma are both representing Creighton University. And without further ado, Libby is going to kick us off for our portal inspiration, features and unique uses.

Thank you so as Danbi said, I'm Libby Anne, we are from Creighton University which is located in Omaha, NE. Were part of the Big East were also a Jesuit school or about 4500 undergrad, an 4500 grad and professional schools.

And then for as far as our instance late, we have seven of our nine schools and colleges that use one instance for admissions purposes, and we've been with Slate since 2015.

So everything that we're going to talk about in this presentation today is just kind of high level examples of ways that you could use portals. So we're going to touch on a lot of different things that we've done in our instance. So one of the first things we've done is a perspective student portal. Most of our examples are geared towards the undergrad population, but you could very easily adapt these for other areas, but one of the things that we've put in our portal is a happy birthday teaser. We like to be really personalized, and this was a super easy way to do it.

Slate has a filter that exists in this late template library called upcoming Birthday, so we've just used that in our query there and then. You don't really have to know how to do a lot of fancy things to make these. We literally just Google how to make a GIF of background and we're able to add that to the portal.

So another thing that we've done where we have rolling admission so we always are pushing a deadline, and we usually have multiple deadlines as the cycle is going along. So we've started to use the current date filter. This is a really good way to put different deadlines in your portal and then studying them and kind of forgetting about them so that you don't have to worry about going back in later to shut them off or to update them on there just in there and they disappear once the current date parameters are no longer valid.

Another thing that we put in our portal is an area that lets the student know if they've opted out of communication from us. We figured that if they're engaged enough to be in the portal that they might be engaged enough that they do want to opt back into communication. So there's an easy way for them to do that with a form that they can click on to let us know that, and then they fall right back in automatically without any other work on our end.

Another thing that we've added that we've had really good success with is an ask a question box for our admissions counselors. So we've embedded a form into the side of our portal where students can ask their admissions counselors questions, and then there's a trigger email that's sent to their counselor, letting them know that somebody is asked the question at links straight to their student record in the email, and then the counselor can reply back to the student we launched this in August an we've had over 1000 questions ask since then.

So it gets a ton of engagement in the portal.

Another thing that we have added a few years ago, we added the functionality for students to self report their AC T and S80 scores. So we built a form that Maps to. We created a test score type for form self reported so the student can type those in, submit that and then we know when we're looking at their record that that's how it was submitted.

Another really easy thing you can do is to embed your social media feeds in your portal so Twitter actually has the directions to do it. You just literally drop in the URL and then you can kind of customize the look to match your your portal styling.

Another thing that we've added in the portal is a box that shows the students contact information as well as their parent contact information. We found that sometimes students don't even realize that their parents information isn't in our system, so this is a good way for them to see what we have or don't have, and then also make updates so they can email us and we can update that for them and it's always showing in their portal so they know what we have as current.

You'll see there the code for that just a lot of liquid markup showing you know if we have something, show it. If we don't then put those dashes to let let them know that.

You can create custom tabs so at the top of our portal we have a tab for each, that kind of links to each of our views within our portal. So we have like a special tab for our Global Scholars program and we're able to create a special menu bar for that group just by having one teaser that shows that tab for them and then a separate teaser for everybody else that does not have that tab.

Also, part of our student portal. It's one of our tabs financial aid, but we wanted a way to show our financial aid packages to students that was in kind of a more user-friendly, digestible way. We're a banner school an we bring over tons of our financial aid data into our slate instance. And So what we've done here is just kind of set up the financial aid package on a portal. View all of our fields just kind of spit out the banner stuff. And then there's a ton of liquid markup in here.

That displays it in this nice pretty way. It's a lot of work on the front end, but then it's pretty low maintenance once it's all set up and it's all kind of specific to the students so they see you know certain students that are of the college that they've applied to alumni that you know have certain interest to them, so it's all really customizable.

And then these are that just the query is kind of on the back end 1 tip that we have for building queries in general is to split your queries. So we've tried many times to put, you know lots of exports in one query and learn the hard way that that times out your queries. So the best thing to do is to kind of break those up into smaller queries that will run a little bit more efficiently. I think in our student portal we have maybe 11:50 active queries that are running anything from the financial aid information to events too.

You know demographic information, but splitting those up helps make your query or your portal a little bit faster.

Now I'm going to hand it over to Emma.

Hi everybody.

I'm really excited to be with you here today and talk through all of our different uses of portals. So hello to everyone joining. I'm going to switch gears a little bit. We were talking previously about our student portal, so essentially that was all customized for our applicants, so that would all be logging in.

Either as a starting application or through a deposited student, and then that transition time over the summer. So we're going to switch gears here and talk through how we've used portals as internal resources within our office for the call. Routing portal essentially came about because previously we had student call routers, so student workers who would answer our main admissions line who were flipping through three ring binders trying to find the right extension to transfer a call to.

To be honest, it was really intimidating for new student workers or honestly sometimes even for our own staff members to be able to step in and cover those phone calls. And it was very hard to keep updated, so we decided to make an internal use portal for for call routing. So essentially the purpose of this is to have all of the information that someone may need on one page and then control F becomes your best friend.

So we can add temporary or permanent notes at the top which we implemented this before covid, but obviously there were a lot of changing pieces of information that those who answer the phone needed to be aware of. So that was a really great resource to have dynamic information available to them. You can see a wide variety of helpful resources that are listed in there. A student or staff member could email the PDF of our driving directions. There are internal documents like the student color schedule.

Internal links to slate forms to keep track of how many phone calls were receiving FY eyes as people are out of office, so this is all one portal view specifically, so you don't have to know where you're looking for that information, so this is a snapshot of essentially if you would Scroll down. This shows our financial aid staff, so it lists essentially their financial aid responsibilities. So if someone called and said I have a question about it.

Grad plus loan you can control F and find that Sarah Depooter is who you should transfer that call too.

It also shows current time, so that can be really helpful because we deal with students all across the country. Hawaii is actually one of the top ten states that we get students from. Can you tell that I was an admissions counselor? Previously, I had no idea how to code this in Java JavaScript. So like Libby mentioned, just Google it and see if there are free resources out there that you can use to to code that information in there. So it was essentially just looking it up and dropping that code in there.

So every minute that updates you know what time it is in the time zone that someone is calling from.

You can Click to send an email or schedule an appointment.

Can see that on the right hand side it has long distance codes. Tutorials for those who may not be familiar with Slate. How to find an ID which is our student ID how to access voicemail remotely.

Ann and I think one thing to keep in mind as we build these internal portals is a lot of institutions really focus on the user experience for prospective students. But there is really a lot of value in taking the time and resources to focus on the user experience for your own team as so making it as easy as possible for people to find information. Making it intuitive, thinking through what that process is like, whether it's someone who's been at the University for a long time. There's a lot of information to.

Need to know either as a call router or as an admissions counselor.

So this portal is essentially to to help make sure that they are equipped to answer those questions. So we have places to add notes of our admissions counselor who is based out of California. Please don't call her at 6:00 in the morning. Or if someone is going to be out for a chunk of time and all of their calls should be directed to someone else. Essentially, the goal of the end of the day is making sure that students have the best experience possible and in order for that to happen, we have to equip our staff with the best, the best resources possible.

So for example, when territories change typically every year, let's, let's be real. You can say OK, control F who is handling New Mexico? Who is handling Alabama so it makes it easy to make sure we're connecting students with the correct staff assigned.

There's also a section of kind of fast fax, so if someone calls and says I have a question about a 529 plan and that student worker has never heard of a 529 plan before, they have access to that information quickly and they at least know where to where to send that conversation.

Kind of the same idea applies, but this one is specific to our admissions counselor, so I was an admissions counselor before I began working more on the back end, doing portals and other digital marketing at Creighton, and I wanted a way to be able to organize all of the information that admissions counselors have to balance. I think every single person here has probably struggled to find something in outlook, even when you're sure that you know what the subject of the email was, you're just not able to find it, was it?

A SharePoint link. Was it in meeting notes somewhere, so helping counselors spend their time focusing on student outreach and territory management as much as possible, things that we may do inflate only once a year, and it's hard to remember what the proper way to cancel a student interview in scheduler is or the impact of updating a student email as it relates to the portal internal resources, like how they can submit business expenses.

Things that seem, you know, maybe a little silly and trivial, like where printer locations are within the office. We went through it an office remodel, so just equipping your staff members to have as much information as they can.

This was a big one as we transitioned to virtual events, making sure that counselors have access to marketing photos, but not necessarily the entire Photoshelter library. Let's narrow it down for them, and they specifically need, you know, kind of covin specific photos. Or are we looking for an aerial photo of campus?

Student Caller Portal is for our current Creighton students to do calling outreach to perspective creating students. So essentially it's using the the calling links and system that slates provides. It's essentially just giving up more context, so within that link to call students from Hawaii who are deposited to congratulate them. You can also see the upcoming visit options. Once again, we have that current time in there.

We have the calling hours so that students know hey, it's noon in Hawaii right now. The calling hours are only supposed to be from 4:30 PM to 8:00 PM. It doesn't make sense for you to be calling a high school student at noon on a Monday.

We also have teasers in this portal that are filtered based off of user role. So this user role here you can see speaks specifically to Chris, who is our admissions counselor who manage is our student callers. So he has a link to a query that's a user based query that shows the current permissions of all of his student callers. That is how we filter our teasers so that we can assign one group of students to call deposits and another group of students to call.

Admits versus app incomplete at various times in the year, so that role filtration makes it easier for us to kind of shift groups of students to be calling different groups and then for the student color they just log into the portal and they see here the talking points. Here are the events that are coming up. This is what I should be referring to.

Deadlines have have changed. They always have that most updated information so that we know they're telling students exactly what we want to be highlighting when we call them.

This is a unique use of a portal for sure. So essentially our admissions office went through a renovation and we received some beautiful digital signage for our lobby and we wanted to be able to display the names of all of the students were visiting that day, and we received a bid from a company, an outside company, to create a system to show the names of the visitors and the distance that they came from campus.

And what they proposed was housed in a separate sign on system. It required manual entry of every student's name and hometown every single day that they visited, and it cost an arm and a leg. So we essentially kind of laughed at them and told them that slate could do that. So we created a portal that we basically put in full screen mode, an IT cycles through every eight seconds. Olivias last name is is blacked out here.

Are blue out here I guess, but essentially this is A3 screen display so that middle display is what is actually that portal page. It's just in full screen mode in Chrome.

And their home state is highlighted on the map and will look at the back end code in just a minute.

And then the distance from their home address to campus is shown.

If a student lives within 60 miles of campus, their high school name is listed instead of saying thank you for traveling for miles to come to campus. So we've got some liquid markup to accommodate for that. So this is the entirety of the code that makes this portal page work. So it's basically a for loop with a little bit of logic as I mentioned. So if the student is within the United States, it's going to pull in an image source that merges in their state name.

So you can see this screenshot of the file editor there, essentially just some some strategic choices of what those file names are. You don't have to put in too much liquid markup for that file path to work if they are outside the United States. We've got a world map that will show there's some logic to say, unless you're homeschooled. If you are within 60 miles, we're excited to have you join us from.

From if they're within 60 miles, join us from the high school name and if they're farther than that, it will calculate the distance.

Then if their home school that has different verbage, that doesn't look, look kind of awkward for those students, this is the back end. So configurable joins is really what made this all possible, so we're just going to dive into a couple of this subquery exports here, so the distance subquery export is using address by rank with geographic proximity. So once again, Google is your best friend. I have no idea what the lanja tude and latitude of Creighton is, so just look that up.

Pop it in an. It's really as simple as that.

Close to campus is just a simple existence field looking at whatever you would like to determine. Obviously is close to campus. We always use 60 miles.

And then the configurable joins at the bottom is what's really cool about being able to keep this up in the long term. Over the past year, I don't even know how many different templates that we've made of having to split out between virtual and in person. Adding new sorts of events, so just being able to add a simple or statement and say if they are in this template and it's today an there either attended or registered that student name should show up and it's been really cool to see.

Students kind of freak out and get excited to see their names, and specifically the distance that they've traveled to campus. And if you'll kind of think back to what that original proposal was, that would have been so much manual work. And now we literally just turn the TV monitor on in the morning and all of the names are kind of magically there.

I'm going to toss it back over to Libby to talk about another use of portals.

Alright, sorry bout that. Alright so I'm going to talk about Summer preview agenda. So last year we had to take our new student orientation virtual as I'm sure a lot of you also had to worry about and we needed a good way to communicate to students what their personalized agenda was going to be for this event. And it was very dynamic. Based on you know what college the student was in when they're advising appointment was all sorts of different factors that made.

A1 size fits all, not really work very well for this event, so we came up with a way to utilize our portal to do this so.

One other thing that we have started using a lot in slate is entities and so one of the entities that we decided to create was for summer preview. So we built a data set. We also use this for our campus visits. Just our daily visits. We built a data set that was essentially going to build out the pieces of our agenda so we were able to basically format, query, run the query kind of put in some of the details and then reimport.

All of these different agenda items back into this entity system to create these dynamic queries for each student, their students specific, we had the type. Here you'll see a student summer preview student and Family Summer preview and those were the way that we could kind of split out our our schedules from student schedule to the family schedule and then things that should be on both schedules.

So what you're seeing there is kind of the back end. That's what the Entity tab looks like in the student record.

And then basically we had two different queries that help this work. One of the queries was for the student and family, or I'm sorry for the family schedule and then the other one was for the student schedule. So you'll see that there's a filter down there that kind of.

Split them up.

That's the family one and then this is kind of the back end. This is an all the code that makes all of this work. I do believe that we had some help from the help desk to do this.

But it's just another loop and it kind of spits out the agenda items based on configurable join export.

And so we use that for our summer preview events. We're doing it for our in person events this year and then. That is also the way that we do our campus visit and are admitted student day programs as well.

So that is kind of all we have questions.

Alright, thank you Emma Anne Libby. That was an awesome session. We got some really really great questions in so we'll start off with.

I think Don B is coming back to facilitate.

We can.

Can you guys can you see me or hear oh awesome?

Well, thank you guys. Thanks. Thanks to Anna and Libby for this great session on portals is amazing. Your examples and super super exciting the chat.

Our.

Registrants or event attendees are really, really excited based off of face stuff of the chats, but will start off with some general questions about just portals in general, and then we'll probably get into the more specific questions on your exact portal so we have one question about what drives prospective students to use the portal. So are they all invited to join the portal? Do they have a sign in? How does that work in front of you? Guys could answer that question.

Yeah, so this would be what we call our status page. You can configure each of your rounds to point to a certain portal if you will. So this is where we point all of our students. Once they've submitted or started an application. So when they submit their application that we send them an email that says you know. Thanks for applying, they've already activated their portal because that's how they started their application. But then that's where we direct them back to in every step of the way. When we're sending out other communications for missing items.

Events scholarship applications. We drive them into the portal and then we do everything else through the portal.

And essentially our strategy with that is to have always so much helpful information to the portal that this student recognizes it as a place that they should be going, and that is always evolving. So it's it's obviously a process to get there to have that much information in there, but it's kind of a two way street, right? You want to push them to the portal, and you want to have enough content to make it worth their while to go to the portal. But yeah, pretty much everything links back there.

Another question is related to the status portal. Do students accept their award in portals?

Unfortunately, we don't have the ability for them to do that. We direct them to, we call it the nest, but that's our front facing Banner piece of it, and so they do have to accept their award in banner. But we do feel like having the information there in the portal is leaps and bounds better than how it's presented, how we have the ability to present that in banner so.

K.

So here's another one. How is portalled better than using default layouts or custom dashboard? What are the tradeoffs or differences to consider?

I don't know that I have a good answer for that. I think that a lot of the things we've shown honestly could be done. A number of different ways, right? Some of these if a school had an intranet or various resources, portals are certainly not the only way to accomplish a lot of these things. So I think some of it is. This is just the path that we've gone down based off of the resources that we have. The knowledge we have and kind of what has already been set up. Obviously a lot of times when you come into a role, you inherit some of those things that have already been created.

So I don't know that I have a really specific answer, but this seems to be, you know, fitting that criteria for us.

Right?

OK, so next question, so I think this has to do with the examples that you guys showed in in your presentation. But how many staff members worked on these portals and approximately how long did it take them to get?

Uh, and what kind of technical background you have question?

Mostly me.

Libby knows everything. Slate it seems, but portals. I was kind of my my domain of expertise. I'm really not kidding when I say I just Googled how to do things. W 3 schools is super helpful where you can pull up code and copy and paste and test it on a portal page that no one is looking at and see if it looks good or not. So there really are a ton of resources out there if you're not very technical, I think having a pretty elementary understanding of HTML and CSS will get you a lot further than you.

I think if you would do like an intro LinkedIn learning class, you certainly don't have to be able to code from scratch. Just being able to see roughly what the code is doing and take a an educated guess at what pieces to change.

Anyone who knows me will laugh at this, but giving brand standards places is really goes along ways like throwing your school colors on to a page and staying consistent with those actually does make a big difference, especially as a student has multiple status portals that they're using with various institutions. So a pretty picture in some blue text really goes along ways.

Awesome.

Next question is are configurable joints. Do you always use configurable joins in portals?

So we started building out portals before configurable joins existed, and so we certainly have not transitioned everything that was pre configurable joins into configurable joins. I believe the.

Admissions lobby signage.

And.

The entities might be the only configurable joins. Query is the.

The financial aid package. I don't think any of it is configurable joins. We do rely pretty heavily on the banner information, so we do have a lot of those fields that already exist, so there isn't quite as much calculation that may may be required at some other institutions. And then we do have some people who were able to help us with any of the formulas at those sorts of things that we needed to figure out.

And Speaking of your your your digital signage are you, are you able to have it only display during a certain time for example, so that we're not sure they're not showing in an ETA 8:00 AM event at 4:00 PM?

We do largely daily campus visits, so the students have very personalized schedules, so there isn't necessarily. For most days there isn't a set amount of time that the student would be here from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM necessarily.

We do a lot of personalization where they may meet with the professor or kind of extend their their traditional visit, which to Libby's point is where we began using entities for our visits. Because the schedule could really have anything on it in any order, so that has never been something that we wanted to limit. Just because the student could be there at any point throughout the day and we don't want them to feel like their name got cut off already.

Our next question is about the portal experiences for students. So does our creightons portal experiences for students optimized for both mobile and computer devices and do do anything in particular for Accessibility?

Yeah, I think that's an area that we could have dedicated more time and resources to, and I think that was kind of just a.

A manpower womanpower question, right? So I think that's if I had to pick one thing that we could have improved in our student portals, I think really thoroughly testing the mobile layout would have been a top thing that I would have wanted to ensure that we followed. But in terms of all tags and those sorts of things, that was always a big priority to make sure that we were meeting as many of those 88 requirements as possible.

And then does Creighton have a separate portal for current students versus perspective students, and if so, when do you transition from?

Slate portals to current student portals if they're different.

So we currently do not have a current student portal. We do have a second instance of slate that we've started to work through for some more kind of student success. Current student type initiatives. We started that last July, so we're not quite to the point yet where we're building current student portals, but we've definitely had lots of conversations across campus about ways that we could potentially build portals to better serve current students.

So.

And then for students, why don't you allow students to update their info in the portal versus sending an email?

Let me do you want to take this one or do me too?

Go ahead.

So there are some fields that we could relationship. Updates can be.

Slightly more complicated to update in making sure that we're updating the right relationship. So just for ease of why can I update 1 field in the portal, but I have to email for another. We've just kept it as email and just manage that process. It probably could be updated for some of those fields, but we've just stuck with email for the time being.

Oh, and this is. This is an interesting question. Have you have you ventured at all into translation capabilities in portals for students or families who are non English speakers? We're exploring implementing Google Translate, which works, but is only about 85% accurate. Are there any other options?

I believe they stopped supporting Google Translate because we were recently looking into that for translating an application, and I don't know that it was possible to add knew and that was also one of the pieces of feedback was the accuracy. I don't know of any other good solutions off the top of my head, but if anybody out there 'cause I would I would definitely be interested in it.

OK, so we have some questions about. I think volunteers. Can you talk more about how you possibly could use portals for volunteers, parents and or alumni? And do you have a portal for like ambassadors or tour guides at your institution?

Yes, we do have an alumni portal and what we do. A faculty calling faculty and staff calling and not right. No card writing campaign.

So we do have portals for both of those purposes. For both of those, it's essentially a query that kind of puts out a list of the different students that they're supposed to contact, and when they click on that, there's a form that they fill out, and then we're able to on the back end query on the form submissions and kind of monitor progress from what those people are submitting through those specific portals.

So we have a few questions on portal layouts, so.

About portal layout options and having the ability to customize the layout yourself instead of picking standard ones. And do they have a CSS framework for a layout that's already provided by Slate?

We, for most of these I think you can probably tell we use the two column layout and then for the lobby signage. I think it may be the only one that's one column layout. We've really stuck with those two, largely because we don't have a CSS template, but I have some really cool portals that use a CSS template and make it look completely different than the two column portal, but we did not have that or or do that.

OK.

Is this is a great question? Is Portal oversight a singular job position or do you have other job responsibilities? How much time does it usually take?

That's a great question quantifying it really depends on what projects are being taken on a still be kind of reference. When we talked through the financial aid portal, that was not a small project when we were getting it.

Up and running and obviously is potentially one of the most important pieces of information for accuracy, so there was a lot of testing a lot of work to make sure that all of that was correct, so I would say during that period of time that was one of my main tasks. The positions have changed slightly, and Creighton is actually hiring right now.

They I'm sure they'll be more than willing to talk about what those positions look like, but it was in conjunction with other digital marketing roles, so it was not just oral.

OK, so this has to do with the admissions counselor portal. With such a built out admissions counselor portal, are you still seeing that admissions counselors are using slate from the back end? Or are they only using the portal to do their daily tasks?

Yeah, so nothing in the portal would really replace using Slate. If anything, it's potentially a little bit of explanation as to how to use slate better or we have a helpful queries page which could very likely be facilitated by an older an notes within the queries, but it just makes it easier for people to once again control F. And I'm looking for a legacy query or or.

High melt risk or whatever it may be.

In case they don't know, the names of those queries.

But otherwise, I mean it's a lot of copy and pasting meeting notes into the portal, so there's really nothing that they do in the portal. It's almost just like a really built out bookmarks copy and paste portal, which is a pretty dumbed down way to describe it. But really, the end of the thing, that's what it is. They're not really replacing anything. Inflate with that.

And I'm picking up piggybacking off of that. So what are the benefits then of having an admissions counselor portal instead of a record custom tab?

I'm not sure I'm understanding what our record custom tab is.

Libby, do you have any thoughts on that?

I think maybe they were referring to the Custom tab on a person record.

So to replace the admissions counselor portal with that.

Yeah, so point, that's what.

So the information that's displayed in the counselor portal isn't isn't specific to a student, it's general information like here's an update. This is the new program name. This is what you're what we talked about in in meeting last week. Here's your how to guide first leads, but wouldn't nothing about that would be specific to a person record.

In terms of a student person record, if I'm understanding that correctly.

OK.

OK, so let's put it from our admissions emission side to more advising how do you deal with advising students who are who are in the portal. We created a portal that we maintain a mirror portal that we maintain separately. Since we were very hesitant to grant impersonate access to so many advising staff.

So we do let our admissions counselors and certain others around campus have impersonate permissions. We found that if we're very explicit with them that they are not allowed to. You know, click through and submit a form or you know, do things like that that we really haven't had any issues with people clicking and doing something that they they shouldn't have accidentally. I would say it's all of our admissions counselors and then a few people on campus, you know.

Someone in student life for their orientation events housing I think can see it. Just certain people like that, but we really haven't had any issues with giving people that permission.

And then are there differences in your portal that's used for traditional students versus professional or graduate students? And what are the differences that there already?

Yeah, so we actually have separate portals for undergrad population, a separate portal for Graduate School population, and then we have several admissions offices that are using this one instance of slate, and they each have their own portal as well. Those aren't all managed by the same people, but it's the same idea.

And so, yes, we do have our undergrad portal does have nuances within it for transfer students. International students that type of thing. But as far as the different groups, we do have separate portals for that.

And then to do you update your portal to applicant admitt and deposited with updated information and checklists.

So there all the same view, but there are a lot of filters within the teasers to show whether or not it makes sense for that student to see it. So for example, the app deadline teams are obviously would only be showing for students who haven't lived there after work completed their application yet.

There are separate checklists for.

Admin before 30 days of Decision being released. Admitt application incomplete deposit.

And then within that there's a lot of liquid markup to show certain requirements for, say, international students.

And I think you touched on this, but this question came in again. How frequently are the portals updated?

All the time. I think one of the.

Great parts of having the person who manages the portals in the meetings with counselors is that you're not putting the onus on someone else to pass along the message to be able to update that right away. To be able to add information that was discussed in a counselor meeting has been, you know, was really helpful, and there are certainly times that are dedicated to going through and testing and making sure information is still accurate.

But I would say anytime anything changes anytime a deadline may be extended.

It's there. There's never a period of time that they're not being updated.

OK, so for our for the financial aid portal that you guys show. So this is I think a really important question. When implementing the financial aid data on your portal, were there any concerns about displaying this data to people in your admissions area? I get a lot of pushback around access to student data.

Yeah, so kind of like what we had mentioned. Anyone who has impersonates access would have access to that information and slate as it is, so adding that to the student portal didn't allow any more people on our end to be able to see that financial information. So that wasn't a specific concern for us, and if anything, I think it can be really helpful to make sure that we can see what the student seems.

To see if something does need to be updated, or if it could be a little bit more clear in the way that it's presented.

OK, so do you have any portals that use the tables feature to display information similar to the standard coaches portal? Or do you find that it's easier to have end users use queries?

Could you repeat that question?

Do you have any portals that use the tables feature to to display information, or do you find that it's easier to just have the end users use query queries?

My $0.02 worth is that because of the populations that we have.

That we have built these portals for. We don't want to have the admissions counselors fall away from being comfortable with using queries, so I would actually say if your end user and as an admissions counselor, I would really want them to stay within queries. I can absolutely see how if you're working with maybe coaches or someone who doesn't need to be as fluid an as I guess fluent in Slate, I think that a table view is great.

I think that kind of goes back to the question about are you concerned about the portal replacing the knowledge of late and being able to query on your own information is so important as an admissions counselor that even if you could build up some table information in a portal specifically for admissions counselors, I would really want them to stick with using the query.

Alright.

Do you have or how much are you using snippets or now known as content blocks to manage the content in the portals? Especially if you're distributing that responsibility to people that aren't as comfortable in the portal environment.

We haven't used content blocks and I was using the word teasers so static content block teaser. Same thing in the portal content block in reference to snippets. What was previously snippets? We really don't use a ton of that and that's largely because a lot of the information that we're showing in the portal is really shown in the portal. We're not also merging it into an email or in multiple places, so it's not necessarily more efficient for us to be using snippets.

Content blocks for that information, and I think also just for.

Troubleshooting and testing to actually be able to see all of the variations within the back end of that liquid markup can be really helpful to make sure that it's all set up how it should be.

Great.

OK, so one more question for your financial aid portal, how does your financial aid portal handle changes to financial aid awards? Does the portal info just overwrite with the current data? And is there a way for a student to view their original award compared to the revised homework?

Yeah, so I just answered this in the chat, but our banner data refreshes nightly, so if something is changed in banner, it will update in slate overnight and then all of the updates will automatically just refresh in Slate, which will refresh in the portal based on the new fields. So there isn't anything we have to do on that end. We do send our students an emailed PDF version of their financial aid packet and so they do have that to compare to their revised version, but they can't.

See the revised version on that financial Aid portal page that we showed.

The boy it looks like we have two more questions left. Could you describe the entities that you used for the schedules?

That's not a short question. I'm trying to think where to start with it.

So essentially we made a custom tab that was specific for the entity widget and we were able to book upload schedule. So there was a lot of work done on the back end before summer preview to make sure that the schedules were ready to be uploaded as a data set for the Daily campus visits that are scheduled. As you could assume on a more one off basis those aren't uploaded, they're just, you know, add new within the entity widget so.

Either way works just fine. It really just depends on what sort of schedule you're talking about. One of the really cool results of that is being able to have a single export within a query and therefore within deliver within Mail merge within anything else that's sorted by time order and has any of the information that you want to include. So if for an internal schedule you don't want to be including location because you know it's all going to be within the admissions office, you can leave that part of the subquery export off.

So to be able to have.

All of those entities combined into one subquery export was.

Was a lot easier than what we were doing before. I'll just say there was a lot of looking work up to make sure things were in the right order for those personalized schedules.

And without entities I don't. I don't even know what we would have done with the personalized orientation schedules.

But essentially, once you have the skeleton of words of query exports for agendas, and those sorts of things is really easy, especially now that there's the query library within configurable joints to be able to have that as a base and then add or remove those pieces like location. But making sure that you have the sorts in the right place and that things are showing properly that.

It honestly be a whole other our conversation, but he implemented entities for our daily visit scheduling.

February 2020 and it couldn't have come at a better time because obviously we had a lot of changes with schedules.

After that, so to be able to add a different entity type and say this is now a virtual appointment and be able to keep schedules fairly similar. At least the structure of the schedule makes me very happy that we pushed to get that done when we did.

Awesome and then one more question about the entities. Why did you choose to use custom datasets and entities for complex events rather than using parent and child events in the standard events tool?

Yeah, as Emma mentioned our visit, our daily campus visits are very personalized an it really isn't. One size fits all for anybody that comes to campus. And so you know we, we tried to explore that path, but we just didn't have enough standardization of our offerings to say, you know that we had related events that a student could select from because it really depends on the students interests, what they want to do, who they want to talk to. So entities was our best option to give us the flexibility to.

Be able to kind of make it the way that we needed it to kind of look and to have the pieces of that event that we that we needed.

Text.

And it also gave us some really positive unintended consequences as well. So to be able to have a drop down list of the names and titles of professors that students were meeting with one of our pre Health advisors who meets with a lot of students. When I pulled previous data where it was a free form text field, there were over 80 different ways that his name was listed, whether or not pH D has periods behind it. Different titles should be able to just have a drop down an obviously.

To be able to query on that data it makes a huge difference as well, so that wasn't the goal of switching to entities, but now we're able to literally just pull a query and see how many people that specific Professor has met with and get a lot of really cool data, which is really important to be able to get a lot of that faculty buy in and show appreciation for how much work they put in because it is a very, very personalized visit experience.

OK, last question. Are you showed a banner highlighting upcoming deadlines? Is there a way to automate turning those off?

So I believe.

More than sorry, go ahead.

I was just gonna say I believe that the the current date filters that we showed on that slide essentially do the turning off for you. You set your current dates to say that it's in within a certain date range and then once that date range passes it just isn't visible to the student anymore.

If you're referring to automating it for the entire cycle, we don't store the deadlines anywhere else since late, so if there isn't like a deadline for the app period or anything like that that we would be referencing, because as with rolling admissions, it's going to get kicked, right so?

So that's the way that we automate it, but you could certainly plan it out for the whole year if you had. This is the expectation of what all of the deadlines would be. You can certainly make those teasers, and you could always do liquid markup. They don't have to be separate teasers, but I think from a troubleshooting perspective and especially someone isn't super tech savvy as you were into liquid markup. I think it's just a more foolproof way and you don't have to create existences for those date ranges then.

Great, well thank you so much Emma and Libby for this great presentation on portals and for our attendees. You guys are really engaged. Love all the really great questions. There's a lot of interest in portals and for you Festival Passholders early June we're going to be launching a bunch of courses and there is one on portals. So get super excited for that.

And and of course, the the recording of this webinar will be available in about 24 hours, so probably check back tomorrow afternoon around this time on your slate home page and you should be able to see that. But again, thanks. So much for attending. Thank you Emma and Libby for a great session. I hope you guys have a great day.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Right?