Slate Portals that Students Actually Engage With

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Hey everyone, and welcome to today's late session slate portals that students actually engage with. My name is Sarah Koshin and I'm a program manager with theslate.org team and I'll be serving as your moderator today. But before we jump into the session, I want to introduce your presenters and go over some quick housekeeping notes.

First, I'd like to introduce way better Marketing's Chief Operating Officer, Lindsey Ferrera, and way better marketing director of Slate, Allison Shriner. They will be guiding you through today's session and thank you both for joining us and giving us your expert opinion on how to create engaging portals.

Quickly I want to go through, so go through some housekeeping notes. I want to remind you that this webinar is going to be recorded and it will be made available for viewing to Festival pass holders in your home slate closed captioning is available for you, and it can be enabled on the right. The upper right hand corner of your screen. You'll click the CC button at the top of the share window. You can also enable full screen viewing by clicking the expand button at the top right hand corner of your share window.

All the way to the right. And if you need to resync your audio or video for any reason, if our voices are off, or if you're having trouble hearing or something freezes, we ask that you just refresh your share window. You could also post questions in the chat. I'll jump in the chat and I also know that Lindsey and Allison have some colleagues that will be in the chat for you as well. So from here on out I'm going to turn it over to your presenters. And thanks again for being with us today.

Thank you Sarah, and thank you everybody for joining us today. There's quite a lot of you and we really appreciate your time. Whether you're watching us slide or you're watching the back version after the fact, we appreciate it and we'll make sure to make it worth your while. By way of introductions. As Sarah mentioned, I'm Lindsay Ferrara. I'm the Chief operating officer at way better marketing and in terms of my background. I've been here for five years and prior to way better. I've had multiple digital marketing agencies.

Worked with national Hotel Brands, national restaurant brands, and I think relevant to this group since we're a slate user group, is the fact that a few of my organizations actually had their own proprietary CRM mandation tool. So I'm very used to building up strategy around a tool like Slate and have loved doing it in slate with clients of ours at way better. Super excited to talk to you about this today and I'm joined with Ali Shriner who is our slate guru. She manages a team of wonderful slate specialists.

You're way better and I'll let her give a little bit of background about herself before we get started.

Hi everyone, as Lindsey said my name is Ali Shriner, I'm the director of Slate here at way better than with the wetter nearly five years and my role is pretty simple. I'm really dedicated to helping our current partners and prospective partners really making the most of their instances and today obviously going to be talking a lot about Portal pages and that is, you know, it really kind of encapsulates a lot of the work that we do. It's such an important piece of your instance, so excited to kind of show you what's possible and how we're able to do it.

Great, thank you.

So we are going to cut right to the chase here and get right to the meat quickly for all of you viewers, here is the plan we're going to spend 5 minutes in the form of five slides giving sort of a back story for you. Basically how we think about these things and how we got here. From there, we'll turn it to Allie and she'll show you portals for the majority of this time slot. She's actually going to be showcasing live portals, live local features, and talking you through all of them. Towards the end, we'll touch on results, and then we'll also answer any questions we can on the note of questions.

We had several through the registration process. We've already woven those into our talking points throughout the journey and will address a few end. And just because we're sort of booked for time, keep in mind that if we don't get to your questions that come through that, we do always answer them personally. So every single question will be answered and then posted to the chat for those that watch the playback, so no fears there. Without further ado, jumping into that back story for those of you that aren't aware there are two types of slate portals, and many of you might be already be familiar with this, but.

Just a brief review. There's the gated and the non gated portal. The gated portal rares, a user to log in or authenticate themselves, and that's because they're going to see something specific to them. After that login screen the non gated portal does not require any login, it's viewable to anybody out there in the world as long as they have the URL it's essentially a landing.

The ways that we commonly use portals are listed out here in those bubbles, so we do athletic portals. Visit pages are very common for us digital ad landing pages, but all of these are typical way better use cases. But for today's discussion we are simply focused on the status portal and that is something that a student in the application phase may see or a student in the admitted student phase, Macy.

And because they're in those late stages of the game internally we call it the finish line portal. That's because in the long enrollment journey that it is for both the student and for you, all these are some of the final steps they may take with your brand. These are literally some of the final touch points they may have with you as an institute institution before they decide whether or not to choose you. So we call it the finish line portal. And of course, our whole goal. We do not want to trip over the finish line. This is a critically important.

That you've done so much this this far to get them to engage with your brand, get them to visit. Get them to apply if they're an admitted student, you've admitted them, you've packaged them. You have a counselor in touch with them, and you've done all of this in an incredibly personalized way and fully on brand. So when they get to this status page or status portal, it is not time to give all of those things up. It's time to learn, and even harder into those aspects and those strategies.

We at way better do a lot of audits and this is what we typically see users and institutions doing for the status page. This is the off the shelf slate status page that can be slightly customized and it's very, very valuable if you're using it and you're putting some extra things in there. Kudos to you. It is powerful in it of itself, but given the flexibility of slate, you can actually turn it into a portal page and have it very on brand and highly highly customized without a lot of management effort.

Year over year cycle over cycle.

Typically, when we're having this conversation, I think what goes through people's heads is OK. Well, what actually would need to be in there? What would be helpful to the student? What more do we need to really do at this stage? And we simply look at the demographic we're dealing with to to source that that thought process. So first of all, when we think about Gen Z, and particularly the high school group of Gen Z, they're digital natives. You know when they were born in that hospital room, there was a cell phone, their cell phones all around their kitchen table.

And they probably sleep with a cell phone at night. They are digital experts that expect nothing less than a smart digital experience and they choose brands based on that. They know what's good and what's not. They can fully see through it.

Also, this generation, like any generation, wants connection, but they kind of want it in a different way on their own terms and often through technology, social media. If you think about these high schoolers, they're walking around, documenting their life on Snapchat or tick Tock or Instagram stories. They want connection, they surely do, but sometimes they want it through that form.

And then finally another thing we know about Gen Z is that they're value oriented. They want to align with brands that they believe have the same values as them.

So when we're building these status portals, we're trying to utilize all these things we know about Gen Z and more like the short attention span and the other things you commonly hear, and we're trying to serve all that up to them in this one spot.

One final slide. Before we have Ali actually take it away and show you the portals that students most engage with.

Just a little bit about how we got here. So as Ali and I mentioned, we've each been here for close to five years at this point, but way better, our organization has been doing it for 15 so for 15 years a decade and a half, this organization has been running multi channel enrollment marketing campaigns for all stages of the funnel. And that's a whole lot of learnings. So when we set out to figure out what we wanted to do with slate portals, we thought about all of those learnings. And we took all those things with us. We paired it with what we know about Gen Z.

And then we started testing and the testing started about 2 1/2 three years ago and it took a lot of fails. A lot of misses. Allie smiling because she remembers some of those, but it took a lot of trial and error for us to get here. But at this point we can confidently say that by the numbers, these are the portals that students most engage with. So with that I'll turn it to our slate expert ally.

Thank you so much. Super excited to dive into some examples and we'll be showing 2 examples. So the first will be an applicant portal page and the second will be an admitted student portal. You'll see how based on status based on interest based on what we know about the student, how we're able to personalize the pages you know for those different records. So without further ado, I'm going to share my screen and we will dive right in.

Alright, so as you can see here again we are going to be starting with an applicant portal page. This is a test record Wayne and we're going to kind of see how this page is completely customized to him before we get started. This is Wittenberg University, private, small private liberal arts college out in Springfield, OH. So we're going to go through this and deep dive into a lot of the different content blocks. But first I kind of want to scroll through so you can get a sense of the overview of the page, how it's all laid out from a workload.

Perspective user experience. And then we'll again kind of go back and you know, dive into each of these things specifically.

So first and foremost, and I think it goes without saying that Lula can feel of this page. It packs a powerful punch. Wittenberg is one of those examples that Lindsey had previously showed on the slide and they were using an out of the box. More standard configuration for their portal asset. Now this is so much more in line with their brand and overall look and feel. And it's important. I mean you spend so much careful time and attention when it comes to your brand. You know, pouring over, you know, making sure everything on the website is perfect. You're print materials.

Email templates and deliver across your digital advertising campaigns. And yet it comes to that finish line as Lindsey said, and it falls flat. It's just not consistent. It's not providing that consistent student experience that that you want to see, especially at this point. So that's you know, we're kind of accomplishing one, you know, big goal, and that is consistency and look and feel. But #2 is that, you know, the standard data of the box configuration will also look very similar to your competitors, so if they are asleep at school.

And they're using out of the box later configuration. It's hard to differentiate yourself, so just by you know, applying some custom CSS and a style sheet, you're able to accomplish.

But that's not the real power of the page. What we're really here today to talk about is how this page is so specific and so personalized to Wayne. And to be honest, we hope that the student doesn't even realize it, because that's when I think, and that's way better. Think that's when personalization works best when it's very authentic and genuine and you are just truly helping and giving useful information for. In this case, the student to move through the enrollment process.

So in this case the applicant portal all a lot of the content that we're seeing in terms of, you know, kind of forcing and encouraging those next steps is related to application status. So Wayne has submitted his application, albeit a slate app common app. But now he's in awaiting awaiting materials, so he sees, you know, immediately his application status is that. And what do you know, an immediate call to action to upload those materials, I click it and I'm snapped to the material uploader, a place where I can immediately take action on what is required of me.

If I continue to Scroll down the page and see another call to action and I'm snapped back up again and throughout the page and you'll see there's many calls to action because we don't want to do it. Not once, not twice, but many times, because as you can imagine on mobile, this all stacks into a nice one column responsive format. So our job and we're going to talk about it. How do we engage students? How do we increase this time spent on page? Well, if we do our job, we want to make sure that through every scroll and deeper into the page they get that call to action is still present.

And is still over reminding them. Again, this is the step you need to take. So in this case it is to upload those materials.

In addition to that, we're now getting into some content, and here we're talking about affordability. You know, we run a lot of different, you know, campaigns and do a lot of different studies. And of course it's no secret, and the big one of the big factors related to you know college search or decision is for affordability. How am I going to pay for this? How am I going to fund my education? Well, we're giving this kind of top placement in real estate within the portal because it's that important and we want to meet that kind of head on. So here we're letting Wayne know.

Here is, you know some of the the need based merit based options that we have available and you'll see how on our admitted student portal how this will become realized. It'll become specific to Wayne and he won't be left guessing. What am I eligible for? You know, what am I hoping to receive, but for now we want to kind of ease that fear and anxiety. We want to kind of stay with within the kind of hunt in his college search and let him know that we're here. We're going to invest in him and his education.

Next up, related to affordability. We have fast information. You may think this is great. This is actually personalized to Wayne. This is again one of those pieces he probably doesn't even realize it, but there's two flags filter logics that are going on here in the back end number one Wayne is a domestic student, so he is. We're encouraging him to of course, complete the FAFSA. In addition to that, Wayne has not completed the FAFSA, so it's a little early on in the process, but if he had, if he had completed the fast food and that fast food.

See Flag was, you know, checked. We would hide you know this this content block because at the end of the day you know and and you'll see how this is kind of baked in throughout our strategy. The main principle that we really kind of are the bedrock on which we build these portals is that we will never show something that's not applicable to you and we will never show you something that you've already done. Because both of those things if not done correctly, can cause a lot of confusion. You know if it's students see something that's not applicable to them.

You know they're left with questions. They're giving you a call if they have completed it and they're seeing you, you know, kind of serving content related there, especially if the call to action is more explicit, they're going to be like I already did, that. Didn't you receive it? So again, making this portal truly self service and giving them the information that they need so they can take, you know, those next steps in action.

So next we have elements and you kind of saw them as I scrolled paths that are on your portal and status page today and to me they're the you know, the greatest kind of benefits of the portal today and that is the checklist to be able to dynamically set and satisfy items based on very specific parameters. You know for certain interested types academic interest you know, et cetera. Very powerful and those aren't going away, and I think that that's your portal page today.

Has these and it's great if facilitates enrollment, but it's very transactional. You know you're telling student I need this and they fulfill it. Uploading materials you know paying an app fee, paying a deposit, very transactional moment, and those moments aren't going away on our portal pages where we are just then turning it into an additional kind of marketing opportunity. Again, kind of going back to what Lindsey said, not tripping over that finish line. This is the most important part, you know. They are getting ready to make their college decision so the time.

To you know to to sell to sell yourself in your institution? What makes you stand out? The time is now to really kind of continue that conversation that you likely have been having with them. Since you know their sophomore or earlier years, so these aren't going away, it's now just pairing this with taking a very transactional moment, but telling a very personalized story.

So we're going to talk about how we personalize it to the student. But one thing I think people also with their portal pages personalization is not just about what you know about the student. I don't only care about citizenship status or their major of interest, it also can be personalized because of the current date and time. So I love the checklist. It's great, but to me it's sometimes lacks a sense of urgency. A student can see that a transcript is required, but that's great and it's 16. Seven year olds are.

I would say a bit across any generation, maybe a bit of procrastinators. So how do we encourage them to take that action? How do we provide that sense of urgency? Well, and you'll see across our portals we have these kind of important date sections so the student can kind of get a sense of what's upcoming. What are the application deadlines? What are the reply by date? What are the important visit opportunities you'll see here May 11th? We're at a kind of, you know, a typical time within the cycle. All of these dates have passed. You can see that they've crossed out. So as a student navigates to this.

Turtle they'd be able to see kind of what's upcoming, what they've missed. Again, providing that sense of urgency, and ultimately, as you can kind of see from this initial walkthrough and from other samples, this is completely custom to our partners and to their needs. You'll see an example where the important dates fall off as they pass through custom JavaScript. Here we have chosen to cross the mat so student does get a sense of of kind of what what was missed. Either is possible, but the point here is really to.

That personalization also should be relevant to date and time.

But there's personalization related directly to the student, so Wayne is an English student, so he's seeing humanities student content. He's also seeing a dynamic photo here. Human humanities, photo, and I think whenever we're giving these kind of demos, we're talking with partners or perspective partners. This is the moment that they are shaking their heads and smiling and saying, yes, yes, I want this. But in the same token, they're thinking I have 90 different major prompts. How do I?

Not only kind of build and support those 90 different programs all throughout you know, cycle Prep is a real thing. Maintaining and managing that can be a big feat. Well for us, and you see here with the kind of headline communities at whittenberg, we take those 90 prompts and we bucket them into what we better refers to as academic segments. Looking at your programs and figuring out what are those major buckets of academic programming that makes sense. So you have your sciences.

Business social sciences Health Sciences. From there, funnel your prompts into them and create content. So now instead of creating major content for 90 programs, you're creating content for 9 or 9 academic segments much more manageable to maintain, so that's great. Operationally speaking, you know you're kind of serving that need, but also let's not forget from the student perspective, personalization is great, but I always say to a point there.

Can be instances where you can over personalize the student told you once that they're interested in accounting, but they've changed your mind and now they're interested in marketing. If I am content specific to accounting, it might be I would scroll right past that. Not applicable to me and not interested in that, but if I had content related to business.

That would be again within within the realm, and we do a lot of studying, research and students do tend to stay within those academic segments.

So now taking that personalization beyond major of interest.

We're now introducing the student to their staff assigned counselor.

This is something that if you're not doing it on your portal page today, this can be a great quick win for you. Go and add your staff assigned Counselor Field merges to the portal because the good news is you've already done the hard work you have all of your territory assignment rules that assign these as the you know data is collected on the student and the reason to do it on your portal is now. If Wayne has a question about uploading materials about financial aid, he now knows who to go to. It's not just.

A general number he doesn't know who's going to pick up on the other end. I know that I'm going to call Rachel and I have specific questions for her, you know, related to the admissions process. In addition to that, we've been talking. We're talking about engagement here. We're going to show you results of these portals too. And while we're concerned with engaging on the status page, this can also help with engagement across your instance. You likely have drip campaigns, text messages coming from the counselor by introducing to the student here, even if it's just in passing.

Oh yeah, Rachel's my counselor. You are drawing a connection to the student with that staff assigned counsel, you're putting a face to the name and it can increase engagement across those other, you know, deliver deliberate efforts.

In addition to that, within this accordion you'll see that we have information related to campus life and to athletics, and it's great. It's interactive. A student can kind of scroll to learn more at way better. I would say that we love these things. Are developers or designers love to build them, but beyond that, beyond just the kind of pretty aspect of it, there's some. There's a very strategic reason for it too.

This is the marketing opportunity. You're kind of. You're selling the institution, you're talking, you know. Painting the picture for the student, but you're doing so in a way that doesn't bog down the portal with kind of heavy paragraph dense copy you're doing in a way that's very scannable and digestible to the student if they want to Click to learn more, they certainly can. But again, it's not taking up a lot of valuable real estate.

Same rule applies here. These are fast facts you know related to the institution. Student can swipe through and see and again very digestible content rankings outcomes. You know that a student will will wanna know.

Here we're kind of near the bottom of the page. This is what we refer to internally as kind of a full width CTA. We are giving. There's it's not kind of baked into other content. We are giving kind of full attention to this call to action, so that again when he clicks brought right back up to that material uploader.

Rounding out the page, we have more personalization related in this time to student quotes, so before we had major content, really kind of focused on curriculum outcomes, maybe hands on learning research opportunities here, we're letting them know this is a student just like you interested in a field you know similar to yours. This was their experience at way better and again when thinking about the management of this when thinking about finding these student quotes. Much easier to do so with those nine academic segments versus 90.

You can overtime make sure that they're updated, which is always you know, kind of key with personalization and makes it much more easier to do so when you're working from from academic segments.

Finally, here we have some visit options. Wayne, as we've seen, is awaiting materials, but once he submits those materials and he's ready for review, he will be in awaiting decision. All of those calls to action will update to visit because at that point, we're hopeful that he'll be admitted and we're going to encourage him to take those next steps.

Beyond that, though, there are a lot of other visit. We know how important it is, you know to the enrollment process. So here we have a content block for that and it can be default. You can list out kind of your major, you know, visit programs, but it can also be personalized. Let's say that you have events for virtual versus transfer. You have events for certain major certain academic segments, maybe a Health Science event that you want to showcase to those students.

All of these and I would say in addition to that, you could have an open house and that could be relevant based on date and time. So as that open house passes you, you kind of fill it in with something else. You can constantly be changing what you're promoting here based on your events, and I think that that's really the kind of thing in the game when it comes to the portal. You know, having the the utmost kind of discretion when it comes to the customization. Your slate instance is completely respect to you, the data structure and foundation of what should be built, and then the students who serve in the processes that you built.

From it all are going to be supported by the portal.

So that is the applicant portal.

Yes, so as we said, it began in beginning the applicant portal that students most engaged with truly by the numbers. So a couple of years of testing and a whole lot of analysis of different ping data. This is the layout. This is kind of the makeup and the features that students engaged with most to the portal the most. So the most repeat visits from this type of layout and these type of features they actually engage with the individual modules the most and then ultimately this portal.

Strategy led to the most completed applications of all the different things really by the numbers by the ping data. The most engaged with portal that we tried and seen actually, and that's a lot. So what we did there after finally getting to a place. And of course we're still building upon this and testing new things. But after getting to a place that we felt was.

We started to pour all of that same logic and the same principles into the admitted student portal, which Ali is about to show you.

At the admitted student phase, you're leveraging a lot of different platforms, so you guys have a lot on your shoulders every. You're probably leveraging a platform to create student community that may be on Facebook. You're leveraging a platform perhaps to have just general engagement through trivia and giveaways.

And then you're leveraging a platform, possibly to understand the students.

You want to know if that's a yes student, a no student, a fence sitter student and you're using that to arm your counselors with information to drive action. That's a lot of different platforms, vendors, partners, what have you that you're trying to manage at this stage, and we're trying to simplify.

So in addition to bringing over the great learnings from the App Portal, we also put those things right into your into this portal into your state instance. It's a one stop shop for you to manage. It's all in your slate instance all in your control ran because of that, and it's also much better for the student. They're not ping ponging around the universe to get to all these different initiatives for you. They're right here within this page that they're driven to frequently. Oh, and by the way, there's a lot of deposit calls to ask.

So again, using the logic that we had already come to and the winnings we had the the winnings we had already gathered. And then adding in what we know about the admitted student phase and what you need during that phase. So Ali. Without further ado, we'll show portal that's doing that most engaged with.

Yes, thank you. I'm super excited to dig into this because I think when people think of like a status page they think of the admitted student portal. It is a major driver of, you know, being kind of the recipient, end of persistent emails once their decision update, you know a lot of traffic's going to those pages because students are anxious to see you know what is. What is my decision. So, just as with Wittenberg, so I'll be in the small, private liberal arts college. I want to take you through the page. You can kind of overview of the overall layout and wireframe, again taking a look at the look and feel.

And then we will of course scroll back through and talk about some of these individual.

OK, so the applicant portal as we you know just saw all of the calls to action are really, you know, based on application status.

The admin portal, depending on your data infrastructure, but most times are going to be based on decision code because it is a great kind of toggle and filter to be able to say what am I asking the student to do next. So this is my test record. As you can see I have been admitted but I have not yet taken the next step to deposit so I am seeing all throughout the page confirm your enrollment calls to action, so I'm immediately kind of seeing that here within the navigation and I'm taking to the reply to offer.

Of admission form. From there I would then you know submit my deposit once once affirming kind of yes.

And you know, really? As I mentioned, the page a major driver is going to be those system emails, so don't have the student go hunting for that. We want them to know. Here's here, it is. Here's your admin letter. So this is the decision widget which we've obviously applied custom CSS to, so I'm able to click through. I'll see the confetti I have been admitted.

As I Scroll down the page again, I'll always see that call to action to confirm my enrollment, linking me to the reply to offer form. But now you know we saw in the whittenberg page how affordability is so key well as promised. Now it's realized now it's specific to me. Here is what I have earned $25,000 merit scholarship and so I have the numeric like you know dollar amount here as well as the name of this scholarship, the Ferguson scholarship. It gives further context to the package which we'll talk about in just a moment.

But it's very transparent and clear. This is exactly what I have earned. So not only are we doing that in a very clear and easy to understand way, but we're giving it a lot of attention because it does deserve a lot of attention. For the same reason that you have the confetti in the admit letter, you, we wanted to prominently display this merit scholarship. This is what I've earned with all of my hard work, and it can be a major differentiator. You know, for your institution, in terms of the marriage, you're able to offer.

In addition to that, I have been packaged. I have a financially package. Again, different instances do this in different ways. Most tend to release their financially packages as decision letters. So just as this is a decision widget, so is this again custom CSS, so we can have different styling, different content, and as you can imagine, we have different filter logic on the back end. This will only display when a student has been packaged, so I click here and I can see that.

I can see that offer you know letter in its entirety.

In addition to that, we talked a lot about the fast food on the whittenberg portal. Well, here I'm international student, so this gives you an example of you know, whereas that was faster content before now. This is it. General information related to international missions. What scholarships are available? What is the admissions process like or what are the requirements here? I can I can learn more?

Again, we talked about the kind of major tenets of the application being the checklist, the forms checklist. Those aren't going away on the admitted student portal. They are still here.

This is the important date section and this was the example I was talking about. This JavaScript is actually having the dates fall off as they pass. So now I'm just seeing the upcoming dates and as you can imagine this is going to be tailored for admitted students. So instead of talking about application deadlines or apply by dates, open houses, preview dates now this is all about the deposits of mine since passed, but now I'm kind of focused on on different orientation days. I could be promoting accepted student days. Of course, you know before they come in, but again.

Giving relevancy to date and time and encouraging students to take those those next steps.

So this portal up to this point has accomplished the two goals that the whittenberg portal has to have a great kind of overall look and feel to really facilitate enrollment and to tell a great story. We're accomplishing a lot of those things, but the admitted student portal now has a very kind of third important goal, and that is start to peak the picture and to think about. As Lindsey mentioned, you're doing a lot of initiatives with admitted students.

It's a critical part yield is, you know. Obviously a very important KPI when it comes to admissions enrollment. So how do you yield those students? How do you paint the picture? Well, a lot of you have Facebook groups and semi groups trying to get students to connect well, we're going to do that right on the portal. So if I scroll back up to the top you'll you'll saw that my picture is here and that is because either on the applicant portal or as an admitted student. I have completed a student profile.

I've uploaded a picture and I've answered three questions about myself.

These questions one is more specific to all then we are constantly looking to build. I would say like brand affinity in fun ways. They don't even realize that they're getting to know us and what life would be like here. But the question was, you know what student club or activity would you be interested on? Campus? I played soccer in college so I selected, you know, varsity athletics.

Then we strategically have included two questions that are just for fun. Like, again, this is an exciting time in a student's life and a lot of it is kind of mirroring that. So we talked about. What do you do in your free time? And apparently I'm all about athletics these days because I answered exercising or playing sports. In addition to that, we asked what your favorite streaming service you know. And I said Netflix.

So at the at the start when I first logged in, these toggles are all selected, so as I'm scrolling through the yearbook, any students that pictures are in color. These are the students I've matched with. These are the students that are exactly like me that have answered the questions as I have as I changed the toggles.

The student profiles change, so again I can continue to connect with my fellow peers and classmates, and you know, get a sense of who else might be coming to Albion.

So let's say I'm looking specifically at you know, firstly athletics I wanna who are my fellow student athletes that are gonna be potentially at all then and now I wanna take it a step further. I want to make a connection. Victoria looks like she could be, you know, fun to get to know. So throughout that profile the student has not only provided their profile, you know information the headshot and answer those questions. But they've also provided their social media handles so, so much of a student's life is on those platforms.

Instagram and Tick Tock so meet them where they are and have them. You know really kind of start the conversation there you know with with their friends.

And I'll say that.

A lot of the.

Yeah.

A lot of the different things that we're talking about today. You know, we're really kind of born out of, you know, brainstorming and strategy sessions. And this is one that we're super excited to kind of come see to life. I know Lindsey was super excited to kind of see integration.

I always give out over this love it and I'm convinced that someone's gonna find a roommate or a best friend or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or somebody to carpool with or something here through this yearbook. And so I really I really. Yeah I'm very excited about the future and so our clients allowing them to connect in the way they like to connect, which is sometimes through social media and through technology. And then really more than anything we hear it all the time in our campaigns outside of slate. And then also we have a couple marketing account.

Managers Bella Bond Muda run. A focus group here they run it year round. They follow students enrollment journey and one of the common things they hear is that students just want to see a sign that they'll fit in on campus. They'll fit in at that school, literally. They're getting a print piece, and they're not even reading the words. They're examining the photos or signs that they'll fit in. They see an ad. They're looking for a line that they fit in when they go to the physical visit. That's kind of what they're assessing, and we're trying to ease those worries here.

Right now in this sport.

For people like you with similar interests, go ahead and toggle around and see who they are. If so inclined, go ahead and connect. If we can ease that, worry it's it's a lot more likely that they'll envision themselves on your campus and ultimately deposits. So again, yes, thank you, Alexa.

Yeah.

Yearbook as as we all are so as, we Scroll down the page again being introduced to that staff assigned counselor. I am a nursing student, so I'm seeing a Health Science student quote here and again I have not yet deposited, so I'm being encouraged to confirm my enrollment. Fast facts again, related to the university. Very scannable, digestible, then comes the yield intent form. At this point. I haven't yet deposited so it's you know in terms of the admitted student pool, the I am an unknown like what am I going to do?

When it comes to my decision, and especially may, one has just occurred but thinking back to that week, wouldn't it be great to arm your counselors and your staff with that information of those assigned to them? Here are the students that are workable that are winnable that are on the radar, and at this point you know we can still kind of, you know, convert and kind of get those deposits. So we're going to ask them what is your intent? Maybe I intend on coming to Albany. I just haven't gotten around to find to offer admission or depositing so I can select that, and I can say yes.

But I'm still unsure. I was going to drop some conditional questions again. Interested in athletics, maybe I really want to talk to the soccer coach and I can put that in here.

After I submit this form, two things happen. Well, three things actually, we have a dynamic confirmation page which will appear right within this block. But some emails that kind of trigger off to that one is to learn to my staff assigned counselor as an internal alert. Hey Lauren, Ali has just filled out this form. She says that she's undecided and gives all the forms submission data and now Lauren can follow up as appropriate. We definitely encourage a personal touch point, a phone call, a text at this point and beyond that, as you guessed, we then are utilizing.

You know, form, communication and deliver messages to trigger alert to the student, personalized to them. So I said, you know, I'm most important factor to me as athletics. I'm going to utilize custom, you know, content blocks and liquid market to give content around that because our I would say another kind of major principle and strategy that we have is if a student does something if we ask them to do something and to to work, then we're going to pay back to them. We're going to give them personalized, you know, content. So in this case asking a little bit more.

So we're gonna make it worth their while and give them personalized content in the back end.

Next, we have giveaways. You're probably doing this today, whether it be on another campaign or platform or just that you're accepted student days. Giveaways are great. Anyone loves free swag, especially 1617 year olds. Lindsey will talk a little bit more about the results that Albion had, but you know this when we talk about what are the goals of this, you know, admitted student portal one is just to make this page we refer to as as internally as sticky, make students want to come back again and again.

Because ultimately when you do that, you control this environment. You can let them know. Hey Allie, you still have to confirm your enrollment. You can serve important information to them within this within this portal. So here I see there's this grand prize and you see this total visits one. This is actually tracking the total logins to my portal page. I'm delinquent, I'm not logged in a lot. It's unique per individual a day, but it's tracking my logins to win the grand prize. Quick anchor link.

To the giveaway section and I know that the enrolled student with the most portal page visits is going to win $100 book catcher. I know how expensive book bills were. That would be very nice.

Beyond that, we're going to have monthly trivia for those kind of just fun kind of swag items that you can do. And instead of just doing, click here to enter. You know. To win, we'll we'll do a drawing. We're going to have some trivia. Again, this is a fun way for students to get to know your brand. To get to know you as an institution in a fun way. How many acres is all being campus? I would, you know, make a selection hit submit regardless if I answer it right or not. I'm going to be entered to win, but again, just a fun way for them to get to know your university. Let's say I.

I'm interested in the T shirt, but I really want those socks. Well, I have to come back and again kind of dangling that carrot and saying not great yet come back June 1st and we'll have you know that trivia question opened. We have these built out all throughout the cycle and that is to you know, really soon to come back again and again. Facilitated enrollment. Here you have housing forms, health forms that might be on those checklist.

But beyond that, you know we've talked a lot about yield, yielding students, getting them to confirm. But this is also about melt. This is about once those students have deposited and confirmed getting them excited about their choice. You've made a great choice and you know, really, ensuring that they do show up in the fall that they do show up, you know, and register for those classes.

Next up we have information feed really for social media. So as you can see, this is something that the student can easily scroll through. All the and in this case has chosen to showcase their Instagram feed and it is a direct feed of their Instagram feed. But as you can kind of see here and the functionality, excuse me of this plugin is we're able to pull in a specific hashtag too. When we talk about, you know our initial strategies and brainstorming sessions.

We wanted this, you know, we envisioned this to be student generated content. So if you have a hashtag that students are using again, this helps to paint that picture so students can see other admitted students are doing and to see what campus you know life is like and you know they'll be able to see that within within this block.

Scrolling down the page Health Science student. So seeing Health Science you know photo here as well as major content.

Student life default information. Again, we're going to make them stand to learn more. Don't want that heavy paragraph text and again much more important on mobile because it takes up the real estate.

And finally, when I talk about that goal of pain in the picture, we've hopefully done that. We're giving them a sense of what is student life, what is campus life that all being? We're getting them a sense of here, who your friends and classmates may be now. Let's take it to step further. I know they're major of interest, and I know who the department heads are on campus, so why not make the connection? Why not make the introduction? As I mentioned, I'm a Health Science student, so Ken Sybil is the Health Science, you know, department head there. And I'm not only getting an introduction to him.

But I can also get in touch. I can email him directly. Let's say I want to learn more about research opportunities or different clinical. You know, field placements. I can do that. So I get a sense of who I'm going to be learning from. You know what I'm going to be learning and this. And you know, the students. I'm going to be doing it with and it makes again that choice less of a choice. It's more of a reality and you're really kind of starting to to picture yourself there.

Rounding out that page is again that visit kind of block and this I would say is definitely can be dynamic. Students that are accepted but haven't yet deposited. You're gonna throw up your accepted student days. You know more information there. Students that have deposited. You'll want to be pushing orientation. And again these can be dates specific because the accepted student days have all have all passed at this point.

So that is the accepted or admitted student portal.

Valley there we have it, so we often get the question about how hard is this to manage. So we thought we'd that into this discussion. Today we're trying to thread the needle between making it customized to the student, but also making it very manageable for you as the slate users. And it is. This is a page that no one, no two students are going to see the same thing. Ali's not going to see what I see. I'm not going to see what Rich sees riches and going to see what Bella.

Cheese Bella is not gonna see what Emily.

Be exactly the same page, but it doesn't mean that that's going to be complicated for you on the back end. The way that we built this, it is truly just a few tiny things you have to do to every cycle, so cycle prep year over year cycle cycle. Very, very manageable. Just wanted to make that clear from the go in terms of results you saw Albions page just now and this was their old one. They were using a status page that off the shelf option from Slate when they moved to our portal.

Strategy in the first seven days. These are the results. They saw 138 students entered to win the April trivia. 56 told us whether or not they planned to enroll and 96 students submitted their profile and that was just this week. The numbers have obviously grown dramatically since then. Also notable about Albion. They've let us know that their checklist items are being completed at twice the rate year over year. So the housing questionnaire, the writing assessment, the math assessment, those are being completed double the rate.

Year over year because of how it replaced in the page and the stress that we put on them on the page.

Overall, we've had many clients switch from the default status page to or another portal page to our strategy have seen results. These are some of the overall averages we see 60% lift in Portal visits year over year. Again, we found this strategy to be the stickiest. It's the one that's driving the most repeated visits.

65% of the admission students wearing their intent to enroll on average and 70% of those that say yes, actually end up depositing in that same visit because of the way that we place those calls to action, change the verbiage and. And we've played with the placement a lot, but this particular type of layout, thinking well from that regard.

We sit in the chat and it also came through and registration, so we want to be sure to touch on it with the limited time we have. But what about grad is a big question, so I will turn it to Allie to just give a brief overview of how these same fundamentals would apply to grad. Obviously it's a it's a longer game, so some things do change, but a lot of the same logic applies. Thank you, Adam.

Yes yes yeah. Seeing in the chat and it's great. I'm so glad that we have kind of this slide in here to talk about grad and that is, you know, in terms of the strategy, same rules apply. We are constantly going to be for application status, decision code. Again depending on portal going to be serving up. What is that next step? But the goals are a bit different. This is an undergrad. We're not so much as painting the picture. This is all about the four year experience. This is what life is like on campus. The decision is built on different factors.

So we have different content blocks related to that.

The program of the most important need to understand what am I going to learn? What are the outcomes you know that are associated with this, so that is going to be custom and specific to that interest and you wanna get as granular as possible here. If a student is saying that I want to masters of education with a concentration in elementary Ed, you know you are going to have you know content specific to that. You don't wanna kind of in this case. Don't take it out of academic cycle level. Get as granular as possible because you have you know. Certainly the content to to back it up.

In addition to that, what we hear oftentimes is, you know when we talk to, you know partners about. Why do you lose a student? It's not so much that you lose. It's maybe that they don't understand like the requirements, or they miss a start term. You know in terms of the cycle. So let them know specifically what are the admissions requirements. Here's exactly what's needed. Do you know to be eligible for our program and let them know up front so they can? You know, be sure to to gather or kind of meet those those specifications.

Next, and this is a huge one, especially given the the pandemic is flexibility is again very very important in terms of decision and this can be different. You know you have cohort models you have on campus hybrid fully online. You know fully residential like there are a whole host of different kind of format options. So neat that's specific for each program we work with with partners and you know the the grad schools. Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to different institutions, not in a bad way. It's just they have different processes and different formats that they're offering their programs.

So we want to make sure that the content is reflective of that in terms of format and flexibility.

And the kind of borrow something from the undergrad portal. We introduced the student to the department head to, and that Health Science professor that I was able to get in touch with. Here we want to do that earlier. We want to do it on the applicant portal because in terms of decisioning in terms of what are the key factors you know when it comes to students decision, program directors can be huge. They are driving the program, they're building, you know, the curriculum they are mentors to these students you know. Certainly, as you know, prospective students, current students, and well beyond. So make that introduction early.

Let them know the kind of their expertise and allow a student to connect.

Thank you.

So way better has one rule. If you've ever been on a webinar you've seen this slide, we actually have it plastered in our office as well, and I think it's something we all live by. But the concept is don't try to build perfection before you get started, do something and then make it better. Start building upon something, but you got to get going first, so we have actually been living our own rule through this as I've kind of explained throughout the process. But we just tested and then we rolled with something and we're still iterating on top of that thing. So the yearbook.

Feature that you saw were layering in home state so that people can see others coming from the same state as them. The giveaways were turning into a charity play to play on to that kind of mission. Value driven aspect of Gen Z. The more student visits their portal, the more we'll donate to a charity on their behalf. So just simple examples of how we're continuing to build on what we've already done, but don't stick there in a state of paralysis and be scared about what you see, even if you insert a staff assignment into your status page, or you make the banner bigger about their application.

Status, there's just little things you can do to make it a little bit closer to the Holy Grail while you work your way towards the Holy Grail, so.

Best of luck and then, if you liked what you heard today, please join us for our webinar on Monday that will be our President, rich white and myself just kind of reminding you of why you bought Slate. A lot of times it's easy to get bogged down and all the operations of it all. The query management, the application management, the connection to the SIS and you forget about the bells and whistles that got you excited originally. So we're just going to try to give you some tangible tips that you can walk away with and we would love to see you there and then. Also, a bunch of us from way better, including Ali and I will be.

At the summit in June and the only sad thing about a webinar is that we can't see your faces, so we'd really like to meet you in person. Please stop by our booth. We'll have a lot of fun and just going to dangle that carrot and see if you stop by. But yes, well, please. We'll look forward to seeing you then and then. In the meantime, if you have any questions, Ali and I both dropped our email addresses here. We're proud moms proud Slate users. Proud enrollment marketers. Proud you know folks in higher Ed. So if you have any questions at all as it pertains to this presentation or other, please don't hesitate to use the email addresses.

And then as far as questions, we don't have a ton of time, but I have a few polled here that came in through the registration process and this comes up a lot. Basically, the gist of it is how is this thing constructed and how did you pull this off? That's a big one, Ali.

It's a big one and I think it's as I mentioned before, it is as custom as your instance. So for every partner it's a little bit different, but I can tell you some commonalities and elements that are would definitely be included in every portal. Custom CSS style sheet, custom JavaScript. In addition to that, there are things that you know we could mark up content blocks, translation tables and lots and lots, you guessed it, configurable joints, so you know really all that being said though, as as Lindsey had mentioned, rebuild them to not only be.

Great and customized to the student, but to be manageable for our partners. So at the end of the day, we provide a very kind of thorough, you know, management document. But really, it as Lindsey said, it's like 2 major things that have to be, you know, updated year over year and one being those important dates which change you know, just because of different event times. But it's super easy, you know to to to maintain. But in terms of the build a lot of a lot of customization that that goes into that.

Thank you, yeah we always try to take the heavy lifting off our partners, so leave that hard work to us. Another question that came in was why 2 Portal assets instead of 1?

I'm so glad someone said that's good. I saw in the chat too, so they are discrete separate portal assets. So certainly again kind of based on partners instances that cheered. Is it not versa and just verse on based on the partner's needs. We could make it into one, but having it kind of be too discreet, it allows the filter logic to be less complex. You know that you're just working within like applicants. You know in terms of that Portal admitted students the same graduate students the same imagine if.

All of those were in one the filter logic and the management of that. You know over time, and especially we know these instances, they trade hands. You know people that were there on that slate, captains that the implementation are different than those that are managing it today. So making it truly kind of stand the test of time and making it, you know easy, easy to manage over that time is why you know we typically have. You know separate portal assets.

Thank you and last one. I took Allie down alley. I don't know if you have anymore on your end but it's where do we even start?

Yeah, it's this is a. This is a good one and I would say I can kind of walk you through our process. I think there are some definite quick lands. Hopefully we've been able to get those today staff assignment as Lindsey said, having very clear kind of headlines of what the students status is you know will will certainly help and you can do those today.

Beyond that, really. Start with design you know, and the look and feel it's it. It's great, but it's really when the the design comes down to the wire frame. Have you accounted for all the different you know content blocks on the Albion portal? You didn't see it because I wasn't eligible for it, but we have things related to honors. We have things related to certain programs that again need to appear to facilitate that part of of enrollment. So making sure you've accounted for all of those kind of secondary, tertiary, you know populations.

That are still very important, you know, to the overall enrollment process. So beyond the wire frame, you now know, kind of what you have to work with and certainly data you know comes first. You need to understand what data you have and what data fields are available, what's coming in from your SSIS, you know in terms of and then in terms of financial aid, that you're going to be able to offer on that admitted student portal and what have you been collecting on the app that you're going to be able to? Again kind of surface to the student, know what different content blocks?

Then you'll build up the content you know, kind of have the building blocks in place. You'll build the content and you know really surface that you'll do the actual build all those things that I mentioned the in terms of your style sheet, translation tables, content blocks, liquid markup, and then test, test, test, test, test with every piece of personalization. Need to make sure that you find a record that meets that and is seeing the correct information. We I can't tell you the amount of QA and testing.

What we do it's it's very, very thorough. To ensure that we're really making sure it's a great experience for everyone. As Lindsey said, my portal is different. For Portal, it's different from someone elses, so it needs to look perfect. You know, for everyone.

The.

Thank you Ali and I think we're basically butting right up against the hour, so there are a lot of really wonderful questions in the chat. As I said, we will personally answer them all via email. We'll also post them back in this chat, so if you refer to the recording you'll see the answers and we're sorry that we didn't get to them all, but thank you so much for the time. It was great to have you and we really appreciate it. Hello, Sarah.

She's back.

Thank you.

Hey, just closing out the session, just reminding you again if you are a festival pass holder you will have access to the recording of this video through your home slate. Otherwise, again Lindsey and Allison. Thanks so much for being here with us to all who have joined today and I hope everyone has a great night.

Thank you everyone.

Now we had.

Now we can.

Boy

I wanna make some.