Dive Deeper with Waybetter Marketing: How Two of the Biggest US Institutions (and Several Small Ones) Transformed Their Portals

Hello everyone. Welcome to this Dive Deeper session. On this is Dive Deeper with Way Better Marketing, how two of the biggest US institutions and several small ones transform their portals. I'm Christopher, Senior Client Support Engineer at Technolutions. I'm going to be the moderator for this particular session today. And there are two presenters today are Allie and John, both from Way Better Marketing. We're going to stay on this slide for just a minute or so, just let the number of people start keep trickling in.

It looks like we have a good number so far, but hopefully we can get that number up a little bit more. So it exceeds, uh.

The top registrant session so far this so you all know this is the second most registered session for this particular series of Dive Deeper, so I'm personally really excited about seeing where these registered numbers go and the where the attendee numbers go as well.

OK. Looks like that number is holding pretty steady. Go ahead and introduce yourselves in the chat.

OK. I'll just dive right into the housekeeping slides. So just so you'll know, this webinar is going to be is recorded right now and will be made available for viewing. I anticipate probably this webinar will be available probably later this week or early next week. If you do want to enable closed caption, you can go ahead and click that CC button at the top right hand corner of your share window.

Things to know about the closed captioning option is that that is a system not hosted by Slate. So there there can be some words that it might not be able to understand. So just be aware if you are reading that and relying on that.

Full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button in the top right corner as well. And if any point in time if Ali's audio or video or John's audio video comes in unsynced, just go ahead and click that refresh button and that should sync it back up again.

At any point in time, post your questions into the chat. But also one other tip as well that's not mentioned here is that if you do decide that you know you don't want to see Allie and John or you want to make their their screens a little bit smaller. You just want to zoom out a little bit and that will actually make the slide screen a whole lot bigger as well as you can actually rely on those slides a little bit more because I do know that pretty cool stuff. OK. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to them and so they can go ahead and introduce introduce themselves and get started. Ally and John take it away.

Thank you so much. Thanks Chris. Thanks so much everyone for joining us today. Love to see the activity in the chat. Hello to familiar friends. Hello and thank you for joining us. We, it's a great day. We're post May 1. We're a couple weeks away from Slate Summit and of course today we're here to talk about portals, something frankly John and I love talking about. And it's because portals are really a true representation, a great example of really how you can harness slate to its maximum to really kind of you know, harness the data and really drive kind of the critical activity you need.

And that goes for everyone, for the big schools, for the small schools, no matter where you're calling in from today, thanks for kind of indicating from the chat. We'll really aim to offer very points of view and strategies for you to really consider as you look to optimize and really overhaul your portals.

So as I said, I'm going to be doing that with the help of John Thompson today, who, like you, was on a campus for many years.

Yeah. Hello, everyone. Yeah, I got to spend about seven years on campus and that's where I definitely fell in love, UH, with enrollment, even though my title was a marketing person. So, UH, prior to that, it was a strictly marketing background. So pairing the marketing background with the enrollment, UH passion is why I'm so passionate about talking about portals. It's it's the perfect mix of marketing and enrollment. So you're driving action, but you're maintaining and growing the brand at the same time. So I could talk for portals for a long time, but we're going to keep on rolling here and give it back to Ali.

Thank you. My name is Allie Shriner. For those that don't know me, I've been with way better just over 6 1/2 years in a role really dedicating to helping our partners making the most of their slate instances. Today me and the great team are doing active work within 50, you know to 75 plus instances. Everything from implementations to audits to campaign build outs, reporting suites and of course custom portals. Prior to way better, I was with the Chronicle of Higher Education for just over five years, helped to implement their marketing automation platform Ilqua at the time, now Oracle.

But regardless the platform that sends you likely the you know many newsletters that you receive on a daily or weekly basis. So really honed my marketing automation chop since CRM knowledge but also learned a lot about higher Ed. I've learned a lot about the challenges that you all are facing, you know certainly on a daily basis and now obviously full circle for me kind of marrying those two things and thinking about how we do that with insight. So when we think about you know a little bit of background about way better, the simplest way to really kind of describe what we do.

Is that we drive enrollment at the top funnel, think your RFI submissions, think your event registrations through applications, through deposits. I'm of course skipping a lot of steps. There's a lot kind of in between that goes on to drive that activity. But we do this, we aim to really kind of drive those conversions both in and out of slate and have been doing so for a long time. Quick timeline here you can see way better. You know first over has been around for over 15 years. In 2005 we bought our first cloud based CRM platform.

Launched our first multi channel marketing campaign and it was successful and have really been in the higher Ed space ever since. Today we exclusively work with colleges and universities and with that work really use the best tools you know to to execute upon that. Today we leverage 8 different automation you know tools in house to really operationalize our campaigns with Slate of course being one of them. And it's with this work that we've helped over 100 institutions and have currently over 100 million students in campaigns as we speak.

And just mention that because it's a lot of learnings every day. We're learning what works, we're learning what doesn't and really gives us the ability to speak to you on the topic you know that we're about to today. So in terms of today, in terms of the agenda, we're talking about those conversions, we're talking about those touch points with students. How can we drive that activity? We'll dive into solutions that support your student portal, your student status page and we'll take you straight to a live portal. We promise to get to the goods quickly.

And then really give you the background for the mechanics, for the strategy of how we affect all those critical KP is app completion, You know, you know, improving yield and reducing melt investment here at the student portal is your time, your energy, you know, your dollars is really a no brainer. The moment you go, the moment from the out-of-the-box kind of slate standard to a custom portal like the one you're going to see, it's just a literal flip of the switch on the back end At the round level you will instantly start to see dividends and we'll show you how and we'll you know, show you how it's all possible.

We'll then shift gears from student to parent and we can't forget about them. They're often overlooked, you know, population and you'll see how the student portal and the parent portal really complement each other, yet are still very specific, you know, to that intended audience. We'll then head to non gated portals and we'll head to the top of the funnel when thinking about your, you know, campaigns, when thinking about your digital advertising efforts. Have you ever considered a slate portal to be the home for that? We'll show you why you should and we'll show you kind of how you can manage it on the back end.

And then finally again thinking top funnel, what about the launch of a new program, we have inaugurated portal for that too, one that promotes you know the new program also de anonymizing kind of the traffic and building you know a great kind of pipeline of applicants. The running theme behind all of this, you know behind they're all portals, well obviously going to be show you showing kind of what's you know, we consider the best in class, but it's the fact that these are critical for all institutions, the big schools constantly driving striving to really support the brand.

And the small schools really looking to amplify their voice and working with the resources you know that they have. You all have challenges and though on paper you may feel very different, you actually face a very similar challenge.

Yeah, I'm, I'm the only thing standing in the way of the live demo. So I'm going to go through these next few slides pretty quickly. But we've selected two schools to kind of highlight to demonstrate what this challenge is. So first partner University of Central Florida, massive student population, very dependent on seamless processes and things and then conversely we're going to be talking about in depth McDaniel College, which they're much smaller institution regional and nature private.

And they're able to do things a little bit more on the personal level. So these look very, very different on the surface level. But what what do they have in common? And to take that even further, we have this list here. What do they have in common? So it's pretty simple. They have the exact same challenge. So what these all these schools have is they have a massive offering to people who all want different things. So that is a significant marketing challenge.

I can tell you from that my first hand experience, so we have to appease the alumni group, the advancement group, the news and everyone else who comes in knocking for that prime website real estate. So we have to somehow get to the part that the students care about, which breaks my marketing heart is about 5% of all the things we're saying and putting out there and we just need to find the best mechanism to unearth that 5% and we have determined that a good way to do so.

Is through portals.

Yes. And when we think about portals, when we think about that 5% portal can be the answer. How do you connect with students? How do you kind of connect with parents? Because with a custom portal like this, you're saying we hear you and you're really saying we know you, we know your interest, we know where you are in the process. And here's what we can offer, here's how we can really help. When we talk about Portals 2, we're talking about two types of portals, which we mentioned.

Non gated portals, these are your slate hosted landing pages which are you know, geared for anonymous kind of web traffic, but they can still be packed with personalization. Gated portals, conversely those require authentication. Of course we know exactly who the user is, whether it be the student, whether it be the parent because they're logging in and you can bet that we're going to use everything we know about them to really kind of perfect that you know, experience. So we're going to dive in as we said, we're going to take you to the good stuff quickly.

Will really show you a best in class looks like, you know at every point kind of here within the process you'll see a portal that is entirely self-service, entirely personalized and hyper focused to the student. You know at every step, you know kind of encouraging them to take the next step. It'll move the needle on all those important KP is too app completion, improving yield and reducing Mel. And then again we'll circle back to talk about the strategy and how schools the biggest in the country and the smallest really use them to operationalize, you know and truly kind of harness late for the sake of an example here today too we'll be taking a look at McDaniel College.

It certainly doesn't fit the bill for one of the biggest schools in the country, but they gave us permission today to kind of showcase the portals across all those key statuses. And then we'll talk about how some of those tactics change for school, like, you know, UCF. So with that, I'm going to start screen sharing here.

OK. All right. So this is the student portal. This portal is for Maddie. And again, it is for McDaniel College. So I'll go ahead and Scroll down so you can kind of get an overall sense of the wireframe and layout. And then we'll kind of go back through and talk about the, you know, strategies at play, how it's configured on the back end, how you can do the same and what the impact, you know, is that we see.

So for a portal like this, first impressions, well is that it's nothing like the standard, you know, I would say kind of out-of-the-box portal. It is reflective of the brand. And for again a school like UCF brand is everything, brand is a draw, brand is your reputation, brand is certainly a value proposition that you want to lean in on. And so having a portal that is custom to your look and feel is very important, but it's also very important for school like McDaniel.

They spend, you know, just as much time and energy across all their student touch points, across e-mail, across print, you know, across their social properties, ensuring that the brand is reflected appropriately. So let's keep all the marketing folks in the on campus happy and knowing kind of what's possible from a slate portal is this. It certainly can be like I said, reflective of of that brand. But the real power of the page is in the data. Maddie at this point, she's logged in. We know exactly who she is.

So we're going to use it here and encouraging her to take that next step. Maddie is an education student, but more importantly, we know her application status is awaiting materials. So through content blocks we can show her and really tell her encourage her to take the next step, which is to submit those checklist items no matter where she is on the page, the sticky NAV will snap her right back to the checklist, which of course is the first thing that she's seen here within the portal. And I think that's important when we think about a self-service tool, the hierarchy of information.

You're basically inherently telling the user, the student, what to pay attention to. In this case, it's the checklist. You absolutely have a checklist on your portal today. It's really marketing automation at its finest. Being able to set and satisfy items automatically based on who the user is, based on their status, based on kind of what's required of them. Along with the material uploader. Students are able to select, kind of self select into forms, complete them, they're able to upload kind of missing documents and really take action. And it's with that that this again becomes, you know, the ultimate vehicle for them to complete their application.

But I often say, love the checklist, but I think it lacks a little bit of context, a little bit of sense of urgency. So what if we gave it urgency? What if we included, you know, different kind of deadlines, open houses, information for students you know to pay attention to within important dates? This is a, you know, section of the portal. Maddie doesn't realize. It's very personalized to her. She's an incomplete applicant. She's a domestic student. She's a first year student. She's the expected fall entry term. All of those factors dictate what she sees here in terms of those important events.

You can do it different widgets on the back end, Liquid markup, obviously looping through those things that you want to showcase. We are crossing out and graying out you know information as it's passed. So to give a little bit of FOMO, so it's emergency and then really kind of showcasing what's next upcoming.

Next, when we think about again a self-service tool, when we think about how to get users to engage, we again are very intentional with the hierarchy of information. We'll you know talk about it, but the student can now really make the portal their own with these collapsible widgets. They can you know hone in on the things that they want to learn more about. And 1st we think affordability obviously it's key to any critical to kind of any decision. So that's kind of first here within our accordion widget content we can understand what we can expect in terms of aid at McDaniel.

And for encouraging students to take the next step, to take advantage of all the aid, FAFSA, obviously a very loaded topic for this cycle. Bless you guys all for, you know, certainly kind of navigating that and continuing to navigate that for for this cohort of students. Maddie is seeing this content because she is a domestic student and because she has not yet filed the FAFSA. So she is, you know, encouraged to take the next step. If she had filed the FAFSA, if she was an international student, we'd showcase different content.

We would hide the widget entirely. And I think that that speaks to a great kind of marketing automation principle and something we we better believe is that we'll never show you something that's not applicable to you and we'll never show you something that you've already completed. We don't want to waste the valuable real estate. As you can tell, there's a lot of things we want to showcase to the student and we don't want to confuse them. You know, why show them something if they've already taken action on it?

So Next up is visits. When we think about connecting them with the campus, when you think about improving yield, reducing melt, what's the ingredient of that student, the one that is on campus in the fall? A visit is likely, you know, kind of incorporated there along the way. So we want to showcase that here. We have an event widget. This is just stylized, but it's an event widget that you're, you know, specifying folders on the back end. Another piece that Maddie doesn't realize is specific to her. She's seeing different options, you know, based on her status, based on who she is.

We want her to automatically self select into the right event. We don't want her to have to think, you know, is this the right event for me. We want to do that work for her because when she does, when she lacks selects the date and time, obviously this is just daily campus visits. All of that information is all pre filled for her. So it makes the conversion of that event from the portal that much better. So you're kind of improving the user experience there. Here we next have event tiles which you could further highlight you know kind of specific offerings. In the fall we'd be promoting open houses in the spring kind of preview days.

For a transfer student, you know, transfer Tuesday's information sessions again, think about how you can utilize Liquid Markup to really personalize what the student is seeing next connection. We do a lot of research and focus groups here at We Better and I think you would be surprised. You know, for the students, you know, when they have questions, they often don't know who to go to for help. You know, the running theme behind this portal is that we want it to be self-service. We want them to be able to navigate the process independently and John will talk about why that's important for a school like UCF.

And why that's important for a school like McDaniel. But if they can't navigate that process, especially for someone like McDaniel who can offer, you know, a more kind of personalized touchpoint, introduce them to the staff assigned counselor. This is a super quick win for you. You no doubt have territory and staff assigned logic on the back end. So on your portal today, make sure you're putting a face to the name you know, include, you know, field merges here for that you know, kind of staff assigned contact so students know who to reach out to if they have questions.

Next, this portal up to this point is harnessing all the data. We have all the data we know, but what about the data we don't know? We're continuing to build the profile in a way, that is knowing what we want to use it for in the future. We're not just collecting data for the sake of collecting data, we're collecting it because in this case we know once the student becomes admitted, we want to introduce students to one another. We want to offer a peer-to-peer connection again when thinking about improving yield, reducing melt, those are important touch points for us.

So here it is, a slate form to create the student profile. Upload a headshot, provide their Tiktok and Instagram handles, answer 3 quick questions and you'll see how we later use that to connect students with one another.

Now you mentioned just a just a bit ago the the research that we do consistently and then one of the top three reasons of you know, apprehension is will I fit in. So what we're doing with this type of form is creating that sense of belonging which is a basic human need to belong. We're and we're kind of addressing that right now so they can see themselves there with people that they will actually be going to school with. So that was the main intent of this function.

Yeah, excellent point. Kind of understanding the strategy behind it and really understanding that you're likely doing a lot of these things today via Facebook group, via CME. It's just about thinking about how it originates and thinking about this late portal and being a one stop shop for those activities and you know how you can really use this to manage it all. John mentioned too the factors going into a student's decision, like you know, fitting in, will I make friends. Another one critical of course is academic programming. You know what will.

What degree am I going to earn? You know, what is the program like? What is the curriculum, the research, the internship opportunities here? Maddie, as you saw with an education, students were offering major interest content. Again, that call to action is ever present. It will snap me back up to the checklist. But we're also including a student quote again from an education student. Now in terms of the back end for this, we're not suggesting that if you have like 90 plus the program props and again this is different UCF maybe have you know hundreds McDaniel, you know maybe have less so.

But regardless of who you are, think about how your prompts are categorized into those larger, maybe academic groupings. So you have your businesses, your arts, your education, your Health Sciences. 9 major content and student quotes is definitely more manageable than 90. So really kind of leaning on translation table and content box to power this personalization not only makes great operational sense, but you're doing enough in terms of relevancy for the student. You're still painting that picture and you're still making this hyper personalized, you know, to their interests.

Next we have some inline video and some fast facts. And this may seem like no brainers, but really when we think about going from out-of-the-box to a custom portal like this, one of the key kind of metrics we look at is increased time spent on page. Does a custom portal like this move the needle for getting people to come back here and to stay here to really you know, kind of look at all the content and the narrative, you know that we are kindly serving in front of them. Video is great. It's engaging short form video though so kind of be pay attention of length there because that's what students want to consume. The same research and focus groups we have, you know they are going to telling us this is how they, you know, want to, you know kind of see content.

It's going to be recalled at a high rate along with these fast facts and rankings. They're great for parents, but they're great for students too. So be sure to kind of incorporate that. So that is an applicant. So let's kind of continue to move further down the funnel. And now let's look at an admitted student and how the portal changes. So I think it's important to know that across incomplete applicants, across admitted students, how do students get here? They get here by a system e-mail, this one. That's the default that says an update has been applied to your application. Please log into your portal.

And it's good to know that because when they come here, they want to see that decision. Don't bury it again. Think about that hierarchy of information. Make sure it's here and you know in the top, I'm not going to ignore this pop over either. So we'll go ahead and talk about that when we continue to think about data we wish we knew, especially now May 6th. What we wish we knew is our students coming. You know, we have admitted students may one has come and gone. Maybe you've pushed your you know, enrollment deadline, but it'd be great to have a pulse check.

Kendall is seeing this too, because she's an admitted student, of course, but she's also received her decision. She's gone from released to received and decision status. She's logged into the portal a few times, and at this point we want to know more. We want to kind of get that pulse check. If she says yes, great. We're going to encourage her to take the next step, which is to deposit if she's unsure, we're dropping some conditional questions here, which we can then, you know, follow up with her. You know, you can bet with personalization related to whatever this kind of roadblock really is to her decision.

So in addition to that, the page is now kind of shifted to be governed by decision code. She is an admit, not yet a deposited student. So she's being ushered to confirm her enrollment. So again snaps to the checklist, to the reply form, you know, which is obviously being dynamically presented. She's also seeing her financial aid package. She has completed the FAFSA somehow and is ready to be. Her package is available, it's ready to be viewed. So we're kind of indicating that here. And there's also a, you know, I would say subtle but you know, direct kind of call to action to include her parents.

We'll talk about parents in just a moment, but this is a, you know, basically a traffic driver to that parent portal, so parents can see complimentary information for their student to help them, you know, really kind of guide the process, you know, from afar.

In terms of the rest of the portal, important dates, you can see how these are now changed. Kendall's again an admitted student. She's seeing May one is Juwan is now the new May 1. So she's seeing that. She's seeing other things related to kind of enrollment and orientation coming up, financial resources again that financial aid package is available.

She has completed the FAFSA, so you see that block is not visible here. She only is seeing her, you know, download her call to action to download her financial aid offer and letter in terms of connections with campus. Again, these event folders on the back end have changed to showcase their kind of upcoming accepted student days. The view from the top of the hill is McDaniels accepted student day, so we're dynamically showcasing that here.

Sarah is Katie's staff assign counselor So different counselor seeing, of course, you know different merges here. But now we're taking it a step further because beyond, you know, painting the picture when it comes to curriculum, when it comes to the student quote, we want to connect her with a professor.

She's an art student, so we're connecting her with, you know, the kind of faculty and department head there. And this can be managed by that same translation table that's managing the major content below. You have a number of exports, you know, that you of course can utilize there. So one is going to be for that academic segment, The next is going to be for the professor name, the professor e-mail and the professor's headshot. So utilize that same translation table to really kind of power this, you know, great introduction, you know, with those on campus. Next we have this social media feed.

Today you can do this on your portal, but you have to add your feeds kind of individually. X you know, Instagram, Facebook. This plugin pulls them all together so you kind of have one continuous feed. And it can also be student generated content so it can be governed by a specific hashtag. And again, think big school, small school, big school. Probably invest a ton of time, energy and dollars in their social media presence. They likely have a huge following. So leverage that and leverage the student activity behind it.

Again, when students see all of their other peers that have also been admitted are now accepting and you know confirming their enrollment, create that little bit of sense of FOMO and get them to really kind of do the same.

I think it also creates this fresh environment at every single login, so if it does get a week or two or three goes by and there's not a whole lot changing, you can rest assured that the social channels are constantly refreshed, so every visit there's something new for them.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think it's when we talk about, you know, this portal kind of being a great resource, one that's being constantly updated with fresh content, as John said, certainly you know, we'll get people to, you know, to come back here again and again.

Another way to get them to come back here is to connect with other students. John talked about that fear of fitting in, finding students like me. Will I make friends here? Kendall has completed that student profile, so she can now connect with others. If she had to leave the profile, she'd see that call to action. But as soon as she does, she's now able to connect with students. So the top travel destination, she answered Europe. Naomi answered the same way. So she can now connect with Naomi via Instagram and connect. And I think again when thinking about Facebook, when thinking about Zemi, it's really just originating this activity within Slate.

Really offering this to be, like I said, that one stop shop, you know, for students to, you know, kind of do everything that's important to them as it relates to their decision.

Finally, another important KPI beyond time spent on page is increased portal logins year over year when we launch. When we go from a late standard out-of-the-box to a custom portal, we see logins go up by as much as 60 to 65%. And I think it's building a self-service tool, having it be personalized, getting you know they'll come back here again and again.

But I always say a little incentive doesn't hurt either. So we incentivize the students. We kind of dangle the carrot. These are all slate forms. So we have the A trivia. It's a fun way to get to know the university. Certainly these are, like I said, slate forms with activation deadlines on the back end. So I can enter May, but I cannot enter June. I am stopped. So I have to come back here if I want that McDaniel T-shirt in June. When we think about Mel 2, this is a great way to keep students kind of engaged over the summer and we want to provide the ultimate giveaway along with these kind of monthly items we want to provide.

You know, the grand prize. This is simply a field merge for Portal logins. Again, something you can easily do. And when thinking about the prize, Mcdaniel's offering free books. I mean, that's a great incentive. I would have loved free books, but for our D1 schools, they offer I've seen like season or not season but courtside, you know, basketball tickets to the D1 men's men's game. So it's, you know, thinking about who you are, thinking about what's important to your student body. You can really offer kind of great prizes that kind of, you know, correlate with with your brand.

So that's an admitted student. Now I'm going to kind of showcase what it would look like for those that have deposited. So for deposited student again, we now shift to melt. We now shift to getting them to campus. The yearbook and the trivia are not going anywhere. They still live on this portal again as as means of engagement. But the other thing with Melt is simplifying the process. You know we are all in this space. We know the forms and the steps a student has to take, but for students.

Especially, you know, for even for gens out there, it kind of feels like whack a mole on that checklist. They complete something and then something else pops up. They really have no end insight of, you know, when you know this will kind of all be completed. So use the portal as a way to really draw a lot of context to that. Again, we're categorizing all the things that we asked them to do. So it's meaningful. It's digestible. So I can see here, you know, everything that's being asked of me and I can see kind of my overall, you know, kind of status behind that. I can see, you know, in terms of, you know, kind of what's complete, what's incomplete.

You know, as it may be and I can see the real time kind of progress tracker, you know to that with this it's, you know, it's you know, really kind of showcasing to a student kind of where they are kind of what's you know upcoming and you know really just allowing them to navigate the process at their pace while giving them critical information related to estimated time to completion. You know exactly what it is we're asking them to do, where it is. You know it doesn't necessarily mean that it has to live in the sleep form or sleep material you upload.

You know, through existence exports you can really kind of power a lot of the automation that a student is being seen here today that we then have FAQs. Allison is a domestic student, she's at residential student. So we are seeing that FAQ is specific to her. If she was a commuter student, she's a transfer student. You can imagine how some of these FAQs can change. Again, give students what they need, when they need it, where they are kind of within the process. We want to get them to campus, so why not let them know exactly what they is they have to pack. Again, just for residential students, we are kind of showcasing back here.

So in addition to that, you know, when I kind of mark, you know, some of these items as received, the status page now will, you know, certainly dynamically reflect that. And now there's the fireworks, there's the confetti on your admit letter. Now there's the fireworks. You did it. You completed everything we've asked you to do. You can see all that reflected here. Your progress tracker is complete and students now know they're set up for campus. You know, internally, you know you've done everything you needed in terms of, you know, kind of what is required.

So that is you know when we think about, when we think about a portal, when we think about moving the needle, you know that's those are kind of really the principles you know that we really look to employ.

Yeah. And Allie had a lot of really great points and I'll probably be a little redundant, but just to kind of put a bow on it, we're approving application completion. That's what we're here to do with this applicant portal. We want to provide the relevant information at the right time to get them to kind of progress as on their own. Now take for example, UCF. They, they need to be efficient. They need to have these students kind of go through the funnel a little bit more in automated fashion, whereas you take a McDaniel and they also enjoy efficiencies, don't get me wrong. But they're also able to to change a button here, add a link here to get get it to a little different degree of personalization and maybe personal outreach. So I think another thing to keep in mind is that the students that you're talking to expect a good experience at this point in the game. So Allie mentioned brand up front.

If you have a standard portal, it might be a negative reflection, it's functional, it's fine, but it might reflect negatively compared to someone else who has a custom portal that is so personalized and so relevant to them. So we say if you know that they will come, they will also come back and I think they will also stay in these custom portals. So. So some principles to kind of guide you as you as you go embark on this, how to build a self-service tool. The driving principle is the user and you're going to probably hear us say this a few times, so bear with us. But it's all about the user experience. Every decision should go back to that. Is it for who is it for? Is it for the student? Then if the answer is yes, proceed thoughtful about the hierarchy of information. Again, it's so closely related, you have to have the most important things up top and and then ultimately leverage the slate function functionality.

Offer clearly what's next And what you'll see here in this next example is just that. I mean, make no mistake, they know what we want them to do. So you'll see here on the left side of the progress tracker, you'll see where they are. They know where they are in the process. It literally says things that they know what to do next. And it's all about where they are in this process. So then you can see as we go to the next slide, UCF pops up another question immediately. Now this might not apply to the smaller schools who might not want to let them say no at this point in the process. But UCF has built the portal in this way to get that information or data, the data they wish they knew right now. So you can kind of see that these custom portals are built.

Always with the user experience in mind, always with the most relevant content on top, but also differently depending on the size of the institution and the and the wants and the needs. So while they are portals, they are built very custom to exactly the data that these schools wish they had.

It's exactly right. I mean UCF before and the UC there that is their reply to offer form that is an embedded form right on the portal. So again different strategies, different tactics, always encouraging students to take the next step. But how we do that changes you know based on who the partner is and you know what their you know overall kind of applicant pool looks like And it's really kind of important to consider too. We want to build a self-service tool because that will drive traffic and behavior automatically. You know when we talk about you know increased portal logins year over year part of that will be the tool.

But we also need to think about the automated touch points. We need to think about campaigns that we really put behind this through e-mail, through texting. You know, we need to encourage them to take the next step, to go to the portal, you know, at every given appropriate, you know, application status. The same principles apply here to to your emails, that to the portals. We need to be clear, we need to be consistent. We need to let students know exactly where they are. You'll see that progress tracker here. You know on on the right. The more that is understood from the beginning from the student.

The higher the conversion at every step of the process, students will complete your app, They'll get you the required materials and then if they meet your admissions requirements and mission standards, they'll see that again, that famous, you know, confetti on the admit letter and now your job really shifts to yield. It really shifts to anti military even. How do I get them to campus? And it's with those strategies that we really kind of need to to look at, you know, some of those additional, you know, tactics that we're doing.

Yeah. So I said what are we doing here earlier? We're trying to get applications in and now we're boosting yield and reducing that and how do we do that? I mentioned it earlier, we're putting them in this environment where we want them to live from the first point of application all the way until deposit. We have them in this environment that's custom built. It's not out-of-the-box. And for more proof points, we've seen four times the amount of time spent on these portals after they're personalized. So that's a, that's a huge difference in time of engagement there and at the most important time. So these students are making probably one of the biggest decisions of their life. We want them in our portal seeing students that they're going to go to school with faculty members that they're going to have that first semester and of course their counselor and maybe their financial aid if appropriate.

This time so the the saying that we always use is don't trip over the finish line. We we spend countless hours and dollars on talking to sophomores in the best tone with the best print having juniors come on campus and and at any campus visit giving them the very best experience possible cooking the best food in the in the cafeteria that day. So then now when it's time to apply we don't want to let down we don't want to trip over the finish line. We want to get them to apply and then once that happens we want to get them to eventually yield and then get the even more helpful through deposit. So now we're building affinity they're fitting in belonging. So how how do we do this And Ally and I have both said this data, data, data.

And a phrase that I've been throwing around is just don't be data lazy. I mean there's a lot of data out there and I think there's a choice of being lazy with it or not. So if you're if it's, if you have it, you certainly use it. And if there's something you wish you had, what is it? So this next slide here is an example of actionable data and how to collect it. So this is UCF, they're they're collecting this data here and it's yield intent, it's are they going to use it. So the the example here of UCF is what happens after they get this data.

Play.

Are they going to slide them into the drive to deposit count flow? Are they going to throw them into another conflict to encourage the completion or overcome some objections that have may come up in this form. Conversely, if you're a smaller school, you're going to have this yield intent form and if there's an objection or unsure you might have the council call in immediately. So you can kind of see how this yield intent from can go a lot of different ways depending on what you what you need to do. Another proof point because I like to have some some meat behind the talking. When this portal went live here there was over 100 submissions in the first day. So it was that tells me that the user experience was built appropriately. We were able to keep some of the clutter away that I'm going to talk about here in the next slide.

Play.

And the user, you know, in this case up to this point has been the student. But there was a question in the chat about parents, and we're heading there next. So now we're focused on the user, and that user is parents.

But ultimately, it was about the student, their experience, and it produced those immediate results. All of that to say these, these have become such a nice place to drive people. I mean, throughout the process, we talked with our partners, you know, this cycle more than more than most even of what do we do, you know about Facet? Well, driving to the portal, update the portal. So you're constantly putting things in there. But what that does is invites more people who want to get more content out there. So hey, can we put this in the form? How about this? How about this? Well, eventually, we all know how that goes and it becomes your Edu. My apologies. I can say that because I did it. It just becomes a lot. So you need to remember always that the user should dictate the strategy. I mean, that is the most important. Like, it's easy to get caught up in the piece, but we just have to remember that the user is in charge here.

Yeah and and parents, they're huge decision maker. I think from my time back on campus it's always we know the parents are important. We just don't know the best way to get in touch with them or stay in touch them outside of a standard issue newsletter. Well, one thing that we do know is that when you give parents a little information, they want more and then more and then more so. So why not just give them a place of their own to to really embrace their helicopter parenting. So that's where we're going next with the parent form.

Yes. And when thinking about the construction of this, you know, we've spoken on this in the past and a lot of questions that we get are around access or around permissions. And while providing parent information is often required as a part of your applications for financial aid purposes, it shouldn't mean the parent automatically gets access, you know, to a portal. If you have a slate application, drop a custom question on a relationship form widget. If your common app exclusive, add a custom question there. And if that's not possible, run your completed apps through two, you know, drip, you know, e-mail series that seeks to get that reply from students.

Because then beyond consent, OK, I give my mom, you know, consent to go to this portal. Parents access the portal via personalized URL containing the student's GUID, but the link is not direct access. We have a gatekeep, we have you know, kind of a form with security questions including likely the students birth dates. My mom includes my birthday and now successfully navigates to the portal And then when they land on the portal, they don't know this, but you know this, we know this. It's going to be a person scoped portal that is completely personalized to their student.

But the magic of configurable joints, it will not just be person scope data points. We can of course have you know application ones you know as well and that's kind of you know where the personalization comes in. We're truly able to build a portal like this, a portal for parents, one that feels very familiar to the one that we just saw. And I would say that's intentional. Again, let's keep those marketing folks in the room happy. You know the the brand is consistent here the the experience is certainly consistent, but the audience has changed, so the content should too.

We should also think about the goal. The goal of this page is to inform the parent, influence the influencer, motivate them to motivate their students to take the next step. But parents will not be the ones actually taking that step. They'll be able to see what's missing on the students application, what status this application is in, but they won't be able to kind of provide any of those, you know, missing documents you know that really falls, you know, to to the student. The parent though, will see a checklist. Just like you know the student, the parent will see their own checklist.

That you can, as you guessed it is dynamic based on status, incomplete app, admit enrolled. Those things change as their students application goes through the funnel and then again through the power of liquid markup. We can loop through the students checklist, showcase you know what's the item is, what the status is and the date that you know it has been received. In terms of self-service tool, that same principles are kind of applied here to the parent portal. We are introducing you know parents to the staff assigned counselor, but we are going a step further.

In that directly from the portal through this late form, if we call it like the counselor messaging center, they can ask a direct question to the counselor to get, you know, a kind of quick response back here too. You can see it kind of in the upper right hand corner of the second screenshot. We are connecting parents with one another. McDaniel has a parent and family council, maybe you have a Facebook group, whatever it is. Again, when thinking about that student yearbook, let Slate be the place that you promote it. Let Slate be the place that you drive that activity from.

And that's a quick win for you because again you're doing these initiatives today, but how is it managed? Is late even really a part of the equation? If it's not, you're missing out on those comprehensive user timelines, recording all the interactions, easier management and really driving critical traffic, you know to your portal. So when we think about gated portals, when we think about parents and students, it's obviously critical, you know the student status page, but that kind of brings us to the end of of gated portals we also want to talk about.

Non gated portals and for that we're going to flip back to the top of the funnel. You know today when we think about non gated portals and the efforts that are driving them there, you may feel like you're managing countless you know source formats. You know the places and tactics we use to attract students are constantly changing but digital advertising obviously is is a key one and in that world KP is are measured in impressions and clicks but and there can be certainly a lot of value in that but the ultimate goal is.

To get to know the user, to build inquiries, to build your pipeline. So with the help of a non gated portal you can really go beyond just the impression and the click. And that's when we consider best practice for these non gated pages. First we need to draw them in. You likely again think about digital advertising. You likely interrupted A mindless scroll. You know, introductory yourself truly into that search, you grab their attention, which is the impression, that's great, you have got the first step, the click, and now you need to draw them in.

And you need to do it quickly before you know before they abandon and you know to to do that give them information that matters most right from the start, quick, scannable digestible content and immediately make them aware of what you're asking them to do which ideally should be motivated by an offer an incentive. You know we love incentives. Think about what's in it for them. And you know in terms of engagement again increased time spent on page, same kind of you know KPI there we're looking at with personalized relevant content. You know the data doesn't lie no matter what portal it is. The more relevant you make something, you know the.

Overall kind of metrics or the page are going to improve dramatically when the page is personalized. So with a page like this, the image, the body content, the calls to action should be driven again by one goal and that is to you know de anonymize the user. So we're now going to see how we kind of put this all into practice. We're going to do so at the school you may have heard of the University of Southern California and you have two choices, you can either just sit back and relax and watch my screen share as I kind of queue that up.

Or you can grab this QR code and kind of see it for yourself. So let me go ahead and start sharing there. OK. So we'll go ahead and Scroll down through again so you can get an overall sense of the page and then we'll talk about personalization even on a non gated portal and how it works. So again with a page like this, the number one goal is to de anonymize the user. So the the call to action is to you know learn who they are to de anonymize them. So we have the form here.

We have it over kind of in our sticky NAV and then we have you know it within the embedded form. And what's great is let's think about you know this page, the USC, the Rossi School of Education, they have a magnitude of programs, you know that they offer, but their digital advertising campaign was promoting just one. So that's why Slate is a great kind of choice for this non gated portal because we can now really kind of focus on just that one program instead of sending them to the.edu.

Which has, you know, everything. All the admissions requirements for all the programs we can now offer in a very tailored, you know, kind of experience. So here I'm offering those facts, facts about this program, great social proof here where alumni are currently, you know, serving, you know, and really kind of in in painting the picture, encouraging them to take the next step, which is to in this case, schedule a one-on-one consultation. I can connect directly, you know, with a recruiter to learn more about the available concentrations. And then you can bet there's a campaign, an inquiry campaign on the back end that will, you know, kind of take up, you know, the marketing automation that follows.

We still have student quotes here. Again we are doing the targeting and the segmentation upstream. I know this digital campaign is likely for those that are going to be interested in our EDL program because I've done my due diligence with look alike audiences with my targeted list at the digital advertising level. And now here I can hone in on those kind of specificities related to the program. I can offer a program snapshot again specific to that program estimated time to completion, the modality of the program online hybrid on campus.

And here's where there's still personalization on the back end through Liquid markup, there's I always say in grad timing is everything, you know, based on application deadline, based on start dates. When a student becomes interested, hopefully the timing kind of aligns that they can take action. So here we are looping through the basically application deadlines to always show the next upcoming. They can of course see all the deadlines here, you know once past ones in the future and we're focused on the next start date. So based on cohort you can really kind of showcase, you know that dynamic information to students.

They can learn about those individual concentrations to prepare for that one-on-one consultation, you know with counselors and then again another important dates carousel. You see we love those unneeded and non gated portals alike showcasing what's passed, showcasing you know what's upcoming. So that's really you know kind of a non gated portal for those again coming from digital advertising, but of course there's other use cases including for new program offerings.

Yeah. So building a pipeline is, is more important now than it's probably ever been. So there are a few different ways to to kind of get the word out and and announce this new, this new program that you might be offering. So this is just another fine example of bringing the marketing team and the enrollment team together because I can't tell you how many times I've had the conversation of impressions are great, Clicks are great, form fills not great. So it's almost like 2 meetings, Like, if you just want awareness conversation, everything's going well, but going down to it, what's going on there? So we have this slide here to get the word out. So we're using a targeted list for e-mail that could be, you know, a purchase list for alumni, it could be or for your advancement operation, it could be your alumni or and get the message out. That way, you can do print, digital ads and text messaging if available.

The point of this is that you want to get them to this landing page by any of these mediums and then just prioritizing the user experience, giving the best up top. And then the ultimate goal, as Ali mentioned, is get that form filled out. So what I really like about this portal is if you are getting plenty of traffic and something's just not working, the forms aren't getting filled. You have to really kind of look at yourself and say, did you miss the mark? Is there something that we're not saying about our program? And then just switch the order really quick. So that, again, user experience is telling you if you're getting a lot of form fills and a lot of interest, you've done things just right. If not, take a step back, reevaluate and maybe kind of reshuffle the deck a little bit to put that more important material up top. So we are really running out of time now, Allie, so we should wrap this up.

Let's do it. With that comes our final tip. If you're new to way better webinar, this will be the first time you're hearing it. But otherwise it's really kind of one of our, you know, you know, standard kind of calls and that is to just do something, you know, when it comes to your slate implementation, it's never ending. It's ongoing. It's iterative. To start right now think about some of those quick wins that you can look to apply to your student status page as you look to lift off, you know, maybe some of those non gated portals. Don't get stuck in the mechanics, don't get stuck in perfection.

You know perfecting like that kind of airtight solution accounting for all contingencies, do something and then iterate just continue to really kind of make it better. So with that I believe we have a little bit of time for Q&A. So John, I saw some things come through the chat I'll quickly because those are kind of quick hits and then I have a couple of queued up here for you that came in from The Reg list. So Sarah had asked do you recommend showing financial aid award within the parent portal? Yes, you certainly can. You know in terms of the full financial aid package do not recommend but in terms of the institutional aid, you know that's something that we, you know, definitely include.

You know for parents to see and in terms of the, you know, portal kind of for every, you know, program you know certainly once you have for that USC Rossier, once you have a portal like that, it can easily be utilized as a template that you kind of, you know, just kind of copy create, swap out, you know the specificities related to the program areas. But it's, you know easily something that is you know configured and then ultimately maintained.

So for some questions that came in from the registration list, John, here's one for you. How do institutions balance the amount of information available? Importance, next steps To Do List upcoming events without leading to decision fatigue? Specific limit? Is there a specific limit on the number of widgets, additional fields, fewer fields for applicants utilizing section section bricks, etcetera?

Yeah, that's that's a good question. And what I'll probably refer back to is the user experience and what is the data saying? There's a lot of different ways to kind of to address that. But I think just first and foremost, looking at the data and if you are not getting the metrics you're hoping for, then you've probably gone too far. There's also other things that can be done like Ali was showing with those drop down menus. And I view that as a way to appease many of our audiences, but keep the integrity of the page intact and keep it light, keep it short. But you've just got a lot of information condensed there. So I don't think there's any specific number and he's really silver bullet in terms of what the number is. I think it's mostly to our previous slide if you do something and then you just make it better if it's not working.

Definitely let the data really kind of dictate, you know have sophisticated reporting on the back end to really measure the conversions that you really kind of expect to see. You know we believe that our testing in and out of our wireframes and strategies all the time and really just letting the dictate or the data kind of dictate you know, our next step, you know, in terms of what's too much, what's too little, you know and really kind of determining the hierarchy of information there make it way better. Thank you James. Exactly. So there's another question that came in interested in comparing app Status portal with tabs versus no tabs for segmenting information.

And then looking for a parent portal, well, we went over the parent portal and tabs is an excellent question. It's something we get from our partners, you know, kind of all the time. And again when thinking about the data, when thinking about the reporting, we've done portals with tabs, you know the kind of sectioning out those accordion widgets into tabs. And we simply have found that the engagement is not as high. Things that live on that page, students to click on students to engage with are not as high as ones that are in a single column, ones that are in line and.

When partners ask us, well, what about tabs, we kind of respond I think with a question back to them is that are there any tabs on Instagram? Are there any tabs on your Facebook feed? And there's not. It's just one long continuous scroll with an algorithm that's obviously driving personalization, irrelevancy. So we do that with personalization kind of within in the portal and serving them information that matters. But as of today, disclaimer again, we're kind of always testing in and out. You know, we use the one kind of column format.

And as use cases warrant, we certainly you know could make leverage tabs, but it's just not something that we typically do today.

So with that, I know there was some other questions. We'll be sure to follow up. There's some others very specific that came in from the registration. The team way better will certainly be following up with you to address those on a one to one basis, but please reach out at any time. John and I love talking about portals. We'll always talk about portals if you want to give us a ring.

And you know, love just to hear what you're doing today. You know how it could be, you know, certainly better. We can do that obviously anytime via phone, but we can also do it at this late summit the entire way. Better team will be in Chicago, will be exhibiting. We have a session on on Friday as well. So yeah, we'll be looking forward to connecting with you.

Thank you all so much for this and thank you everyone else for attending.

If you have any questions, definitely feel free to reach out to them. And as Allie said, we're looking forward to seeing you all at Summit. Thank you all so much for coming.

Thank you.

Thanks everyone.