Slate.org: Where the Conversation Begins

Yeah, this day and age, yeah, I don't think.

Right?

It looks like we are live and we've got some people coming on in. Please feel free to take your virtual seat and we will get started in a few seconds here.

You can see people kinda coming on in right now will get started in just a few seconds. For those of you that are chiming in.

We are representing three different time zones on this panel, so be curious to see where everyone else is coming in from and if it's as hot where there from where it is here.

Says over 80 degrees in New Haven, CT not. Not sure how warm it Is, everybody everywhere else.

Looking for that right from the Heat soon.

Alright, well let's go ahead and get started here. Oh, someone said it's 88 in Pennsylvania too. OK, so everybody is getting a little better than heat wave. She already got distracted.

Let's go ahead and get started so welcome everybody. We are kicking off the applied to alumni managing the lifecycle in slate webinar series. With this first webinar called slate.org, where the conversation begins. This session specifically is going to focus on members of the slate and slate.org community who have used slate and slate.org specifically to foster stronger communication and outreach during the college admissions process. Discussion will include more than just the technology that's being used and.

More importantly, how they're adapting to these times, but it's everybody knows these have been some interesting times. There's some unpredictable and challenging times ahead. However, talk a little bit more about recommendations and best practices for moving forward with that shared goal of really helping students an having an impact on college access specifically, but for those of you that are coming in, I want to go through a little bit of items for you to know this webinar is being recorded, so if you need to leave earlier, you want to share this with colleagues. We are recording. It will.

Will be posting it online to view at a later date. There's also some closed captioning that can be used on the upper right hand side. There's a CC there you can click on that for captions.

If you want to see this in full screen mode, there is also a way to expand the screen in the upper right hand corner of the toolbar should you need to re sync audio or video at anytime, just go ahead and refresh your browser your window right there and that should put things back In Sync. If you have questions beyond weather and so forth that feel free to throw those in the chat right there, we will be pulling those questions together and will try to get to them. There were some great questions that came in your registration forms too.

Like I said, a little bit earlier, we are talking about members of our slate slate done work community. For those of you who are chiming in, that may not currently be using slate. Slate is a comprehensive platform for admissions, enrollment management, student success, alumni and advancement so it can donor relations as well, and it's trusted by over 1200 colleges in universities.

And we're also going to be talkingaboutslate.org, which directly integrates with slate, and this is a 100% free platform for school counselors, independent counselors in community based organizations with a commitment to college access. So we're going to hear from counselors who are in slate.org is as well as how colleges and universities are using both slates like.org as well to better communicate. Some highlights about slate.org and how you can leverage this in the admissions process of counseling area is.

The ability to directly integrate with those colleges. Universities that use late to share information such as applicant, checklist, statuses, decisions, as well as the ability for schools to upload things like a school profile and to share information about their students. You can also create and manage visits, create invite lists as well as college fair invitations and so forth. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg as we do have some more exciting things coming in the world of slate.org. But we'll get to that.

In a few minutes.

And just to kind of put a visual behind how the goal is to really bring communication full circle, since there is that shared goal of assisting students in the beginning of that student life cycle is showing how high schools can really better communicate through these two different platforms. It's like in slate.org, through that visits functionality and through sharing applicant information. Another thing to note too is that colleges that don't use late can also enrollinslate.org for free and take advantage of the visits functionality that is there.

Who, without further adieu, you do see some other faces here on this piano. So I want to introduce today's panel. We have Brian due is the director of marketing and outreach in the office of undergraduate admissions at the University of California, Irvine, in my home state over in Irvine, CA. And we also have Sarah cutest, who is the executive director of the academic success program in Dallas, TX. This is a program that is has national and statewide recognition as a top program that works with schools across the state of Texas.

And so likewise gold. He was also a slate user and is now works with a slate.org as the Associate Director of college counseling at Bullis School in Potomac, MD. So welcome guys, yeah.

Alright, so really, the nucleus of all of these presentations in this apply to alumni. Webinar series is going to focus a lot on communication, right? And it's the thread that we're going to be pulling through these presentations going forward, and more importantly, how? How can we all be better partners in the admissions process? An end? The counseling process to assist students right? And as I mentioned, a little bit earlier, one of the highlights and really one of the uniquefeaturesofslate.org because of its.

Direct integration with slate is the ability to share applicant information in a very transparent way so that the student, the counselor, and the college are all on the same page, and so, uh, institution, that's doing this quite well is University of California, Irvine, who's been leveraging slate.org for communication. So Brian, I'm just going to hand things over a little bit to you to talk more about what are some of the things that you're doing from an outreach standpoint, whether it's from your communications, an using slate.

Are driving counts, Legislator Org and collecting information some things you're doing to be a better partner in the admissions process?

Absolutely well. Thank you so much Aaron for having me and welcome everyone. It's 82 degrees here in Orange County right now, but the temperature is rising so and there is some smoke and ash that's you know. No typical fire season anyways. But yeah, so with slate.org Aaron put it perfectly in terms of this is really how we view this counselor relationship is a partnership that it's all part of the process of really assisting students and we want to be able to be good partners.

On the higher Ed side to that and be as helpful as possible for these students as well as you on the counseling end. So what we've done is slate.org was the perfect platform for us to really transition and old process. We actually had a legacy process where we did allows counselors from both the Community College and the high school side to have a log into our database and then counselors would be able to actually see the list of their applicant roster. See their status if they were admitted or not and the decision with that.

So as we're kind of retiring our legacy system and moving into slate completely, this was a perfect tool to replicate that, because before hand, without that tool, counselors who we had good partnerships with, we're trying to ask. Well, how do we get the roster? And I didn't want to. I was uncomfortable about just doing individual queries and sending them out so we were able to kindofleverageslate.org and so with our counseling page that you see right below, it's listed right there where if you're a high school counselor, you're able to log in.

Createyourslate.org account an we share freely to anyone who is a slight.org user. Essentially what the status is, so you'll be able to go in.

And see the list of students who applied to UC Irvine from your institution, and then we just choose to display the status is an the information how we how we kind of leverage this in outreach. This is that we do have a regular counselor bulletin that we put out and this is just one example. One of our emails that we sent during this spring. Actually during the whole kovid response. So as part of the idea that we couldn't go out yielding we couldn't travel anymore. We sent a message to all of our school counselors saying.

Hey, here's a way for you to kind of find out what the status of your students are, especially since students might not be able to reach back to the counselor. We kind of went proactive and send a lot of information and write in that email that are we kind of give this specific instructions like ronslate.org. If you register your account, you'll be able to actually see a list of your students and the statuses that are there.

I'm really on the on the institutional side or the college site. It's not a real big lift for us, it's very easy to kind of put in an just share the information. I think a lot of the work has to be just the institutions comfortability in terms of deciding to release information on. And that's where we really had a lot of discussion Ann. I appreciate slate being really good partners and one of the advantages is just having direct feedback to Erin and various other staff members to be able to kind of talk through this process. And so when we were debating whether to use slate.org.

We communicated with her about OK, well, here's our reservations were a large University Ann. We have certain communication restrictions, an releases that we need to abide by, and slate and technicians was really responsive in creating customized fields that we could use to actually create filters off of it. So rather than releasing the whole round or applicant pool were able to actually filter that out through our unique communication releases so the University California, we have specific releases that we ask students to kind of give us.

And one of them is counselors, so we actually have a specific filter release that we create that says OK if the student has released information there counselor, then we will actually display the information.

The other really nice thing is that we actually can customize a lot of the wording so I know every institution has their own kind of decision wording and tables, so we're able to just kind of translate that into a very easy admit, deny, and then we can also delay the instances so we don't want to kind of spoil the fun. And we still want the students to be able to log into the portal and have that moment of expectation an we've all seen that students are essentially just refreshing or checking their email all the time when it's college decision time.

So we have no no doubt that yeah, it's pretty instantaneous. The minute they hear from anyone on college confidential that certain releases we gone out. So we've gone on an allowed the counselors to see that two days later.

So we feel that's kind of inappropriate time. Usually most of our students have checked their portal within that that first for 48 hours. Once we kind of time those decision releases. So it's a really, really easy process for us. It wasn't. It was more or less just deciding what filters we wanted to use to ensure that the data was accurate. And then we also did was we partnered with a few of our counselors that we knew really well.

And we just got on zoom calls like this or as web and our calls. And we said, well, show us your screen show us we're releasing data. Let me just see it and double check that all the information we've done is correct and that the students we did admit from your school is showing an everything was working well. So we've used this for about 2 years now and we just really really I love it. It's also a talking point for us as we go out and recruit recruiting two counselors to say during the fall time. You know, one of the ways we can be a better partner with you.

Is by sign up for slate.org and that way we can kind of share that information with you. I know counselors always want to know who's applying, what the decisions are, and this is just a really easy way to kind of see all of those statuses with us.

Right?

Thanks Friday yeah, and it's an important .2 with knowing that.

Colleges, universities that use slate. They have granular control of how they want to share the data. So as Brian mentioned, OK, we UC Irvine want to share these decisions with counselors insight.org. But two days after this decisions have already been released and so all the more it's that important to communicate that information back to counselors, even if it's in that newsletter or bulletin update like Hey, these are maybe the types of decisions were sharing and and so forth.

We're right now. Two years kind of a counselor view, and so and these are not real applications. By the way, you should notice there some superheroes on there if you're a Marvel or DC Comics nerd like I am, anyway.

On here to just kind of shows you this would be the view of a counselor. So when we think of things like sharing decisions, application statuses or even enabling his like document uploads, just I guess hearing from either bill or Sarah. What some feedback that you would have ridges in terms of maybe thinking what's working and what's not working or or. Examples of information that may not be clear away that colleges universities could be more transparent or communicate more effectively with you, either through their communication that this lady or what they're putting in.

In Slate.org

Sarah, you know?

I will chime in here really quickly. I'm first. I think I need to back up a little bit and explain so academic success program is actually we provide college counseling to the schools that we serve. We are in an urban public school setting. Sometimes a charter school system in our directive is to have at least 90% ninety 7% of the senior class applied to college and our classes range from 115 to over 500.

And so our ratios for our staff look like the National College counseling averages. So when we're talking about scope and scale, we're talking about a lot of students to guide through. A processslate.org has not changed entirely the process, but that's because we still need the colleges to buy an an. That's what I'm here to talk a little bit more about, and I'm going to talk about why I'm first of all, you have to understand that we graduate about 3500 seniors from.

15 different high schools are crossed. the Dallas area and then we also have two students in Houston for the upcoming year. We have virtual school that encompasses the entire state of Texas were students that don't necessarily want to go back in a hybrid fashion or whatever is being offered in their home communities. So we're going to learn to figure that out.

And we're dealing with students who are mostly first generation low income, not a huge college knowledge base, and we don't have a college class and we don't have a lot of time with the sheer number of students that were working with. So I just want to set the framework working in that under resource student population and why this information is so very important. So imagine taking that many students who have a limited knowledge of the college process through this process.

And then turn up the volume and add the virtual space to this.

And one of the things that we have found that students have really struggled with, and we're actually trying to address head on is the digital noise and Clutter around the college process. So you know, as soon as College Board gets that email address and gives it to the colleges, I'm suddenly our students have 4000 unread emails, and in those 4000 unread emails, then they're going to have these emails from colleges saying, hey, we're missing your transcript. Hey, we're missing this document, but how on Earth?

Is a student who doesn't have knowledge based either know how to set up rules and filters and folders, or a separate email account which is now what we're telling them to do, so we're going to throw off all your algorithms on demonstrated interest. Sorry bout that to just sort through the noise.

And so we have really utilized slate.org in the last year of helping get those students to file completion because our students will apply to college, we will not necessarily know where they apply, how they apply. They won't necessarily know how to add their counselor on common app to make it super easy for that upload. So the more information we have through all of these different portals, the better. An yes, it's really awesome to be able to pull down that application report from apply taxes, but.

Without the other side of that and being able to send you transcripts, 'cause T. Rex doesn't always work and we actually don't have access to T. Rex Fun fact. So those of you who are on slate.org or making our life a lot easier in terms of being able to get files to completion.

So really thinking about like the admission side but then also and I think we'll talk about it a little bit more of the financial aid side again because we're dealing with low income vulnerable. Students who may not understand what those requests mean when they're coming from your office. Ann may not have the wherewithal anymore to run in put their phone in our face and say what does this actually mean bones? Don't translate well to zoom our digital engagement with zoom is on a completely different level and.

I've talked to a few people around the country in the last week, asking what their populations are looking like that are similar to ours. You're not going to reach those students, so if they are going to apply an you want applications that are complete, not just sitting in that pending status, the more information you share with counselors so that we can make sure to get you the transcripts and documents you need to be able to review the better off we are. I'm going to flip it over to Phil to talk a little bit more, but really and truly, I can't beg you enough.

On the information that you're sharing, if students are applying their interested, but they may not have access to all of the resources to to traditional and get you the documents you need, especially in this new world that we're living in, so the more avenues you provide to students for completion and not taking it for granted that everyone is going to have a counselor that knows how to upload things via common app or coalition is also something to keep in mind. Again, more information and Opportunities.

The better bill.

That's a lot to follow up after. Thank you Sarah. So I will say just to give some background, bullaces is a very different community. Our senior class is typically 150 or fewer, but we have found that the sheer transparency between the University and college side and the high schools alone, even for our smaller community has made such a paramount impact on our students and their ability. Like Sara said, not only to complete, but to actually understand what's going on and what that means and the panic that sets in when they do get that.

Email from you that says Mr. Weiss colder missing my transcripts, but but Naviance is that you sent it 2 days ago?

I know I sent it 2 days ago. I bet you the college knows that you submit into two days ago, but being able to even if I sit in front of them and say look type type type on my side of the computer I just uploaded it again because maybe UC Irvine allowed me and then they can see instantly that it's been received specially for the parents. It may have no idea what that does for them. I will say Aaron right now has up an example of an application checklist and this is something that definitely can vary school to school. You have the option.

Of which checklist items we can see which we can? This is a great example of 1 where we can see a lot. We can see everything and one of the things that we've especially this year going to virtual has found have found to be extremely helpful is for students on the wait list. That last category that says the wait list response form. So obviously on the college side, you all are very used to the stealthy applicant. May be the kid who doesn't know what demonstrated interest means, and because they don't have access.

They have set up a separate email because that is easier to clear up the noise so they're not opening the traditional emails that you might be sending to them or their opening yours, but maybe not the other 11 colleges that they've applied. 2 or 12 colleges they've supplied to. They might miss this weightless response form, which you may take as a lack of interest. But if I can see this and I can say Hey Johnny, it looks like you were offered a weightless spot. It's late University, Johnny said, how did you know? If not and I can see?

I saw it and it looks like you still have to reply to them and then Johnny can log in or Peter Parker in this sense respond on his side. Whatever his portal looks like and then we can see that it's done. I will say from from experience this year this happened with one of my students at a wonderful small school in the South. She replied to her wait list reply form and then a few days later was taken off the wait list. She just those small stories really can make a difference.

And because of the transparency, there was no law. There was no. Maybe there was no question mark, it was all right there. So please share. Transparency is everything, even if you only allow us to upload a final transcript, which I think we are going to get to talk more about that later. But every high school is on a different timeline, so some high schools have a final transcript available mid March to mid may, others not until mid June and these kids continue to forward us.

To buy school you have to send my final transcript. This is my third notification. Well, if you knew that I would send it when I would, I promise I will. So having this functionality in case naviance is slow, in case we are home in case something's not loading again has just been a paramount change from this. So please use it's great and it's free.

Yeah, one of the things from especially the current pandemic that we we really switch to fasten was really thankful for slate.org is the ability for counselors to upload documents and transcripts and so right. Here is an example of our slate.org page where if you go to a specific student you can see if they've you can have the ability to submit that final transcript for them because we weren't sure what was happening with schools with schools closing down.

With the Mail in kind of a reckless and even our own campus policy, when we were when we were told to leave campus on March 12.

They actually suspended alot of the Mail systems and we with us being having a big public health school, our public health program was basically advising no staff should be on campus even for Mail. And so when we went to get the Mail about a month ago there was like 5 bins just waiting out there and with 9000 incoming students that were going to bring in for this class, we leverage slate.org heavily. We put it in our UC counselor bulletins. We put it in on all of our portal information. We sent another email to counselors indicating.

The ability to do that, and you can see right there. It's a really easy process if you go into the specific student, you're able to see that they don't have the transcript up there an if you're able to upload it. We really we actually prefer all electronic transcript. We even went into a pretty big campaign of not wanting to take Mail in any form, knowing that it was going to be delayed and at the process of processing of it was going to take a longer time than anticipated. And with our deadline of July 15th deadline for transcripts, we knew it was going to be difficult.

And so we really went proactive about getting us E transcripts, not sending us anything directly in the Mail, just helps everyone for the most part. You know, it's just reduces a lot of the risk of it getting lossed or having someone not be able to match it or link it correctly. So this all this process is really helped us an other institutions are able to upload and you can upload other documents and things really. For our part, we just need that final high school transcript. That's where we essentially need from the school, and that's kind of the last thing and for.

A big campus like us to be able to kind of process that automatically, since when it comes in it comes in as marked as the transcript. So it's very easy to match it up. We don't have to literally worry about anything once it comes in, just to verify that this transcript you put in was the actual one that is matched up with the student.

So it was a definitely helpful process for us, especially during this time when so many things are changing.

Eric.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for that. I wanna get on a soapbox a little bit too and emphasize the importance of sharing this information. But also thinking about it probably goes back to this too. On what's working, what's not? Or how can we know what is most helpful to 22 counselors, but just feedback from our end to a technicians and hearing from everybody the college universities in the counselors and sometimes counselors. Wondering, hey, I uploaded this transcript. How come the college is saying they don't have it in kind of understanding?

You know how the two sides come together in this and there are two options when it comes to sharing materials and one is is as a college or University that uses slate. We would encourage you to allow for batch material upload so that if a student has more than one application that's being shared in slate.org and you want to upload a final transcript, you can upload it and will go to all of their applications that are being shared in which the college University has that enabled versus having to click on an individual. Each individual application for that student upload.

The final transfer it, so that's just be back we've gotten from school counselors kind of puts the process at ease and helps all parties, and so remembering there is that batch upload opportunity you can enable and configure in the guts of yours like database to be sharing in Slate.org. Just you know, maybe This Is Us air or or fill question as well, but are there other things that have maybe stood out to you that I've worked really well or something that's not clear if it has to do with like wait list. I saw Sarah you put something in the chat.

For schools to know.

Yeah, so to piggyback off of Phil's comment about the wait list. Again, sharing this decisions is really helpful because it means that we can effectively guide students an again when we're dealing with students who even infills case may be going through this process for the first time may not really understand all of the terminology and what it means. So for our students, a lot of times they think a deferral or a wait list is a terminal answer. Anna Terminal decision and some cases of some institutions we know.

But that may be true. However, we also know a student may not report a weightless to us the same way that they report an acceptance, and so if we can see that and we know that that might be the only affordable option for a student, then it like also will trigger me to reach out to admissions and say, Hey, like what is the likelihood before we go down this road. And you know, also having that conversation about whether or not there is money available to the wait list so that admissions officers.

Are spending their time on weightless decisions that make sense for everyone. Again, time is of the essence. You need that information. But also when we see that weekend, call students in and ask those questions they did. You know, let let's talk about what a weightless means and whether or not that's something you want to pursue. And in some cases for our students, they need to pursue that. But won't ever do it if we don't know about that decision and know that that possibly could be an option for them. And we've definitely had some.

Weightless decisions in the past few years that have come through with the funding that meant that student actually got to go to college and the other option just wouldn't be available because they didn't have another affordable option. So sharing that information with this is really helpful, but also helps us guide conversations that are inefficient use of the admissions office time as well. On the second piece, I will say is about the financial aid information and sharing as much as you possibly can again.

Not taking for granted that students know more than anything, so I'm sure most of you know that Fasa an in can a lot of organizations have been pushing this faster completion campaign an yes, I agree, more students should file the FAFSA and know about it. But filing the Fasa isn't enough, especially if your CSS profile institution, which we can have conversation about that offline. I did a presentation on mad at Mac last year, and I stand by my decision that that needs to die. Let's talk about options.

However, I'm not here to do that today, but also there's the verification side an apply. Texas does tell us in the faster report whether or not students have been selected, but we know that institutions can also ask For more information and so sharing that information means that we can pull students in and make sure that they are providing that information to your office. A checklist is not going to complete bassa. It's not going to complete verification. Those are hands on documents.

And IK, specially in title one schools and I would venture and say that even resource families have trouble completing those documents. An understanding what you're asking for. It allows the counselor to be better informed an also follow up with those families as well, which ultimately leads to that financial aid office application completion, which helps offices as well. We definitely had one of my Co presenters last year is from a very well resourced school right outside of Washington.

And she talked about the fact that she'll have two attorney is sitting in her office saying we have no idea where to start on filling out CSS profile. I'm so again not taking it for granted that wealth lack thereof. Nobody has any knowledge about how these processes work, especially if you're going through it for the first time. And I'm going to shout out my friends at Case Western because they share all of the information. And then when a student needs to contact the financial aid office, it has the phone number on slate dot Oregon, says call the financial aid office. So when I pull this student and I say, OK.

Here it is. Here's the phone number, let's call and find out what's going on, and they're the only people I've seen. Be this transparent, so learn from Case Western and understand that if you really are talking about access and going to recruit these students, this is a great way to start closing that access gap with the information. And then bill if you want to add anything. I'm sure you have plenty to say to you.

Hear me, I'm a thank you. I may die on this cross of the helpful checklist, but I'm Aaron. If you go back to the slide we are, you know. Pretty lucky school and then we get to have conversations with many of our colleagues on the other side of the desk ahead of time about our applications. Those counselor calls. Again, you want to talk about saving time and time that not a lot of us have these days. I know ahead of time. Going into a call that Peter Parkers applications complete, I can be ready to advocate for Peter.

Or to answer questions you might have about Peter, and if I'm not a DC Marvel person who sent like Diana, she's a person, right?

Sorry Aaron, I'm feel like I just stabbed him.

I have to be in. That's a Wonder Woman fell OK.

So let's say if I know ahead of time that Diane is incomplete, maybe in advance of our call I can talk with her and find out what's going on, because transparency is not just between technological platforms, but it isn't our conversations and we have to be able to trust each other and trust that we're being honest, and maybe I'll be able to tell you on my call that you know what Diana she was accepted early decision. She's got a lot of other things to do. I promise she's going to pull out of your applicant pool, but let's not waste time sending her.

Emails about finishing her application. I don't wanna waste your time and I don't want to waste Diane's time.

Yeah, let's see what else is working. Honestly, everything the decision releases huge, especially in an area like the DC Metropolitan where word travels like rapid fire and if on college confidential we see that some of our friends in Northern Virginia have gotten their decisions. I can go into sleep.org with the school that maybe I can have accounts or call with. It's a huge let's use Texas right? Texas does not. Having accounts are called they shouldn't. I'm fine with that, but if they were able to share some of this news ahead of time so I could be prepared.

For the feelings that are going to walk through my door or this year, the feelings I'm going to see behind a screen.

It's it's helpful. Again, we're we are all on the same team. As cheesy as that sounds and slate.org is that conduit that lets us be on the same team, so that's really working. I love this checklist I love.

Yeah, I mean, I think heading you hit the nail on the head with really being on the same team and then that's what we hope to see ourselves as being with you all as well as really being a team in this and about being prepared for the student conversation. So based on your feedback, one of the things we added and it may seem small, but it goes along way is a tiny lock icon next to decisions to alert you on whether or not this the student may not have seen the decision because you know for for those that are using slate, you know like my Brian and his institution can decide when to share those decisions, right?

Sometimes they can share it only only if the student has first viewed it or X amount of days after it's been released and so forth. So we're trying to help kind of notify you whether or not you may proceed with caution, as the student may not have viewed it, and so to thinks there. I know there's some questions too about community based organizations and so forth and how they're leveraging slate.org and CEOs can have accounts in slate.org. We are making some modifications to this area.

And that leads me to another means of communicating going forward. The fall recruitment season is going to be very different from what we're used to write the road Warriors in admissions will be on a virtual Rd for right now in the platform that we're using right here, this tool called share in slate is what are called universities that you slate can use to conduct online events. Or some of them were doing orientations virtually this year, and I don't know if there's anything you want to share their.

But one thing that is forthcoming is slate.org virtual visits as well, so will drum roll there an what that's going to allow? Is this kind of similar technology that we're using here and our college universities that you slate can use, allowing our counselors or community based organizations that are in slate.org to be able to have this technology to communicate with their students but also communicate with colleges and universities. So these conversations can continue on the virtual road and beyond. With that said, in order to really close the access gap too.

We want to make sure that students can be involved and so students being able to be involved in sleep.org is also forthcoming thing where you can register students for events. And with that comes into additional layer of consent to where I might be a counselor with community based organization and I do want to be able to at least see where the applicants I work at reside in the process. So maybe I, as a student can give the CBO counselor consent to see what my admissions decisions are or whether or not things are complete in some type of read only access back.

Fashion, and so we are actively working on this stuff we've done in a methodical way because we want to make sure we're including feedback from our counselors. Are college universities in the CEOs we've been working with so far and that would eliminate the need to make sure there is an exact match on your organization. Data set in slate with an organization, sieber, what happens late.org 'cause it could really be more of a window one between the student and a counselor or the student. Anna, CEO, counselor, and so forth for CBO for access. So more to come on those fronts. This is really just a teaser.

We will absolutely be communicating with the slate and slate.org community going forward. Once we have all the nuts and bolts in place. So just wanted to throw that teaser in there. And Brian is University of Irvine, CA. Thinking ahead for the fall of using share from their admission standpoint for any virtual events.

Absolutely, yes we are.

We know that everything is going to be virtual this fall. Sorry, so basically, yeah, we are completely going to one seck.

Sorry you called me right in the middle. Yeah, we aren't going completely virtual for all of our events and majority of our default is.

We're going to be flexible if the school is offering a specific platform that they want to use, we're going to let them use that, obviously because that's the best way that school is going to be able to communicate to their students or not. But if schools are giving us a choice.

We are primarily using the slate share that's built in right there, and so it's very. It's a very easy feature because we want to capture all these registrations. We want to be able to send information to students, follow up information. We also want to be able to record it and be able to kind of play it back as well, and so we know that students may not be available at all hours of the day to specifically do things. So we want to be able to record this and have it more of an on demand as well. So later on, after some of these events for schools.

We can actually share that with the counselor and say, well, here's the recording of the webinar here is it to give it to your students that they want to watch it on their time as well. So we just know that this year it's going to be one of those things where we have to be flexible, and so we are. We've kind of trained our staff repaired or staff to be as accommodating to whatever needs as possible. We've trained them on using share within slate. We're also we've also trained them, be able to configure an external web service, so if it's something like zoom or Webex where someone else is providing something, but we still want to capture the registration.

We would put the link in there and say, well, we still want them to register with us as best so that way we can get that information.

And then finally, yeah, a lot of this year we're going to configure all of our websites. We have a virtual website that's available and it's kind of a choose your own adventure for students. Knowing that students might not be able to have regular school hours, they may want to be doing their college searches at 1:00 in the morning or something, and so will leave information available will have webinars available for that time as well. Not to mention our materials and information. But yeah, it's just going to be such a different year that we will. We will be as flexible as possible and kind of.

Roll with the punches as as it goes out.

Great.

Great yeah, it's all about being adopted.

Right rolled out because this process. And so I mean, a lot of this is all coming out of the slate.org feedback form as well. As you know, if your site user you can log in and provide feedback for feature ideas and requests and some in high schools can also do the same thing even when logged into slate.org and the slate.org navigation toolbar, there's ability to log into the feedback form, and so we're getting feedback from you guys in terms of what's needed so that there's also feature parity to what the colleges and universities can do for slate.

So that you can either use leave outta work share or maybe something like zoom so people have all kinds of ideas that they've been putting into the feedback form, and that's what we are continuously referencing an and looking at. So the more feedback you give us, the more ideas that will have going forward to make improvements to both. Slayton in slate.org that benefits all parties and forthcoming the students as well. So but a lot of this has been centralized around technology, right? And online this online that there is the ability to do things in slate, such as print.

Or maybe some calls and things like that, but you know, I when I spoke to to Sarah to a couple of months ago, I don't even know what month Ron anymore. Something in the pandemic is just over an is probably a lot longer ago than it was an you told me this. You said it estimated that 40% of your students don't have Internet access on home, and so in this could be thinking about students, either rural communities or students in low income areas, or think about schools out alot of resources.

What are some things that schools can be doing, whether it's in within slate outside of slate to help address the needs of these populations that may not have Internet access to engage in these virtual opportunities all the time?

Yeah, so the bottom line on this is that we're still figuring it out. Like Aaron said in March when everything started happening over spring break for Dallas ISD, which is the 2nd week of March. Sorry, pandemic time makes it all hard. They finally decided to do a technology study because they thought that we were going to have an extended spring break and we thought we'd back be back in school, but.

Within that technology study, they found that 43% of the 137 thousand students in our school district did not have Internet at home.

At the end of March, this went to the board and they allocated $2,000,000 to buy 10,000 hotspots, which still doesn't even start to close the gap on the technology Gap and they've been working really **** ** that this summer. So I have to give props to our board of Trustees and Superintendent Hanna Hosa for working towards a solution, but as we approach the recruitment season, which in this spring I never thought that we find ourselves still here in the fall but.

Here we are.

And the conversations I've been having with colleges is being creative and thoughtful about where you're spending your time and your outreach. There are certain schools where you know you're going to get applications from regardless whether you show up or not, whether you do a virtually virtual visit, those students will log on as Brian said at 1:00 in the morning and watch your webinar to get the information they need to write their essay. An. I do think that now is it really a time to be thoughtful and creative about where we're spending our resources?

I have been talking to college is about working more with counselors who can identify students who may it be a good fit for their institution and for those of you who are still looking for ways to utilize your student workers and your work studies, students having those students do direct outreach via text. Sending letters home, believe it or not, our students do still read Mail and it's not saying You need to do really expensive massive Mail marketing campaigns because we know that you don't have the budget for that.

But some of the most impactful letters that have come into our office in the last few years have been those handwritten letters, either that parents of 1st generation students have written to other parents and they bring it in and say, you know, look at this letter I got from the college. I want my students have this experience. Did we apply here? What's happening? Well? Obviously they applied there. That's how the college got their information. But really, trying to be creative and think about who you're not going to see in your applicant pool and then finding ways to address that.

And I think that Andrew Moe at Swarthmore does a really great job of crawling those resources to access rules students. I think there's a lot of information and slate on students that you may not necessarily see. So like, really, it is going to be a question of you looking at your institutional priorities, your applicant pool and saying who's not going to be in here and then saying how are we going to make sure that those students are in our applicant pool and then being creative, flexible?

And again, transparent and sharing all of the information and knowing that we're going to have to wrap around students to show share as much information and get the information and the files complete. And the best way to do that is by being transparent about what's missing, an not putting the onus on the students be responsible, or to read the emails, or to get through the digital divide that is going to be happening, and then also implying that idea of Grace. You know a lot of us want Grace extended to us when.

Are pets and children pop up on our calls, but also realizing that students are going to need that grace when they can't upload a handwritten form or they can't scan a handwritten sign fee waiver? So how are we going to work through this together? So that's my thing is saying, being flexible in fluid, which is what I have challenged my staff to be being creative but also being realistic about the challenges of the students who aren't going to show up in your Poulan. Recognizing there are people that are going to be there regardless, and that's OK.

You don't have to spend your time on that right now because all of our time is precious and it needs to be allocated in those places that were more concerned about as opposed to reinforcing the relationships in the same way that we would in a typical travel year. Others may have other opinions, but that Saraki does talking on behalf of vulnerable students everywhere who are often overlooked and don't have a voice in this process.

Any other?

OK, thank you Sir, that's super helpful information. He was really thinking about the multi channel approach that we just don't always default to to strictly online virtual everything. Although there all those capabilities but other capabilities are there which there are tons using Slayton and other tools and and so forth. We even just remotely print and things like that. We could be personalized outreach but I think also being able to identify who these students are in tracking these students effectively and thinking about how you're communicating with them is is Super.

Important and so we did touch upon a little bit about communicating costs, not just applicant completion as well, and it kind of threw those charts out from the national men. Can right there as well had those up when you're speaking earlier, Cerus wanted to throw that out one more time as a reminder to folks here when thinking about Boulder Bowl populations in title one, eligible public high schools and it really is our mission with slate dot or two to keep this platform free and it will forever remain free.

No matter how many more bells and whistles that we give you, all I just wanted to reiterate that there's no hidden charges or costs or anything like that. We are committed to keeping this free so that it is accessible to any school in a matter of their location or resources. And same to students in the future as well. With that said, let's open this up to some more questions that have come in from some of our attendees weather with the registration process or through the chats. And there's some that are really overlapping, and so I'm going to go ahead and throw some.

Some questions out to wall. There were a bunch of questions that revolve around the consent process for sharing application information, especially Brian, when you were kind of showing how you guys can figure things at UCI and someone wanted to know you know, how did you go about collecting consent? How are you deciding who's information should you? Also for Phil and Sarah, are you guys collecting any type of consent on the high school side? Foreseeing applicant data? Anything like that? There's some stuff just.

Questions over all around the consent piece, and then I'll be happy to speak to anything that we have on the slate.org side internally for account verification.

Anyway.

From the high school side I mean obviously for pies is huge for us and we take that to mean when a student says that we can release their data, which they give us permission. The other line in there, at least on common app, is and can speak on my behalf. I think one of the important things to remember about this tool specifically when it does come to consent is that little lock right? And that accounts are would know that means a student hasn't had the chance to see it. And just like I'm not going to tell a student that I've got my counselor call with UCI today and hear all the things, I'm

I want to say about them and then follow up with them after that call. I'm not going to release a decision to a student before they've seen it.

So for us, I would say that is for PO. We also at Bullis. We have our students in their junior year sign a release form. For example, if a college coach wants to see their transcript instead of asking the student every single time our legal office came up with a document intended with us to give us that explicit permission to release an to talk on their behalf.

An yeah, I mentioned in the chat, but the UC since we're a system, the University California kind of common application has several releases that students have to opt into. So one of them is teachers, counselors and the other is obviously parents, scholarships, etc. So there's actually four different releases that the students have to check off. Depends on who they want to use, and so we just basically follow that wording and information from there.

Perfect and industry. Iterate to, you know we kind of had a little bit of a screenshot direct when Brian was covering what happens on on the college side. The configuring what you want to share is really quick. I would argue it could take 5 minutes.

I think the tougher part are the conversations that had to be have internally when we hear from colleges. Universities is are those conversations about what are we comfortable sharing and when right and so leaving time for those type of conversations with other constituents on campus to get some buy in before sharing another. Some questions too about what happens when someone requests a slate.org account. Our team here at technicians is only involved with approving the very first after the user for an organization in which they have to be, you know.

In the school counseling office for their role can be confirmed and after that.

Schools manage their own users going forward so they can inactivate, activate their own users, and so forth. They have ownership over their account, inside or just as they would with some other systems, so that's kind of how that process works out where we can make a match then between the college applications that you're sharing and the institution that's involved in slate.org as well, there is a feature request out there, and so he intent you should go look in the feedback form to support it. On the college side to be able to see.

Who specifically the Contacts are in the high school and in whose enrolled so? That information can be passed back so that if Sarah and Phil were to provide consent to share their contact information with you, that that data could transfer back and forth between the slate.org database through the data bridge to your slate databases, there is an active request for that. If you want to, you know, comment or or thumbs up in the feedback form and we take a look at those.

And the other thing to note as well is you know we get questions about on the college side. How can I see which high schools are enrolled in site.org? You can run and organizations based query. I think Brian May have already said something in the chat, but in case someone missed that to see that. Additionally, you can see what materials have been uploaded specifically from slate.org and so for example, I think Brian you guys have a fun little query built using configurable joins where that will pull any materials 'cause we do store that in the metadata.

Many of them are chills that come in, so you can say how many final transcripts did we get? What high school for which applicants? And that's just going to give you good reporting abilities, but also help you kind of see how much laid out or really helped your process to from a paper processing standpoint when we're in this virtual world, you know how we get these materials in here quicker 'cause the Melvins are piling up is Ryan said, and so forth. Another question that we had Speaking of this is.

How can we and I think this may have come from a college get more buying from counselors, since they may be logging into a bunch of other systems like and. They mention specifically systems like nonsense core and things like that. So if we're UCI or Case Western or other institutions that were mentioned in this shot, how do we communicate to counselors that we really want them to be checking decisions or using a slide over?

Yeah, you know, for us the buying is really as we kind of leverage that partnership idea and we kind of say you know this is the platform we're using an you know it's the easiest one because it connects right to our database. It's very user friendly and the advantages that it's just not directly to the UCI. Once you registerslate.org you have access to all the other slate campuses and I'll say you know seven out of the nine U Caesar on slate, so you know six of the nine UC is also receive over 100,000 applications a year. So we're trying to cover.

A wide net and say, Well, there's a lot of institutions that are using slate. It will not only help you with our campus, but all the other campuses that you're working within. Your students are applying so it just helps that it's a one stop shop. It's also great that it's free. It's also a lot more I think user friendly because you just log in and it's very self explanatory up there. So we've really tried to promote the ease of it, the Accessibility and even targeting schools and district areas where they may not have navions or any of those other resources.

Some of our larger public high schools, especially ones here in Orange County, my wife said public high school teacher. They don't have those type of resources for the counselors. They have very home built systems like that which they use to track their students. So to be able to say hey, here's counselors. Register on slate.org. They already get that list of students that are applying to our campus as well as anyone else who's on there. So part of what I've been doing is trying to help other institutions like our sizes like the other uses, understand how efficient this can be and helpful for that in.

And what we're hoping is obviously the counselor is also buy into that as well to really kind of close that loop. Like you said, it's really more of an ecosystem of this. We're not trying to. I'm not out there to have one up advantage over another school. We're really trying to help these students here, and the counselors make the most informed decision for them as well and advise them in the best way possible, as well as let them know if they're missing anything. I think part of the part of the process to now that were, you know, we can't meet with students physically, is this whole idea of just enrolling them and there's.

Even once they accepted their decision, there's so many other steps that are just so crazy. You know the financial aid information is so confusing. The all the different tutorials and orientations and contracts they have to sign and the housing contracts. It's so overwhelming this next part, and so we're really trying to ease that process. It it shouldn't be this difficult to literally enroll into a school, but we've added so many layers of things, so we're trying to really simplify to make it more efficient for the students to have it one stop shop. It's nice that everything is connected in the portal as well, so.

When you go into slate portal, as students able to see all the stuff that they're missing, all the stuff that they have to do. And then it's just easy to be able to kind of connect all those things together in one database.

Yeah, I know it's another thing to we know you all want to see and impersonate the school counselors we know. We've heard it. We've seen it in one of the things we've been working on to her slight dot or portals to allow colleges, universities that are using slate should be able to further customize the information that they're putting out there. Maybe event links to forms, and with that some type of impersonation. Right now there is the ability in your slave.org application sharing.

Settings to a preview results really say. What would this specific students checklist look like in slate.org and so forth, because the data that's there is the day it's going to push out, will look the same to fill versus Sarah and so forth. Not necessarily unique to the high school institution. It's really kind of more of a static thing, but there there has been information. The feedback form from you all that is helping us inform how we develop those played out or portals to give you further customization going forward as well an to touch up on to this.

All in the same ecosystem. That's kind of our motto as well. Or, you know, we work with some other organizations and we play friendly with, you know things like score for example, we have an integration where you can import materials and in transcripts from there so early to the common application. My learning things like that. So we have this shared goal of helping students, counselors, colleges, and so forth an because of how robust and easy slate is from a data integration standpoint, you can bring in materials from those other platforms.

Andnotjustlike.org, but what does makesa.org a bit more unique is that unique and is that integration with like to allow that easy back and forth data feed without any additional configurations? And for those of you that have been asking about more training where the training, resources and so forth when you're in knowledge base, there's a whole section for counselors as well, and they can access it in slight downward when logged in as well, or the help icon with a buffet written documentations and video based training lessons, as well as a demo that will show you both.

Sides of the counselor perspective in the high school perspective and those can be shared to you. Could even link counselors to that documentation as a refresher and we're continuously updating that library to stay current going forward. And there are also webinars on how to configure their data sharing settings. If you're on the college and University side as well, there's web and R on that as well as written documentation and how to guide to walk you through each step. Like how do I do batch upload? How do I do these decisions and so forth? And we hope hearing from the counselors.

In a platform like this, going forward will help inform how we share that data, how we communicate and strengthen those communications going forward so we have reached the end of this virtual panel opportunity. But we should keep these conversations going. It's really important that we continue to amplify the voices of those who are working with students, especially some of our most vulnerable populations. We have opened up thislate.org community form the community, formsdisplay.org counselors, counselors that are logged into slate.org. Whether you're an independent counselor, school counselor, community.

Working for community based organization. You can go ahead and go to the help icon not just to access documentation, but to go right into the forms and log in and communicate with our us Lake community. So calls universities that are using slate get on on their start a conversation and you know, continue. Kind of what we've been talking about. Or start a new post and get to know one another. All of our colleges, universities that use later already enrolled in slate.org so you do not need to create an account. All our undergraduate institutions are automatically enrolled.

Arcologies who aren't using slate. You can enroll in our high schools and so forth. You can go ahead and sign up for a free account right online at slate.org. This was really just the start of our conversation about the life cycle and how slate slate or can come together up next on September 1st at 2:00 PM eastern is are applied to alumni managing the lifecycle in slate series with admissions and enrollment management. So harnessing slate for optimal communication, digging deeper, pulling that thread of communication.

A little bit longer there so we can really dig into how institutions are using slate hearing from admissions and enrollment managers on that end. So even if you're on the high school side, go ahead and you sign up for that. You can get into the minds of what's going on with the colleges. Universities using slate with another opportunity to bring everybody together and will follow that one up with one on student success and then advancement alumni next. So Bell, Brian, Sarah, thanks so much for your time for the work that you do and will continue to do to impact students.

And access and we hope to hear from you soon. Thank you. Thank you everybody.