Underscore Your Slate Experience

OK, and we're alive.

So welcome, everyone works very and sing some inclement weather in the northeast here. As you know, there's if you've been watching the news, there has been a forecasted does sort of tropical storm that's working its way up the East Coast, but will sort of work through here and we should be able to get through the session this afternoon. The weather is still fine outside, so let's get started.

Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Anthony Castonzo and I'm a director here at Tech solutions. I'll be moderating today's session. Thank you all for joining us for the third installment of our brand new webinar series. Slate by Tech Volutions Presents.

These webinars will focus on a variety of topics that highlight members of our preferred partners program, including the products and services they offer, and support of our shared mission to create transformation TLE effects on the world of higher education.

The slate preferred partner program recognizes organizations that integrate with slate and offer implementation support while providing meaningful contributions to the higher education community.

Today's webinar titled underscore your slate experience, will include a presentation, two client case stories from the higher education community, a panel discussion and a question and answer session.

A few items to note before I introduce our presenters, the webinars being recorded and will be made available in the coming days. Close captioning can be enabled by clicking the CC button at the top right corner of your share window. Full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button at the top right hand corner of your share window.

And should you need to re sync your audio or video, please refresh your share window and finally feel free to post questions in the chat and during the web. And are we collected some excellent questions from the event registration form, so we'll leave some time to answer them at the end of the web and her.

I'm pleased to be joined by members of the underscore team who will lead us in a discussion around the customer experience and journey using slate a little bit about underscore founded in 2017 and headquartered in Charlotte, NC, underscores a privately held marketing consultancy firm serving the higher education community as the countries largest dedicated slate development and optimization company. Underscores mission is to transform the enrollment landscape by leveraging the power of slate.

In 2018, underscore became technicians first slate platinum preferred partner. We thank underscore for being a part of this exciting journey with us.

So without further ado, I'm pleased to introduce our presenters, chief executive officer and cofounder of underscore Scott Novak.

Director of slate implementation and consultation Megan Robinson.

Director of Slate Communications Ted Majeski, Megan Scott and Ted thank you in advance for leading this afternoon's discussion. Presenters all turn it over to you.

Thank you Anthony and thank you to everyone for attending this webinar. Uh, were hope you're all doing well and are safe, particularly today during these obviously very challenging times. I want to also think technicians for allowing us to be a preferred partner. My name is Scott Novak. I'm the CEO of underscore and I'm happy to be joined today by my colleagues Megan Robinson and Ted Nugent Ski and later on in the presentation for our panel discussion. Eddie right from Newman University.

And Stacy Lederman from Saint John Fisher College will be joining us as well to answer questions and lead our panel discussion. Now I'm going to give a very, very brief overview today of underscore. For those of you that might not know us, 'cause I wanna be able to hand this to Megan and Ted people that you're really going to want to hear from today.

So I want to give a little bit of background on the underscore story.

Um, we underscore the work done in flight. We were founded on the primary objective to enhance the work. Our clients are already doing. Inflate to create the most effective optimized instance possible.

One thing you might want to know about us is that we do not integrate our own product into slate. We optimize slate for the schools that we serve.

A couple other key distinctions of underscore. Our slate consultants are full time staff.

It is our belief that our clients deserve our full time commitment with no chance for a conflict of interest by working for another institution. It's not the only way, but it's our way. And that's something that underscore prides itself on.

We are a true team. We don't promote ourselves as individuals were all about being part of a bigger entity. Every school that we work with is assigned a team comprised of a slate team member, project management, creative staff, and Roman strategy as well.

We are very well versed in enrollment strategy to get our clients the results that they need from an enrollment standpoint, we have a number of staff members with more than 25 years experience. We also have a number of younger team members who know how to connect with perspective students and are incredibly innovative, tech savvy and forward thinking. And we think that unique, combination and mix of staff is a benefit to all of our clients.

A little bit about our structure were broken up into five different divisions that underscore we have the slate implementation in consultation team.

We're in charge of implementing new instances of site or reimplementing slate. We do full slate audits. We also offer consulte tive services in a number of different formats. Are enrollment strategy division monitors communication campaigns for effectiveness. They build out complex reports and leverage robust tools and slaves such as Voyager for things like territory management, which is going to be crucial especially during these times. Roll dealing with today.

Our slate communication team is where we started. We handle everything from students search bringing that in house to application generation, yield campaigns, anti melt for all departments. Undergrad graduate international transfer, any type of communication to a perfect perspective student is generated out of our communications division. We also have a special project area.

They had a lot of portal developments online application builds, digital advertising campaigns, data clean up, pretty much anything else inside of slate that you can build out. That is what that division handles, and then finally and last but not least, we have are awesome creative team that helps build out our campaigns works within our portals and also a little kudos to our friends at Callum Scott for developing slight print. I personally have been in higher education now for over 25 years. Believe that's late print is going to revolutionize.

How colleges and universities are able to communicate with the power of print which is still important today?

Finally, a little bit on underscore by the numbers. We are 100% slate focused. That is all we do is what we do. Well, we do what we're best at, and that's all.

We're not distracted by other types of services were focused on slate, and that's what we do. We work with over 70 schools nationwide. As Anthony mentioned, we were the first slate platinum preferred partner. We aren't the only ones and we are in the same group of very respected companies have been around for decades, but we will always be the first and that's something we're always going to be very proud of.

And we in 2019 we did an exhaustive look into all of our clients. Try to understand how many different outsource solutions were able to in source into slate, and we found that we were able to, in source more than 20 different initiatives at 10 work. Normally, something that you would outsource to a third party organization. In doing this, we recognize that we have saved our clients millions of dollars and in one case we even save one client over a half $1,000,000 on their operating budget. They're able to allocate to other things.

And I think with obviously what we're all dealing with today, that's certainly something that everyone needs to consider.

So we have one goal for today and our goal for today is for you to walk away. Anyone on this web and are with one idea, one initiative, one strategy that they can bring home and hopefully implement at your organization.

As we go through this presentation, you will notice a couple of different polls that we will put on the chat. On the left hand side. The first one is how long is your institution been using slate and you'll see one later on in the presentation right before our panel discussion.

And with that I would like to now hand the reins over to my friend and colleague and who we affectionately referred to around the office as the question Queen Megan Robinson.

Thanks Scott.

As he said, my name is Megan Robinson an I'm the director of implementation and consultation underscore. I've been with underscore for a year and a half, and in that time my Division Four of our 12 slate squad members have worked with more than 25 institutions across the country as they've implemented their instance from the very beginning. Reimplemented themselves after having had slate for a long time. Utilized late in order to gain efficiencies in their business processes and.

I'm certain that you're with us today because you find yourself in one of those situations, knew to sleep, working in a system, even heritage, and would like to restructure our ensure as to the health of your instance, or have a large wish list of Clady, things you've been trying to get to for some time.

Today I'm going to talk through some of the unique ways we have worked with our partner schools to customize their slate instances and variances. By the time you rap up our conversation, I hope you have heard a problem posed to us by one of our schools to find yourself unsure of how to resolve, but will be able to tackle after having them with, uh.

Mount Saint Mary's University a small private all women's undergraduate and Co. Educational graduated undergrad and grad cheering instant. This is a situation I'm sure many of you can relate to. How can two constituents with stark differences in processes and needs share the same instance of slate?

The application process was one that evolved overtime and shout out to Carla for her leadership. On that we created a single period of M SMU application with multiple rounds for their freshman who are common opposition undergraduate, which encompasses transfer weekend, evening on line and nursing students.

Graduate and Deepti student types at first we created a single app that nursing transfer non nursing transfer. We can even on line an grad population for sharing.

However, given the vast differences in the undergraduate and grad app pages, materials to be submitted in the app and war, we ended up splitting the absentee two and gave the undergrad and grad pops the ability to greatly cut down on the page keys and app logic that was previously in that single app, which can be helpful whether you're looking at undergrad versus grad like Mount Saint Mary's was or freshman versus transfer like we just worked through with MIT.

Now both populations can adjust not only their custom pages, but also their slate standard pages when they need without worrying about the domino effect that can happen when sharing a nap.

As you look at your various applying populations and are trying to decide whether you can share an app or if you should split, here's some things to keep in mind.

How similar your applications? If they're identical, for about 70% of the app? Maybe you can keep them together and add a few custom pages with app logic in Page keys if they're very different, especially in the areas of those slate standard pages, maybe split the apps. Whether you're sharing or's playing, you can still share the same period, so don't let the hold you back.

Another question is who's responsible for keeping up with changes from year to year? Sometimes there are different offices and even in separate locations. Keeping up with app changes. If you're an institution whose undergrad and grad offices or more siloed maybe splitting that will benefit you.

As always, the student app experience should be at the forefront, but sleep makes it so easy to deliver a positive experience on both ends of the app. So take advantage.

Speaking of undergrad and grad working together, I'm reminded of Western Carolina University, alarge public institution, whose undergrad and grad populations work extremely close together. Thanks to Mike and Brian for maintaining that relationship.

Even though they work closely together, they've never operated within the same CRM, not just not the same instance of a CRM. Literally, they've had separate CRM's or systems all along in the move. This late, they were able to purchase two instances, which I'm sure there are a lot of you in that situation. From western we could talk about how important it was to ensure their fields are structured similarly in both instances, thus helping verb, cross level training and ease of data exchange. But I think Western is helpful in terms of building an advanced application like Mount Saint Mary's.

The western grad out processes wild, and maybe it's their 43 programs that share 15 plus launch days each year.

But the plan for Western is to build this League hosted app to meet the needs of most if not all programs and then to build dynamic app pages for each program in a program group.

Each group are those that want to launch their application on the same day and this will help as we launch our grad apps impulses throughout the 2021 cycle.

As you build out your grad up launch plan, consider this approach. First, look at group together all of those programs that want to launch on the same date. Then outside of slate, look at the questions each program asks on their current app to make sure they even need to be asked. Overtime we find questions, he added apps on on a whim, and so many of those questions that make a program page unique might not even be necessary when you rebuild them, inflate.

Go through your slate hosted app to make sure the slate standard pages and their settings work for all programs and then add in the custom pages with Apple logic in Page keys to show these custom programs pages.

I'd also like to recommend, if possible, to bring in those programs. App though may not be launching it. You can easily see sharing the page of the program group that launches sooner.

I'm a big fan of having as much of the app filled out as possible before going live with any portion of the app, but the plan I've laid out can help if you don't have the time or resources to include everyone all at once.

Obviously applications are a big part of every implementation, but so were scholarships. Thinking of scholarships brings me to Saint John Fisher College, a small private liberal arts institution in New York. With so many scholarship opportunities, it's unbelievable. And I'm not just saying that to toot the horn of Dave back at Fisher and Stacy, who's with us today.

I'm sure he would ask her one of the biggest pain points at Fisher priest late was the amount of paperwork involved in all these external scholarship and program processes. In this implementation we're utilizing one of my favorite tools workflow.

Now when is soon applies for a scholarship there application, transcript, nomination form, whatever is needed to complete the scholarship is moved through been movement rules and the scholarship specific workflow.

The cool thing is a student can apply for multiple scholarships that all have their own review process. Now instead of applying through a Google form and or keeping a list of applicants on a piece of notebook paper, Fisher staff will be able to instantly review completed scholarship applications in the reader and even simultaneously without holding up other review processes.

When thinking on your own review processes, think do we need to review Megan for admission to the college program admission, which might involve faculty and her competitive scholarship, and possibly all at once built separate workflows. You can build Benz Ben movement rules, review forums, an custom permissions on each workflow allowing all reviews to happen as needed without holding one another up.

I talked a lot about schools. We work from the beginning and so we were there to make those early on decisions. But sometimes that's not the case sometimes due to longevity of having the instance or turnover or whatever, we end up working with schools who just want to know more about their instance in its structure health.

Through an audit with Susquehanna University MPA, we found they had some person scope verse app, Schofield issues, and we're not always mapping to or querying reporting off of the right field. Just last week Rocko, the ski team and I were in the midst of what's kind of like a data re implementation. We made new app schofields for those fields that were accidentally created as person Schofield in the beginning.

We updated all live items like forms, application source formats and things like that to start sending data to new app schofields. We exported all incorrectly scope data and re imported the data to the appropriate fields. After the data was cross checked. To ensure accuracy we started Remapping all Alcyon queries, reports, forms and next we're going to use a retention policy to delete the values in the old fields and finish off the project by and activating those fields.

If you think you might be in the same situation where a lot of persons go field should be app scoped or you have multiple versions of the same fields of data isn't storing uniformly. Consider reimplementing your instances, fields and props. You can use the same layout. I've just described an in doing so can ensure your reporting is correct in the end.

There are lots of areas in slate you might feel nice truck restructuring and that's what brought us to working with Kim in the wash you team.

Having fear there, that module might need some work. We are now rebuilding the campus visit template and ultimately the students visit experience.

Do you realize related events across the many things students can do on a campus visit at Washoe?

When looking at your campus visit, if you know the Times in which a student can interview tour, visited class, consider adding those in his events. In your instance, pull the related events, wedge it into your master template, and let the suit customize their day. If you don't know the exact time that might be available for the pieces in the day, let the student tell you all they like to do. Get their registration after setting up those meetings with coaches, faculty, financial aid, or whoever. Add the event in the instance at that point and then go edit the students registration to select the related event utilizing related events across.

All options within the visit experience will also help you deliver a personalized chronological itinerary which I know is always the goal when building event confirmation is.

This event thing is pretty common, which is why we're also helping Katie in the Whitman College team. Do the same. What's even more unique about our experience in working with Whitman, though, is their desire to create person records for parents and counselors listed as relationships on student records with newer functionality in slate, we were able to create linked records between students and their parents and counselors, so now reps can click on a student.

Go.

Go to their relationships tab, click on the counselor or parent relationship and it will take them to that counselors person record which and this is the coolest of all on that counselor person record. They can see all the students who also listed that counselor. Think about how helpful that is to be an admission Rep and be able to search for Megan, the high school counselor at North Putnam High School and see all her students before giving her a call to chat about her applicants and their statuses.

To do this, build a configurable joint query with all students with a counselor. Export the list, reimport it with the student listed as the counselors relationship and connect them together through the length record value mappings. It's crazy to think how helpful it would be to like current students to their counselors, their parents, and even their siblings as you're building your future funnel.

So now I've talked a lot about implementations, audits, consultation, but there's another part to all this training.

Remember to train during your own implementation, like we did with Indiana tax team of counselors on how to utilize the reader to filter for their own students or with Saint Louis College of pharmacy on how to build export queries and source formats for integration.

Train regularly by module like the training were doing virtually for Carlton this month on queries, both beginner and advanced levels forums an reporting.

Or just train those to give them up in the same role like the training we did was Saint Kates and their marketing folks when they came to Charlotte and they learn how to use existence, exports, conditional logic, liquid markup, and all that.

Remember not to let training fall by the wayside. It's important whether through sleep, training resources or through external trainings to keep up to date on all the latest late functionality.

Speaking of training, it's not surprising to me that we're doing more and more training on how to build portals.

Portals, especially with all the new functionality released in the past couple years, are more dynamic and customizable than ever. I've seen Jeremiah Tutor, director of special projects and a very close friend of mine, built some incredible portals.

For example, every applicant has an application application status page. We know this late allows you to customize that status page with the portal, but what if you took it one step further? We worked with fill in the Susquehanna team to build a custom portal as a one stop shop for applicants to access their information and feel more connected with the school and other applicants. We were able to proactively address applicant questions at every stage of their application, submitted, admitted and deposited. Counts are saw, an immediate reduction in emails because applicants actually read.

Answers already in the portal.

We are also able to differentiate information based on the status of the applicant.

Imagine the applicant viewing their status portal and seeing a checklist are welcome. Letter from the counselor. An event schedule for those thinking about Susquehanna. Now imagine they receive the decision of being admitted the next time they log into their status portal. They see new information and new banner. Maybe confetti a deposit payment link? A new set of checklist items, and even events specifically for accepted students.

When thinking through the soon experience post application, what is the most important content they need to see? Map out what this information is, an what filters need to be applied to make sure the correct information is showing for the right student at the right time.

As you continue to meet the student where they are, think about affordability. Affordability is one of the biggest factors in an applicant choosing a college. Stephanie in the Oxford team wanted to create a way to connect the financial aid counselors to the admitted students in a meaningful and personalized way. They challenge us with building a financial aid portal that allows the admitted student to go through self-service financially. Counseling based on their specific financial aid award.

In this portal, Megan can view all components that go into her bill, tuition and fees on campus housing, and then the miscellaneous expenses to expect. She can then view the total cost of her attendance, her financial aid gift Award and use multi select features to figure out how she's paying the rest of her bill.

She then sees instructions based on her specific selections and she's able to calculate how much Augsburg will be out of pocket for all four years.

Utilizing filters and formulas within forms can allow you to build our robust process for calculating and informing students of financial information. Utilizing multiple forms can also allow for better tracking of engagement and follow up based on the information provided.

And with that I'm going to turn it over to my board game, loving friend and the colleague that got me to underscore to chat with us about communications. An enrollment strategy said.

Try again, you know, just to recap again, my name is Ted Nugent ski. I'm the director for slate communications. Here at underscore were very good friends, but I've been relegated to the call room while she gets our shared office space. So I appreciate that.

As we kind of talk a little bit about communications at underscore, it is really where we started. I know Scott alluded to that a little bit that when he really called me a couple years ago and told me kind of what they were trying to do over here and have outsource solutions brought in-house. Utilizing something like slate where I had basically just been implementing at another institution that was a significant change and we started off really just focusing on that is running student search primarily as a communication tool out of Sight. It's migrated much more beyond that. So again all the other things we offer now in terms of working with schools on portals.

An Apple builds and implementations. It is much more beyond that. I think you know for us, especially within the communication division, it does kind of reflect the admission funnel. And really as a school starts looking at their communication plan, this is really where you kind of need to model it after only because.

Students are at every stage of that process, right? And we're always trying to meet them. Kind of where they are, what their needs are, an as we've had these discussions with about 50 schools that we work with for communications. We've seen that a lot of schools have a full communication plan, but there's always kind of gaps. There's always students that may fall through in a couple different areas. You will hear the train behind this as well. There are some students that fall through the gaps in different areas, and so if a school might be very good at yield communications, or they may have really strong inquiry communication plan. But maybe it's that.

Application conversion of incomplete apps or something like that, that there may be not as tuned in on or don't have the resources or the time to focus on that. I think that's really been the natural progression of the company is we've kind of moved through is assisting every step of the way because it really needs to be a full court press, right? So we're looking at students at every stage in the final and making sure that we're meeting where they are. It still starts with us at student search, so a lot of what we do is still dedicated to student search because I think for a lot of schools, that's really the biggest area of change for them.

Um, we've seen the advantages of bringing student searching house and primarily for a lot of schools. As Scott alluded to, the cost is a big factor. Having an outsourced solution to run student search is not something that is inexpensive, but bring it in-house into slate is very possible. It does take time and obviously effort to do so, but there are a number of advantages beyond costs that make it really worth doing for us on the late side at underscore, and being able to work with the schools. It's nice to have access to that data, so working within every slate instance and having full access to all the reports and queries and in the student records that go into that.

What that's able to allow us to do is really get true ROI for all of the campaigns, especially search, so we're able to see exactly when students came in, see their entire journey through the life cycle. So if you have students from a sophomore search campaign in the spring, were able to track that throughout the entire timeline and verify that that's the name buyer, that's the score band that actually generated that that application an ultimately conversion, and so you know, I think the access to the data in the collaboration we have with the schools has probably been the best part that we do with search is really being.

You're tuned into that. We use that data going forward as well, so you know any communications that happened out of slate search doesn't have to be a static object that is kind of running off on its own. There's no set it. Forget it mentality behind it. It really should be something that is a living, breathing communication plan. And when we develop that with schools, there needs to be room and an ability to run emails and print publications and text messages out of this late in a very responsive fashion. So meeting students where they are, if we're.

Relating to them with certain events on campus or inviting them to campus or letting them know certain things that are going on or updates anytime we do any sort of communications like that, there are always going to have a higher response rate, higher engagement and higher conversion only because students recognize that even as a search student, they're getting communications that are much more relevant than they would have typically expected from with a very clearly see as a search email, which is always something that we always want to combat. And last but not least, is really data security side of it. So again, anytime we work with the school and we.

Work with him on the name buys and bringing that data into slate. Once it's in there, it's in there and that's I think one of the biggest advantages is there's no need to send the data elsewhere. There's no other third parties involved. It's pretty much in this late instance it always there, so there is the element of transparency, data security and kind of retaining what is in there in your slate instance in making sure that it is as secure as possible.

And as we talk about search, we always kind of emphasize it a little bit. But it's not just about senior search. It does include as as kind of alluding to a little bit junior search sophomores that whole life cycle, that whole timeline. It does become a much longer term process, and so this year, especially as we're kind of running through multi year campaigns that we've had with schools and looking at conversions, we're seeing those juniors from last or the software is the year before that converting, applying, enrolling at potentially higher rates than newer senior name bias in the fall, and especially it's probably going to change even more with the way the testing changes are happening this.

Sure that anything that you can have earlier building that relationship earlier on it really can't be understated, because that is going to make a significant difference down the line. But again, there needs to be that build up that long term planning in that timeline, so buying additional names in the spring, having a stronger communication plan for the spring, and also referring to those students that are non responder. So there may be a number of students that get a dozen or so emails in the spring and they don't do anything until August of their senior year when suddenly they're ready to start interacting, engaging, and applied to the schools that every child to them so.

You know student search is still kind of the lifeblood of what we do. Because I still think it's a very important market than area. That's two schools are needed to focus on as they go forward.

You know a couple of years we do also work with so one school in outside of California that I used to recruit in that area when I was in an emissions is Marymount, California University in Rancho Palace Verdes. There we worked with him an inquiry worked at them on search but also worked on with them on a application generation campaign and we decided to make that a little bit of a different approach because we wanted to use the data available to us in slate as a way to drive the campaign. So it wasn't just every inquiry getting communications, it was.

Students that were engaging and students that had consistent engagement over the course of several weeks. So if a student had visited the website through ping, or if they've opened a couple emails or clicked on an email.

Those are the students are getting follow communications and so you want to make that very targeted. You want to have that be very specific and meeting the student where they are. Essentially that these are the students we want to work towards and really focus on and so you know for a school like that to run those kinds of campaigns, there's obviously an element of additional work because you're sending a lot fewer communications. There may only be 100 or a couple 100 or a couple 1000 emails going to that group, but the engagement is significantly higher and that's what we had seen. Both open rates click rates as well as conversion numbers.

That you're ultimately reaching the students that really want to be contacted in that capacity.

And again, as we kind of move through the funnel.

And migrate through.

Click.

There we go.

So we look at yield campaigns and this is obviously been a significant shift this year as well that we're kind of anticipating going forward to really move that up in the timeline and then, especially from those of us that are from small liberal arts colleges where we have jumping everywhere now where we have one deadline that we sent end up having applications in and then we have one release date for early action. Early decision, you'll really starts as soon as those decisions go out and so that can be earlier in the process that might be in October where we don't want to drop the ball and say.

Wait till February when all the applications are done being read and everything is processed. You want to make sure that you're actually following up with those students early on so they aren't feeling abandoned. Since it's part of that process, because you'll really does go year round. Especially this years were potentially looking at more deferrals. We're looking at more gap years. We need to have that conversation with students and meet them with the questions that they have and then requires a little bit more listening and requires being much more involved on a regular basis so that yield is something that doesn't just surprise us that we work towards all throughout the year.

Uh, in or on the same page going forward. I think one of the things that's nice and again, this kind of speaks to the division structure with an underscore is anytime we have admitted student portal that Jeremiah and his team put together. We want to make sure that's rolled into whatever you'd campaigns that we work on. So whether it's design, whether it's strategy, everything that we do really revolves around tying everything that we've done together, and so we work with. Obviously the school with the other divisions to kind of make sure students are getting the relevant content they need up-to-date content and pushing them where they need to go. And that's obviously work very well.

For a lot of the campaigns we had this past year and going forward, and then there's an timeout, which again that's becoming a more significant concern. And as we know with this fall and not really knowing what this fall will look like in a few short weeks, that's become a significant shift that we really have to focus on because we really can't count students until they're on campus. Whether that's virtually or whether that's physically on campus. So it is a year long process at that point in time, not shouldn't be something that you're just putting together at the end of the year at Post May 1st. It really should be playing all year round.

Some of those things can be can be laid out a little earlier, so especially with Newman University here, a little bit from later. We ended up doing quite a few scheduled communications with them. Both the parents and students because we wanted to make sure both of those constituents were getting relevant, timely, consistent information to make them feel good about their decision at that point. And then also there were on the application itself. Both common app as well as the slight application there were questions related to students, pet names, and so we wanted to do a follow up of that of sending out.

A bandana for all the students that submitted a pet name that says my human goes to Newman and obviously there are being pushed to social media on that. There will be a little bit more follow-up and emails dedicated to that, and obviously those performed very well very quickly because I always find it very interesting and reading the pet names as someone who has weird pet names as well. One of the students that is deposited to Newman has your old a turtle. There is a lawful the rabbit, which is really that funny but I just find it amusing. And then if you're into hip-hop, there is a ghost face. The dog and a biggie. Smalls.

The cat, which I think biggie smalls, is my personal favorite and I was laughing at that for days. So you know again anytime you can have questions in surveys and communication ongoing throughout the year, there is an opportunity to follow up with that and utilize some of that information. After everything is done where you want to continue to engage these students where we have that kind of Grey area handoff between student life and orientation and everything that works on when really admissions still needs to be involved in some capacity utilizing what we have.

And so again, you know we work through all the different campaigns we have. Any kind of work with schools and saying this isn't really just the bulk of it. There's a ton more that school should be doing because there are other different types of students. I mean, we're working with parents at an inquiry level, sending them information for scholarships, financial aid, making sure they're having relevant information they need earlier on transfers, grab an adult is a very unique and tricky population to work with because they are essentially moving targets, right? So they may have a rough idea of their entry term they're interested in, but they may shift to that.

And working with the schools to make sure that those timelines are changing as students move through the funnel, but they're still in the same spot. That's something to make. Definitely keep in mind and make sure that you're being aware of exactly where those students are at what point in time. But they still need to receive international student search. That's obviously going to change a little bit this year as well as we're looking at potentially no travel as well as potential changes from the federal government to visa. Visa acceptance is. So how are we going to recruit for international students? Not not even just considering what's going to happen for this fall.

For incoming international students, so making sure that those communication plans are set up in a way that can be malleable and adjustable as changes happen both for the country as a whole as well as your institution. High school guidance counselor. Same thing. We're obviously anticipating no travel coming up this fall, so keeping those high school guidance counselors that you work with on a regular basis that you typically visit, keeping them engaged through their own newsletter, your own campaign through slate. Whether you're loading them as a person record or you're putting them in, just threw it to the organizations themselves.

I'm giving them relevant updates so that they are aware of what's going on on campus where you are. Are you doing visits? Are you waving Test score stuff like that that they want to tell their students going forward? So really, any type of campaign communication really obviously should be run out of sleep, but it takes a lot of effort and focus to make sure that you're hitting students where they need to be with the information that they ultimately want to get.

And one of the things that I know you know, we're very interested in here, underscore and our creative division here is been working pretty hard and getting this up to speed as well. It's late print and obviously with Kathleen from Callum Scotts webinar couple weeks ago they've had some additional updates that they've been sharing in terms of the work they want to have with that. I think you are codes obviously. Would very useful. We could potentially see some benefit of that of doing visits on campus. Inquiry form. Stuff like that as well as tracking and having being able to see and ultimately win a postcard or brochure.

It's the students mailbox. Then we can do a follow-up communication through email. Kind of knowing exactly when that's going to arrive and being on the ball with that and making sure we're very timely. I think one of the things that, at least in communications that we've had those discussions of, we see some benefit of this of schools really bringing this in house and taking control of it, and that may mean doing smaller print runs and having very targeted information with variable content and being very specific that you might be OK with doing a postcard for 100 or 200 students rather than your entire prospector inquiry pool.

As you may have some information that only that group is interested in, it's going to be much easier to do that much cheaper to do that, and obviously you know putting more control in the hands of the school is always a good thing going forward.

And then last but not least, we want to talk about the enrollment strategy division. and I was kind of feel like it's a little odd to put them last because they're kind of permit in everything that we do. And Jim Rogers and his team. I mean, they work with all of the schools that we have and they work with us on every campaign type project that we work on in communications because they're really involved every step of the way. Helping schools look at the data, interpret the data, and build out different strategies going forward. Name by is definitely an area that where they start, where we're very interested in bringing them an early on and they end up looking at.

Any historical data? It's late, and again, that's the advantage of having everything kind of built out in slave that they can look at past records. They can look at any funnel data from previous years, both from search and not, and I think that's important is when they're looking at a Voyager report and they're putting those together for the schools they want to set up. Voyager, so that they're looking at any funnel, any search names where schools are visiting. So if trips are overlaid in there, and being able to see are there other markets that we're not looking at? Are there areas that we need to be focused on as well as the ACS data that's late already provides and?

And looking at different bio demographic data that is available so if the school wants to look at under represented populations or students you know in an area that doesn't have a high high rate of 30 degrees, that's all data that can be used and implemented. Obviously, in a search campaign going forward after that point, when Jim and his team work with the school and collaborate and bring the names that they want, that's something that obviously we all load in. We put that in there and then all the data transfers done at that point. So once the data is within the slate instance, all the data is available. It's obviously real time, so any reports that are built within the site instance.

You are very accessible to the school I think that's something we've been very proud of. Is that level of transparency that again, we work in the school site instance, so everything that we do and we see the school is very much involved in that and has full full information going forward.

How does make obviously difference as you know, as we look at responsive communications and building out emails based on the data that we see. So if there's a drop off in a specific major or specific Geo market or high school, we want to be able to respond to that. And having our enrollment strategy division helping us with that along the way, it's always been a big part of our role here. They also do reports as well, so looking at the name, purchases and conversions, but they also built out reverse funnel goals and putting together a reverse funnel so school can see how close are we to meeting that enrollment goal?

Uh, in a particular region or in that particular market, and so Jim and his team work very closely with schools on that everything gets built on configurable joins. I know that's one of the things this past year has been really useful for a lot of the schools is again those reports live in the schools instance, and so you have access to that. You can work off of it and build off of it, and it does become a bit of a training element to it as well because we are working with the school is very closely on that. And then we do get the question a lot from schools, especially with searches. How is our campaign performing in comparison to other schools or historically?

We do benchmarking through that so you know, we obviously have our own instance and were able to kind of track that a little bit more and say we know obviously you should be looking at this click rate or this open right based on those types of schools you have or these kinds of conversions, and that's been good information to have because there's always that element of your in your own little silo in your own little slight world, and that can kind of be expanded a little bit by having it run through underscore at that point.

One thing that has changed this year. I know you know, we've alluded that several times that we don't anticipate travel happening this fall. We get the question a couple times from vice presidents were they said like what am I going to do with my admission counselors? Is following to have them do those of us that have been in admissions in that capacity, like traveling for two months out of the year is probably not going to happen. So putting together kind of territory management strategy that Jim and his team will work for towards may include something like Hello recruiting and putting together call campaigns even for search. Obviously setting up virtual events in expanding that. So if you've already migrated your.

Campus visits to virtual events. Obviously there's an opportunity to interviews. There's an opportunity to do with high school visits and have that collaboration with the guidance counselors at the schools. Same thing this late or getting them much more involved in utilizing that resources available to them obviously can help them, but also help you help yourself as well. And then again, kind of listening throughout the year, so making sure that we're responding to student needs, sending them surveys through slide and gathering as much information as we can so that we get what they need to know throughout the year, and then provide that to them.

As a bit of sounding board and I said it before and I'll say it again, you know, underclassmen, I think is going to be a bigger part this year. We obviously are all concerned about what this next year is going to look like and how all travel is going to look in hot location. Season is going to look, but we stuck to plan for the future. And there's always an element of that of looking at those underclassmen, saying what kind of communications can our councils have with them and reaching out on a regular basis and making sure we're staying involved? So it's, you know, it'll be one of those things that will be an interesting challenges here, but I think there's a lot of tools that slate definitely provides that can be leveraged.

As we've seen, a lot of schools haven't really used yet, or haven't had their counselors trained in yet and utilizing, and that's something that we want to make sure we push for, so that's really all I have to kind of go through right now and then I'll push it back to Scott for a little bit of a follow up.

Thanks dad, appreciate it. Why one more full question which you can see here in which light feature are you most interested? So I encourage you all to answer this question and now I'd like to bring in our panelists. Eddie right from Newman University, Stacy Lederman from Saint John Fisher College and we have some questions that I believe we're going to answer that were asked prior to.

Our presentation today so welcome ediane welcome Stacy, Eddie.

My name is Eddie, right? and I am the director of undergraduate admission at Newman University right outside of Philadelphia, PA.

Going into our third year with slate and also third year with underscore as our primary partner at the same time that we're switching into slate, we decided to move into underscore as our vendor for E communication. We were using another vendor previously that with our other CRM in with Scott and his team were able to share with us. It seemed like a smart move it and it has definitely paid out. Going into our third DRF a vendor that is much more of a partner that is like there in an office right next to me that I could best be goes back and forth of.

That lives in my instant so no other CRM or no other thing I have to log into to get data. So three successful years of slate, an underscore.

Thank you honey.

My name is JC Lederman. I'm the director of freshman admissions at Saint John Fisher College in Rochester, NY. We are newer to the slight community we've been involved for about a year with slate an with underscore please that underscores been able to help us not only through our implementation process, but also that we're able to partner with them through things like a Porter Portal, build reporting, and also bringing our own senior search in-house into our slate instance.

Thank you Eddie and Stacy Ann Megan intent. Thank you for introducing us to the five divisions at underscore and sharing the various ways in which underscore has helped admissions offices in source and streamline their business processes. Using slate was very insightful content, so thank you. As I mentioned earlier, we received a number of excellent questions via the registration form, so let's begin addressing them.

Our first question is from Creighton University, and the question reads we are particularly interested in what you have to say about students search. We currently use a vendor for search, but are interested in exploring ways we might be able to further utilize slate for this purpose.

You let me if you don't mind, I'm gonna jump in on that one because we were using a different vendor for search into the ecom pardon really kind of had control over where we were getting names from and what names were using and with this change into slate and bringing an underscore completely change the way we're doing search really there was no outside system so we illuminated that because it's all controlled or it's all you have the ability to host it all within slate.

And so that's that's made. A big change were able to see our data lives when we get those names from wherever the sources are coming from, their going rate into our instance. They aren't being held someplace else, and so I could see my full funnel at any point in time, and I can, depending on the point in time, just click there and keep refreshing to see how my numbers might be changing. So that's been a big change and we really appreciated that the instant access to it underscores kind of helped us narrow down. I'd say by using the different features in slate of what we can do with search and buy.

That I mean like what names are we going after? What students, what areas, the dad is all there in slate I could see how it performed year over year and we could see areas that maybe we need to purchase or at least more names in areas that we might need to travel more do to increase the top of our funnel. Underscores been able to give the reports and help us understand that data that is already living in Slaton. It's carried through all of the search areas when you think about all the different people, all the different vendors you might use to get some of these things accomplished. Underscore really helped us realize what we could do in slate without going.

Symbols other vendors we incorporated text messaging into our search well sleep allows that. I don't need to be with another vendor on another platform now that sleep print is up and rolling. Same thing. I'm not sending list out to different companies or different mailing warehouses. It's all kind of living with in there and we can make it part of that search campaign. Even the design elements that underscore has done for us. We're not going out to a different group or different company. Is there right? We want this postcard. Can you do the design? This is what we're thinking.

Underscore is able to look at it and say, well, this is what would follow. Here's some recommendations in since they're already doing the ecom they've already been in the data and no one is going to respond. Well, they're able to give some really solid suggestion, so it's really narrow down the amount of people going through, such as a whole that we've had to work with in the different hands that are in that or the different.

Vendors that are trying to push one thing or another. Slate has the ability to do almost all of search and underscores really guided us on what that is, so it saved on time, saves on conversation as a small liberal arts school in the northeast is Don budget, so I've loved what we're able to do with search inside slate. Being able to control the names, being able to change the names, being able to bind and instant without having to make a change or requesting a change and having awake two weeks for that data that lives someplace else.

To actually change and then come back into my CRM.

Does does jacket at the question answering or do you think you need anymore clarification?

Now thank you, Eddie. I think that's very helpful, especially sharing your experience using Slayton, working with underscore, namely the expediency with which you have access to the data. So I think that's that's very, very helpful. Thank you for answering that question.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the second question comes into us from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and the question reads I would. I would be interested to find out about the usage of slate with a really small staff. Also would like to hear more about your training opportunities.

Now we we have a smaller staff and team that would be working on the project so I can probably speak a little bit to that into our work with underscore to utilize all the functionality within slate. As we all know, there's so many opportunities in terms of slate TV or things like the articles that are available in the learning lab, that community forums and there's a lot of information that's available to you to do a lot of.

Self teaching or training within slate, but what's fun? Fantastic about our relationship with underscore is that they truly are slowly experts. Not only are they able to come to us often times with a suggestion or a couple of suggestions about ways to approach a situation or a question that we have, but they have been able to point us directly to a training, resource or information that's available to us within slate and that really has saved us time. It's been a great resource to get us into the right information, an able to make it decision that we can click quickly, act on as we go through.

Also, as we've worked with underscore both through our implementation and other projects, we've really had an opportunity to do recordings of our own training, so we really appreciate that because it's a lot of information and sometimes when you're going through that training for the first time and hearing about a new module or new opportunities with insulate, it's a lot of information for our team to really absorb at one time, so we appreciate being able to record those trainings and store them right within our slate instance so that we can go back and use them.

As a refresher or for new staff training as we bring people on board overall and it's really been a good relationship with underscore to help us to understand sleep so that we have been able to not only have trainings to help us thoroughly understand what's going on, but there are pieces that underscore will build for us in pieces that were able to build ourselves because part of the questions about a smaller team. And as we have a smaller team we really need to make sure everybody understands why things are the way they are built.

Understand different modules and how that works back and forth so everyone would be really capable of making changes regardless of the module in Slaton, that's really come from a lot of cross training of our team. I think having a smaller staff, it's all the more reason I'm so happy and confident in our partnership with underscore because they really are a true extension of our team. Imagine bringing on one or two new staff people that are immediately the experts in the room. Ansley it's pretty fabulous when you call a meeting in the new person in the room knows the most about your slate instance.

Um, so they've been terrific and able to have us be efficient in our tools and our usage. And as we move forward and look for building out things like our portal that I know a lot of people said they'd be interested in. I just can't thank them enough for being able to offer us training and their expertise and those types of things throughout the instance. So I think a lot of good training opportunities on both within Slayton, certainly with underscore in their partnership with our office.

Yeah.

See, it's interesting how you describe it as an extension of your staff. That's really important when you have a small admission staff. Thank you for sharing your experience, working with underscore, and I'm sure that will certainly help other admissions offices with a small staff. Thank you.

Of course.

Our next question was received from the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, and the question reads I would like to know if there is a way to create personalized URLs, pearls and their corresponding landing pages through slate. We recently signed on the slate and have interest in utilizing this functionality.

I'll jump in on that one and less Anthony has an update on some updates to slave that they would like to share with us. As of right now, the way that girls would work, it's a little bit of a work around, so it's not a complete Pearl structure that a school might might want to have in place.

Obviously anytime we do any sort of email communication text communication, the goal is to prepopulate whenever possible. So if there's an inquiry form or admitted student or inquiry portal, the pre population can happen and obviously that makes it a bit more of a structured landing page filter on the portal so that the student would have something much more dedicated. As of right now, with the way the current site setup is foresight print, it wouldn't really work in the same way you still have the kind of regular URL you'd still use the ref ID, so it's not a shorter code.

So there's a little bit of a way to do it. It's not so much the same that you would want to do for print, but for anything within the digital realm, it would be possible to have something where it makes it a little bit more personalized. When a student goes to either the landing page inquiry form or one of the portals.

Excellent thank you, Dan.

The next question comes to us from College of Wooster.

And the question is, we are very interested in any work you've done with schools that have been on slate for more than five years, and a few tangentially related questions that came in were, does or can't underscore help with any demonstrated interest scoring within slate and can't underscore help with any predictive modeling.

Sure, I can take this one, Anthony.

I saw a poll earlier. There were quite a few of you that have been in slate for five or more years, but I would say that some of the strategies I'm about to run through with what we've done with her are older slate instances really could apply at any point, especially if you were, as I mentioned before, kind of inheriting an instance. I think even in year two or three we work for some schools that have went through some of these strategy, so I would say a lot of our work usually starts with a thorough audit. I mean, schools that have had slate for awhile, I mean every year we know there's so many new functionalities are new features that come out that.

It's hard to keep up with sometimes, and so we find a lot of our schools, especially in the 45 secure range, are using functionality that's been deprecated or that will be right. So a lot of our work with older schools that way is really lean toward untangling teasers. We did that with Dominican University of California, so again, teachers aren't necessarily something that were supposed to be using much anymore. So an example for them, like they had a custom SQL for payments, and so we were able to switch that over to use this late standard payment functionality.

Um, a lot of data data restructuring which a lot of you are interested in. Given that 2nd pool. So as as we go through our audits, we find that there are like with us. We had in one of my examples earlier. There's a lot of data that is just not correctly stored, so looking through any incorrect storing of data or custom SQL queries, things like that were just constantly going through and just auditing this the instance entirely, which you can definitely do yourselves if you just go through and kind of take a step back and see why is this function.

Happening, you know what features are we using? Are we not using and then we go through and try to integrate some of that newer functionality so some of the newer pieces we've really started implementing more recently voyagers one ping is another. We worked with several schools that have had sleep for a long time and that never turned on pain just because it wasn't part of their instance when they first, when they first sign up a slate building widgets both on the home page and in reader. Obviously utilizing the origin sources, that's a big one. A lot of schools have.

You know accidentally built origin source fields and so actually using the origin groups in origin sources within slate as it's designed has been a big part.

Encompassing related events like I talked with our project with Wash you related events is a fabulous newer feature. So so adding that to the visit registration forms even a small is pre header tax rate that came out this summer where you can actually add up a line of free header text on email. I think a bigger one more recently would be configurable joins now that there's a whole New World of querying in reporting, I think we're working with a lot of schools that like I said, maybe not even been there a year or two, but I really, really learning how to query and report.

And as that segues into the demonstrated interest question that you mentioned, Anthony, I think a lot of our schools.

Like to have several years of data under their belt before they start calculating demonstrated interest or or likelihood to yield or apply scores. And there are a couple ways you can do that so.

I think the most often is that at a higher level, and we've done that with several schools where we create rules and things that you know based on open rate, click rate, ping data visited campus, things like that that might trigger a rule that populates a tier field or a stop light field right there, red, yellow, or green in terms of their interests or high, medium, low, or even more granular levels of of interest. We've also rewritten person status rules, which can be a little trickier, but if you're curious and.

Having applicant top inquiry inquiry prospect instead of just the three basic person statuses, that's an option as well. As you get more granular, you can score interaction. You can score origin sources and and then turn around and create some sort of.

Regression, regression model or something like that that gives you the outcome of the students likelihood to apply or likelihood to enroll. There is a little bit more complexity in that right, because as you do more and more of the same action, your interest at some point kind of tapers off there. But that is an option, so there's lots of kind of ways to work around engagement and demonstrated interest weather. Again, if you're an older sleeps cooler or just getting started.

Thank you Megan for sharing those helpful best practices, especially for schools using slate for a number of years that we've always said, sort of reviewing or taking inventory of the functionality that you are using, or that you might be able to sort of utilize and refining your site instance to remain current is sort of critically important and certainly considered. As I said it best practice.

And with that, I think we have come to time I believe we have a slide with underscores, upcoming webinars series that Scott will provide further details on.

Yes, thank you Anthony. We do a summer webinar series. We've already done one with Gettysburg College called rethinking suited search, but that's still available to view and then upcoming will do worlds collide, financial aid and slate or Jeremiah from our team and Augsburg University will talk about their financial aid portal and then our final one will be hitting the virtual Rd recruiting and managing territory in slate with Jim Rogers, director of enrollment strategy.

Talking about ways to territory manage, which obviously is going to be considering the uncertainty of the fall recruitment season, were bound to encounter is quite timely.

Everyone please join me in thanking Megan Scott, Ted and their clients Eddie and Stacy for sharing all these wonderful insights with us today. As I mentioned earlier, today's webinar is part of a series of events presented by slates, platinum preferred partners. Join us next week when score presents a research driven webinar on college admissions challenges and opportunities in today's environment. You can register from your site homepage by clicking slate presents in the top right navigation menu. Again, thank you all for joining us today. Be well, everyone.

Until next time.

There we go.