Dive Deeper with Everspring: From Data Chaos to Precision: A Roadmap to Enrollment Growth with Slate

Perfect. And we are alive. Welcome, everyone. Come on in. So glad to have you joining us today as a little icebreaker. If you could share where you're tuning in from, whether that is institution or city, state, whatever you want to share, let us know.

The Kabazar had a visitor.

It was really.

And as as we were waiting everyone to arrive, oh, perfect, lovely welcome. It always takes someone to break the ice. I'm going to go ahead and very slowly kick us off so that we give everyone a little bit of time to join. But I will go over first our housekeeping. So first and foremost, welcome. You are in the dive deeper with Everspring. We're going to be talking about data chaos to precision, a road map to enrollment growth with Slate. I'm joined by Rohan and Abu Zaral with them.

Themselves in a minute but before we do so let's go over a few things that are key to keep in mind today so our session is going to be recorded so if you have to maybe stop out at the end for another meeting you'll be able to access this recording via your home slate we have a couple icons at the top that I want to review with you the button that has the two CS on it will toggle closed captioning on or off and that closed captioning will appear in the chat box if you find the chat to be a bit distracted you.

Toggle that off as well simply by clicking the icon with the two chat bubbles and directly to the right, you'll see an icon that will allow you to view this webinar on full screen. Finally, if you experience any audio issues, if you hear an echo or a delay, generally speaking, if you just refresh your browser, it should take care of any of those issues. So our session today will run, I would say anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes and then wall out 15 minutes at the end, 15 minutes or so for questions. But that doesn't mean that you should be shy.

Please feel free to share your questions in the chat, we will compile them and let's keep it fun and active. I'll go ahead and turn it over now, but thank you all so much for being here and enjoy the dive deeper.

Thank you, Sarah. Hi, everyone. My name is Rohan Pai. I'm the Executive Director of Growth Strategy at Everspring. And with me is my partner, Abazar Zaidi. Abazar, want to introduce yourself?

Hi, Hello. Good morning, good afternoon. Uh, my name is Abbasar Zaidi. I'm the executive director of, uh, product development and support here at Everspring, umm, on the technology team. Uh, I'm excited to be here with you today.

Awesome. So as Sarah mentioned before, this is from data chaos to precision, a road map to enrollment growth with Slate. So we'll talk a little bit more about integration and Slate and everything that you can do to boost enrollment with all of these different factors involved. But before that, I just want to do a little bit of introducing with Everspring. Some of you may have heard of us, some of you might not have heard of us.

But we've been in the higher education space for over 10 years. We're a leading provider of technology solutions.

And services for institutions across higher education. We've been working with numerous partners for several years. We blend a mix of functional expertise in technology and digital marketing with decades of combined expertise working in and out of actual universities. And that's been really critical for allowing us to partner effectively with universities to grow enrollment in some really, really challenging conditions.

About a couple of months ago, we actually.

Took what we were using internally to buoy our enrollment marketing efforts and turned it into a client facing self-serve SaaS platform called VIA, which is a performance enrollment marketing platform for higher education that really helps universities maximize the power of the various technologies that they have in their technology stacks, including Slate. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in detail as the presentation goes on, but I wanted to provide a little bit of.

Introduction to Everspring and what we do.

And as you can see from this slide right here with the logos of all of our fabulous clients, we work with a number of different universities of all sizes from all geographies. We're really, really passionate about working with institutions to help them advance their goals. And we'll talk a little bit more about the landscape now, too.

So you may or may not be familiar with some of these statistics. I'm not going to go into detail with every single one of them, but I do want to tell a high level story that I think might resonate with all of you. So we've got fewer students who are getting to that age where they're going to enroll in school at the undergraduate level, right? We've talked a lot about this demographic Cliff that we're encountering. So we know that the pie is shrinking just a little bit, but coming out of.

Pandemic, we also saw a number of different programs, primarily online, spring up. So what's already a really difficult environment for bringing enrollments in is made that much tougher because it's so much more competitive with all of these different programs that are breaking down geographic barriers to tap into student bases that they might not have been able to do that about 5 or so years ago. And then on top of that, you've also got a number of different students. This statistic here applies primarily.

To those looking for undergraduate degrees, but you have a lot of different students or prospective students questioning the value of the ROI of an education, right? Do I actually go to higher Ed when I could make more money just going directly into the workforce or seeking out a different type of program? Maybe it's a boot camp, maybe it's a code Academy, maybe it's a vocational or technical school. It really does feel like not only are we seeing increased competition from other universities, we're also seeing increased competition from other options.

And whether you're focused on graduate programs or undergraduate programs, there's going to be ripple effects from that. So ultimately, we have a less than stellar situation right now. It's very challenging conditions. The pie is shrinking, and there's more folks who are competing for every last crumb. So as it says at the top, executing in an expert fashion is ultimately, ultimately critical, right? Understanding the resources that you have at your disposal and making the most of your technology, including your slate.

Is going to be absolutely necessary to staying competitive in very difficult times.

Now, I don't think we have any sort of formal polling set up, but for those of you who aren't feeling shy and want to use the chat, I'm really curious to get a sense of the degree to which with this audience, enroll hitting enrollment targets is a challenge, right? Is it not a problem at all by which case you choose one? Is it actually a very serious challenge that you're dealing with by which case you choose 5, or is it somewhere in the middle?

If folks wouldn't mind putting their answers there, that would be helpful just to get a sense of.

How people are navigating this environment right now? Give it a minute.

Nice.

All right, we're seeing some twos and threes, a little bit better than the fours and the fives, but I think that also speaks to how engaged this audience is, right? I think there's a lot of folks who might come to a webinar like this who are really, really feeling the pinch from enrollment challenges. But I think a number of you are not only on the lookout for best practices, but you probably understand and acknowledge that you need to stay competitive and you need to be staying on the best practices just to make sure.

That your enrollment issues stay either as a minor challenge or at most a moderate challenge. So appreciate everyone participating there.

Now I want to talk a little bit more about sort of maturity curve that we've discovered as we've worked with a number of different clients over the last 10 years. And the biggest thing that really sort of broke the glass for us was understanding that most of the institutions that we're working with had a lot of different sophisticated technology in place, right? I think there's a tendency to believe that.

Universities are behind the curve relative to other industries and they're doing things in an analog fashion when the rest of the world is digital, and in our experience, that really is not the case.

Universities are absolutely availing themselves of top notch technology, particularly when it comes to recruiting, right marketing to generate awareness of your programs and then focusing really hard on enrollment to start bringing those students in and getting them to matriculate. What we found is that most institutions have that technology in place, but it's seldom integrated. So you have a lot of different technology that exists across different departments, but it's siloed.

And so each individual team is only seeing one part of the story. Additionally, a lot of the marketing focuses more on the brand of the university, right, which has historically been a really strong pull. You stick to those core elements to draw students in. But given the complexity of the landscape, there needs to probably be a little bit more of a shift away from just brand, right? Additionally, a lot of the money that's spent on advertising focuses more on lead generation.

As opposed to student generation. So you're bringing in a lot of folks into the top of your funnel, but are they converting? Those are still questions that folks aren't completely set on from an answer perspective. And additionally, because the technology maybe isn't exactly in the place it needs to be from an integration standpoint, what you're finding is that when you're forecasting, you're maybe not as accurate as you'd like to be as early as you can be. So things get a little bit late and their behavior becomes.

More reactive than proactive. And then finally, when you do try to connect all of the dots and bring data in from different systems together to tell the bigger story of what's happening along the prospective student journey, that process of tying things together can be very manual and error prone and time intensive. I know I've definitely been in that place in years past where if I was trying to connect systems together that I was maybe a little bit less familiar with or we didn't have integrated.

I'm pulling exports from Excel from this system and that system and another system, and I'm doing my best to tie them together.

And by the time I've finally finished that process, all the different data that I just pulled has become dated, right? It's no longer in real time. It's no longer as valuable to my stakeholders as it would have been if I had had those integrations in place. And so most institutions are dealing with those troubles that just kind of get folded in to the day-to-day. But what we've seen with those leading institutions that are driving change that are doing their best to be as innovative as they can.

They are investing.

In integrating their systems, they're focused not just on brand marketing, but on performance marketing and using the power of that integration to understand what exactly is generating students versus what's just generating leads or generating awareness. So they're being as efficient as they can be with budget dollars that we know are precious. Additionally, they're leveraging predictive technologies and predictive analytics to get ahead of the game when it comes to forecasting so that they can be a little bit more proactive and again, going back.

To that final point that I made earlier, with most institutions, all of their reporting is automated because all of the integrations allow for seamless flow of data and real time reporting of what's actually happening all across the funnel. So I imagine a number of you might find yourself in the most institutions category, maybe a few of you are in the leading institutions category. I think that again, the best thing about a webinar like this is you've got a lot of registrants who are focused on taking.

Steps to get into that leading institutions category. And I would argue that it all starts with integration at the very top, getting all of your systems together, getting all of your different data feeds, talking to one another so that you can see the whole story and really get the most out of your technology investments.

Now, I've done quite a bit of talking, but I definitely want to emphasize one last thing here on the importance of integration and technology. We did a survey a little bit earlier in the summer of about 130 institutions, or we had respondents from 130 institutions, I should say. And we asked about all the different technologies that they have in place. And going back to what I mentioned before, most institutions had key systems in place, right? But they weren't integrating them.

So what you can see here is that upwards of 84% are using CRMS or availing themselves of paid media platforms like LinkedIn or Google Ads. And they're also using web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. But less than half of them are using BI software or any sort of analytic software to get a sense of what's actually happening with the data from all these different systems. And about 3/4 of our respondents also were not.

Integrating, you know any of these systems together, right? Not one or two, not all of them. There was just no integration. Everything was living in silos. And so you end up with something that we like to call the drip problem where your data rich, but your insights poor. And the reason that is, is because while you have all these investments in technologies and you've got a rich stream of data coming through from each and every single one of them, you can only see one part of the story with each one. And if you're not connecting, all of it.

Then all these different things are existing in, and it's very difficult to understand just what the problem is if your enrollment numbers aren't what you want them to be or if your marketing numbers aren't what you want them to be. So really overcoming the drip problem via integration is kind of the name of the game. I think getting all of those systems together, really getting the most out of them means understanding them within the context of a connected perspective student journey, and you can't do that without.

Setting up the integrations.

So I'm going to do one more kind of pseudo poll here because I'm really curious to understand what your integration experiences are like, right? Are you integrating your CRM? Are you integrating it with your paid media platforms, data from your website, analytics sources from your application systems? Do you have all of these things already set up so that everything is talking to one another and everything is centralized, which I guess would be option A here or are you seeing some other issues?

Here where you've got maybe one or two systems connected, but a couple of others that are sort of isolated, maybe you don't have all of these systems set up for managing your enrollment marketing and your enrollment processes. Curious to get a sense of where people stand on that just on this scale of Ade.

Nice.

Seeing a lot of bees here. I think that kind of speaks to where most institutions are, right? There's still some silos, but you've made the investments in technology, which is huge, and you're doing your best to connect some of them to give you a better sense of what the story is for prospective students. Excellent, that's very helpful.

So again, name of the game integration, right, putting together your brand and your performance marketing along with what you're doing in admissions to power growth. I know a number of you talked about how growing enrollment is a minor or it's a moderate challenge. But I think we can all agree that we're in a very competitive environment in a place where higher education really hasn't been in years, right, traditional models of pedagogy and this idea that.

People should try to go to college has really been a prevailing part of our culture for so many years. And more and more we're beginning to see folks question the value of degrees even as there are all of these other programs that are popping up. So even if those challenges right now don't seem significant without integration, given how competitive things are, I think it's safe to expect that those challenges are going to grow. So really what we want to talk about in a little bit more detail today is how you establish that road map to.

Right. How you get yourself to a point where your brand positioning is aligned with your performance marketing. You're actively tracking different metrics to get a sense of what's working and what isn't. And at the same time, by bringing admissions in there with marketing, you're creating not just full funnel visibility for everyone involved, but you're also creating a really powerful feedback loop in between your marketing and your enrollment groups, which then not only helps to drive further collaboration, but it helps you get a better.

Understanding of what messaging resonates with folks at different parts of the journey. So if you're integrating all of your data, you have an opportunity to get everyone speaking the same language as opposed to kind of speaking at one another or across from one another in a way where messages don't stick. And once you get everyone speaking the same language and collaborating, you can do some really incredible stuff. So with that, I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to hand it over to Abazar to talk a little bit more about.

And how you integrate your data.

Wonderful. Thank you, Rohan. Some excellent points that you brought up. Rohan. One of the things that I want to talk about as a technologist, technology isn't necessarily always the answer or the end all be all for any given problem in this specific situation despite being the technologist.

Very often we will work with our partners and I I implore them to really understand what their end goal is.

And what they want to try to accomplish with the data. So what we would call in the technology world, the business requirements, right? It's, it's really a four step process to be able to effectively and and accurately integrate the data sets you need to give you the visibility within your organization. But you'll notice that of those four steps, really it's just the 4th step that is more.

Technological, if you will, where you're actually doing the technology build. Umm.

It starts off with what are, what are the questions or critical questions or what is the picture I'm trying to paint or understand what the data set or the data sets that I have within my ecosystem. The second step is to understand within the systems what's measurable, what systems are touching what other systems.

And what am I going to be extracting from set systems to then paint that overall picture that I had determined in step one? Step 3 is a more detailed dive or a deep dive into the data sets that you have available in any given system.

Actually mapping field by field understanding, hey, I need these unique identifiers or this value or this attribute gives me this and, and taking an inventory and being meticulous about it so that when you go into Step 4, where you're actually creating this data bridge, if you will, you know what to integrate, where you're integrating from.

Where the data ingestion is going to happen and effectively what your output is going to be, right? How you're going to bring that end goal into fruition?

So let's take a little, let's take a look a little bit at Step 1. So I feel like this is probably the most important step in my opinion of all four steps, not only because it's the first step, but it really is going to be the driving factor behind what you want to do with your data. Are you looking to understand what your cost per student is? Are you looking to track conversion from top to bottom funnel?

Do you want to understand how you're going to be allocating resources to certain programs or enrollment efforts? Do you want to know what type of touch points your audiences have, right, like click rates, e-mail opens, et cetera? So really trying to figure out, hey, you know, this is what I want to do with the aggregate data set and this is what I want to report out on. That's what this step is.

This is where we partner with our our clients.

The the key stakeholders to understand, hey, I want to drive my my business or institution in this direction with these insights. What are those insights?

Um, once you've determined set in, uh, said, uh, questions or, or, or the narrative that you kind of want to create, that's when we start to take a look at the data sets at kind of a high level. And what I mean by that is, so I run paid campaigns via Google ads. That would be a data set. You can get from that data set how much you're spending, what your yield is, what your Cpl. is, etcetera. So really going across.

All of your systems, your CRMS, your application portal, any type of social media channels that you have chat bots, anywhere where you think data lives, that's going to help you with your step one question of what you've defined. That's what this this specific step is looking to do.

A lot of times we found success in kind of mapping out the student journey from from inquiry all the way to graduation.

And identifying, hey, this is, these are all the touch points that this individual has had throughout the student journey that we found great success in that. And, and that's something that we've used as a best practice in the past to kind of help drive some of this, this data mapping, if you will. And then once we have an understanding high level what's going on, that's when we go into.

Our. Our real.

Like deep dive or, or our, our technical inventory, right, you're going to have inevitably between all of these systems, some sort of unique identifier that helps to attribute to say, hey, you know, I got this lead off of this clicked campaign and now this lead is in our CRM and it looks like we've reached out to this individual four times and they have.

Funded 2 times. All of that data had to get stitched together.

By doing a meticulous inventory of, of each and every field that's pertinent to answer the questions that you're trying to answer. Again, up until this point, still no real technicality from like a like a technology perspective, right? We've, we've asked some questions, we've defined our, defined our goal. We've looked at the systems available to us and now we're looking at the fields that we think are going to be.

Helping us in in developing this reporting.

After you've kind of done a full and complete inventory, in the process you will also have to kind of identify what type of data collection, data transformation and data ingestion you're going to be doing.

We work with a multitude of what you would call methodologies. Whether it's API, flat file, Zapier, there's a lot of availability now.

In terms of what you can use to get the data that you want.

In doing that, inventory both of the systems and the fields that will enable you to then do.

A more thorough technical deep dive of how you're actually going to get that data.

We we have seen a lot of success in utilizing something like a data lake or.

A data warehouse wherein you can aggregate all that data so that whatever reporting layer you have, whether that be via or Tableau or whatever else.

You can pull directly from a single source that gives you better performance, better data availability, but is something that requires meticulous planning in order to be able to kind of construct.

And so this, this last step really is where we figure out, alright, so we've got all our fields, we've got all the systems, we know what systems need to integrate. Let's try to get all of these systems into a place where we can easily access that data.

And report out on it effectively and accurately some of the challenges we face in step four, data availability.

If if we are running some sort of like daily job to get pull down data from a certain system once a day, that means that that's not refreshing for 24 hours. You could face some latency or like like availability issues there than in the reporting.

We also run into performance questions, right, 'cause sometimes you may not have the resources available to be able to run real time all the time, even if it's available. So you have to think about it from a business perspective and say, OK, am I OK with having a lead funnel report that refreshes every three hours or do I really need to invest in the infrastructure to be able to run it real time?

All the time. Like what's the value in the trade off there, right?

So that's that's Step 4 getting getting all the data aggregated into a place where.

We can now access said data in an efficient and accurate manner to then be able to report out.

Roland, I'm going to pass it over to you.

Thanks. And I think the final part that you just mentioned, Abazar, being able to report on things is the most critical part of it, right? If you set up all of the infrastructure and get all of your different streams of data connected and talking to one another at the same time, you need to be able to understand really quickly what's happening across those systems, across the student journey. What is the interactivity look like for a prospective student, all of those questions.

Need to be answerable in ways that catch the eye and very clearly explain to you what's going on. So on this slide you see some of the examples of the types of analysis that you can produce when you start connecting a lot of your different systems and producing things that are ultimately greater than the sum of their parts, right? You're able to have a better understanding of what's moving down your funnel. You can be a little bit more predictive.

In capturing data from a few different places, whether it's your CRM or your application system.

Another thing that you can do is actually use that data in conjunction with whatever you've connected on the paid side, whether it's paid media or it's a list buyer something or the other, and you can start to compare the efficacy of different channels. Umm, so you know, sorry about that.

Sorry about that. I had a little bit of a technical issue at my hotel. Anyway, my apologies. One thing I wanted to note was especially if you were tracking the efficacy of different channels that you're spending on, whether on the undergraduate side, maybe it's a list buy from something like College Board or CapEx or if you're trying to get a sense of what's better at producing leads that ultimately convert into students between LinkedIn or Google Ads, you can connect all of your data from your paid along through CRM and your application system.

To track how those different types of leads move down the system, right Additionally, you can get a better sense as you can see in that top right corner of how different folks are interacting with your web properties, right and more importantly, you can see when they're interacting with your web properties within the context of the student journey, right? Obviously, there's going to be different web pages that are more or less relevant to prospective students when they're applying or you know maybe they're admitted or maybe they're still very early in the process but you.

See where they're getting their information from and what you can do with that content to make it more persuasive and help them move further along in that process. And then finally, I think the sort of bottom line analysis that you catch in that bottom right hand corner is which campaigns are ultimately yielding students in such a way that I'm keeping my cost per prospect, my cost per applicant, my cost per enrollee at a manageable number.

As we've said, we know budgets can be tight.

And even if they're not tight now, you just you can't be certain that something isn't going to happen in the future that limits the amount of resources you have at your disposal. So being able to track those numbers in real time is really critical to understanding what faucets you want to turn on and which ones you want to turn off in order to be as efficient as you can be with your resources.

And so I mentioned earlier that we launched our own platform VIA. And the basis for VIA is that we integrate with the different systems that you have in place, including Slate to be that connective tissue that allows you to get more than just some of your parts out of all the different data streams that you have active across your systems. As we've said, most institutions have made these investments, but they're probably not realizing the full value of those investments without integrating everything together and really.

The entirety of the prospective student journey, because once you can see that, you can understand all of the different levers that are at your disposal to get more students coming in and so that you can shape a class the way that you want to.

One last thing that I will say that again is a real benefit of being a part of this network with Slate and getting the opportunity to interact with institutions like the ones that are our registrants are coming from is that, you know, we're in a really interesting place in higher education where more and more universities are either feeling pressure or feeling compelled to take more ownership of certain parts of enrollment marketing that they might have previously worked with an outside vendor.

Right. And there's definitely some vendors who, you know, will have that service outsourced to them and not be particularly transparent about what they're doing or what their costs are or what works and what doesn't work. And universities deserve more than a black box, right? They deserve a real partnership. And so one thing we love about working with Slate and the way that they're so dynamic in continuing to build on the product and add new functionality is that all of that connects back to what?

We're doing with VIA, which is all very much in the spirit of empowering institutions to own more of these processes and really build their own in-house center of excellence as it relates to enrollment, marketing and recruitment of students. And ultimately, we're really, really excited about this partnership because it gives us an opportunity to go through data, connect different systems and really advance everything that.

Institutions can see to get a better handle of.

The very competitive environment that they're in. So with that, if you're interested in following up or learning more about Via, here's a little bit of contact information here. info@everspringpartners.com is pretty straightforward, but at the same time, Abuzar and I are here to answer any questions that you may have about what we've discussed or other areas related to slate integration Via.

Here for your questions now.

Just gonna give folks a couple a minute or so to type in their questions if there are any questions.

Oh yeah.

It's it's Tuesday, a little bit after lunch on the East Coast, so hopefully we didn't put anyone to sleep just now, but any and all questions super eager to chat.

I'll give you all another minute if he knows the last questions you want to ask.

If questions pop up later, I think whatever gets sent out, we'll have a bizarre as in my and ever springs general contact information. So always happy to chat on the side whether there's any questions about the presentation or if people just want to talk a little bit more about their experiences with Slate and their experiences with integrating different technologies, any challenges they've encountered or any best practices or things that they pulled away that have been really helpful for them. We're always eager to learn more.

So really appreciate the time.

Mm-hmm. Yep. So just so everyone knows, this session is recorded, this, the recording will be made available.

In the near future, I think it's going to be on a home slate, so you'll be able to access it there.

As you can see on the screen, their e-mail addresses are right there if you want to send an e-mail afterwards with any questions you might have. Other than that, since there are no questions right now, umm, on behalf of Tech Solutions, I just, I just want to say thank you all so much for coming umm.

And I do hope you all enjoy the rest of your day and definitely check out any other dive deeper sessions that we are hosting over the next couple weeks. Thank you all so much for coming.

Thanks all. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you all.