Dive Deeper with Waybetter Marketing: Reports: Not Just For Your Enrollment Funnel!

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Alright, welcome everyone.

Uh, we're gonna go ahead and get started in just a minute as folks come in.

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We're very excited for today's presentation.

Alrighty, well it looks like folks are still streaming on in. Thanks everyone for saying hi in the chat. I'm gonna just go ahead and kind of get started with some housekeeping and intros. My name is Max Zeric. I'm one of our client support.

Engineers here at technicians and our Portland office and I'm really excited for this webinar. So dive deeper with way better marketing reports, not just free enrollment funnel. This is really exciting. I got to see it last week. It's a great presentation. We have Clay Meyers and Kishan Zuber here from way better marketing. They'll be presenting in just a minute. I'm just going to go over a couple of housekeeping things. So this is being recorded and it will be available.

Port viewing afterward. If you want to rewatch or share with other folks, close captioning can be enabled. There's AC button up in the top right of the window up. There is also where you're gonna find the full screen view if you want to expand it. And then if you need to resync audio or video. I'm just clicking refresh in your browser should solve any of those issues for you. Please feel free to ask questions in the chat. The folks that way better are going to be kind of moderating, chatting, answering your questions. So.

Um, feel free to throw those in chat. Um. And if at any point you want to kind of turn off chat and get those distractions out of the way, the chat icon in the top right corner can do that.

So without any further ado, again thank you so much, Kishan and Clay and welcome. Thank you.

Great, great. Thank you so much Max and thank you everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining. Way better for this session on reports and not just for your enrollment funnel. I'm Kishan Zuber, I'm the vice president for Slate. Strategy and partnerships at way better, but I am a been a partner of way betters for very for a long time. For the last 10 years I've led grad and undergraduate institutions just like yours in driving enrollment and.

As a vice president for enrollment management, I really was the main user of many slate reports as they informed my strategic decision making on a daily basis. I have experience with Slate at three different institutions and had the pleasure of implementing slate there and so have first hand knowledge of how you can really leverage slate to improve your operation. So we're really excited to be here today and I'll let Clay introduce himself and give us some background.

All right. Thanks so much, kitchen. So my name is Clay Myers. I am one of the directors of Slate here at way better marketing. I've been in Slate for the better part of six years. I started off as an admissions counselor at Loyola University Maryland. So I have most certainly been on the front lines of recruiting and bringing in students and driving enrollment for my my prior university got really involved with Slate at Loyola, became a slate.

Captain at Loyola and all of that has led me here to be at way better this afternoon. Along the way, I also received my masters in data science as well. I am really excited to to be here this afternoon. I'm really excited just about reports in general. Honestly, this kind of stuff really gets me up in the morning. So very excited to share with you some key reports outside of your enrollment funnel and also to hopefully give you some tips and some tricks for creating other reports again.

Outside of your your main enrollment funnel. So with that, I'll kick it back to Kishan to speak a bit more about way better.

Awesome, clay. Well, I have to say that reports building reports do not get me up in the morning and is not my motivation, but we're super excited to have team members like you who do really love that. So hopefully will be a good combo for you today and looking at the overall strategy and importance of the report and then clay can dig in on some of them. Besides Clay and myself, way better has a team of of really smart, awesome people.

Remind us helping out, we have a team of Slaters, of course, people who are experts in slate and helping institutions like yours leveraging slate. We also have folks in, in other types of marketing and digital marketing and account managers as way better offers a suite of services including search and yield campaigns, digital marketing and now services with inside slate as well. We aim to drive enrollment in every project that we do if it doesn't bring in deposits.

Enroll students, we don't maybe necessarily want want to do it. We want to make sure that every action is helping you kind of Dr enrollment. On the other end, we work with different marketing automation tools and one of those is slate and we are a slate platinum partner and we're really proud of that designation and that they give us the opportunity to be with you today. We work with schools all over the country, big, small, private, public, selective, non selective helping them in a lot of different ways.

So that's way better. But again, we're we're here for reports. So I'll just go over the plan, you know, as an enrollment manager and I kind of alluded to this in my intro, but there's nothing better than a good report. It can start my day. It doesn't necessarily wake me up, but it can start my day and understand where we're at. Definitely final reports, but reports of all kinds.

What they should do for you is that report should do the thinking for me to some degree. It should give me information immediately that I can understand and I can take action on, or that I can talk to the team about and then we can formulate a plan to help maybe ward off some kind of trend that we're seeing that we don't like. It's got to be quick glance. It's got to be easy to digest and be in real time. You know, if I'm always coming to slip to clays office asking him the same question every week.

He probably should build me a report so I can see the data for myself. So reports should answer those questions that we are always asking.

Um, we also want to make sure it's giving us insights to our operation. And So what we're going to offer you today is examples of four different reports that we like to use or we think you could use to help take a look inside your operation that will ultimately impact the enrollment funnel, but are maybe not necessarily tied to it right away, looking at your slate instance, looking at data and making sure things are clean. So we'll go over each report with you why we think it's important, and then clay is going to actually jump into the details, the technical details.

Of how he went about building those um, the good news is you don't have to start from scratch. We are going to give you a suitcase today and make sure that you have some of these reports to start so that you can have a springboard in terms of getting started with some of this, so you don't have to take all feverish notes. This is being recorded, which is good. And then you'll have that that suitcase reports to get you started.

All right, awesome. Thanks so much, kitchen. So in addition to implementations and other slate specific projects, we way better get a chance to do a ton of slate audits so we are able to explore various university instances and what we find pretty consistently, there's only about 5 truly actionable reports.

In any given slate instance, so the odds for you as an institution are you probably have a great enrollment funnel report. It's probably the best enrollment report on your side of the Mississippi River. Maybe you have some great reports for your counselors, maybe you even have an event reporter too. And all of that is, is really great, I'm sure provides you some great numbers and some great high level information, but your reports really should be doing a lot more for you, your data and your reports.

Should be driving your strategic decision making and it also should be alerting you of potential issues in the system. So to share with you what that looks like on the operations, and we had a process at Leola where we were exporting data pertaining to event construction. We were running things through Excel filters just to make sure everything was created correctly when it came to fall travel season.

We were able to streamline this into a singular report and a version of that report I'll be sharing with you this afternoon that helped consolidate that time frame. So instead of having this process that took hours and hours and hours and involved a lot of manual relaying to admission counselors and a lot of manual cleaning things up on the back end, we were able to streamline that into just a few minutes. So again, in terms of alerting you of issues, that is a huge advantage of having great functioning reports in your system, but also to a really should.

Should drive that strategic decision decision making, so would love to kick that tuition to speak about what that did for her at her prior university as well.

Yeah, I think I just want to be able to make good decisions and I want to be able to do that on the fly or or in a in a fast way. Again, we're what's important to me is things like return on investment of events and we'll talk a little bit about that today. I'm interested in interactions or ping data or how our campaigns are doing or performing. Again yes, in accordance to the funnel, but.

Based on other KPI's as well, we want to make sure we can bring some of that data to the surface. I also love operations, one of my favorite things about admissions and efficiencies, and very care very much about data integrity. And so I think being able to have some reports at your fingertips that make sure your data is clean and that your systems running well can also be great for your operations manager. But I want to know that too at my high level as well.

We do not get a kickback from Marriott, by the way. That was totally on us.

So our first report that we picked for you, this report is looking at your event structure in slate. So you have users out there that are building events. They have maybe certain templates that go with those events. There's a certain folder structure. You're maybe asking them to title these events in a certain way and then those events might be tied to your communications.

That are going out to prospective students. So all of these things need to be looked at so that you can ensure that the data is good. So basically this report is a way to look at the back end, clean up the back end data, ensure you have good reporting and make sure those comps that are going out to students are accurate is if your counselors or something or your event person is maybe putting in a funky title or maybe the wrong time, then that's again ending up getting communicated out to your students. So this report will be a quick and easy way to find.

Errors within your event structure. Let's take a look so that you can actually see what it looks like, and then clay is going to kind of dissect each of the parts for you.

Alright, awesome. So we've highlighted why reports are important and why they are vital and what they can do for you as an office. You know, let's examine why some schools might be struggling with the negative slate reporting functionality. I think the first reason is they may be a bit intimidated by the slate reporting module. I'm sure you've heard that reports in Slate are driven largely off of queries, which is true. The query module is much more intuitive. You know, you are adding in filters, you are adding in exports, you are seeing the results of those.

Additions or edits pretty much in real time. It's a lot quicker generally to make queries as well. With the reporting module, it does take a lot more groundwork. You're generally not able to see the results of things that you've added or edited immediately. It's a bit harder and a bit less intuitive to pick up. That being said, if you're able to invest the time and the energy in learning the reports module, it truly will pay dividends for you in terms of the ease of report creation as well as the great data and the great.

These sites, it can provide you as an end user as well. I think another reason why schools might struggle with Slate reporting is they are leaning heavily into external reporting methods. So maybe they are exporting data to excel, they are running hibbit tables. Maybe you're sending data off into Tableau, perhaps on a manual basis, perhaps on an automatic basis. This is all good and well, however, you know the big advantage to having reports directly in Slate is the amount of time it will take you to fetch that.

Information. So if it's April 25th and you are an undergraduate enrollment leader, you need that data from that report immediately. You know you can't wait for your operations people to run something and to come up with a pivot table or to send things in Tableau. You need to know, you know honestly on the second which students are still viable, what students are still visiting your web pages. If you need to go to the wait list, you need all that information immediately. You don't have time to wait for those external reporting methods. So huge advantage.

Again, to having those reports in slate. I think another area, and this specifically is for operations folks, is the OPS folks might not necessarily understand what's going to be a valuable addition for their office. So to give you an example, I could create a report for my institution and I can say, you know, the average amount of letters that a student has in their first name is X. And, you know, perhaps that would involve some pretty intense functionality. Perhaps it would be complex, but it would yield really no useful information.

For your enrollment leadership. So having a bridge of communication between enrollment leadership, what data is needed, what data is requested, and your operations folks is going to be crucial in creating actionable reports.

The other issue would be poor initial data classification. So this would be an attribute of your instance, and if you are just implementing or if you've been around for maybe a year or two in slate, these problems are pretty easy to fix. You know it won't involve a lot of untangling if you've been around in slate for five or six years, if you are a bit more of an early adapter, and if your processes are built on faulty data practices, you know it will be a little bit more work to untangle that. But again, it will be worth it.

Just in terms of ease of report creation and of course the information that is being relayed back to you. So what do we mean when we say set a proper data foundation? Really, there are two key pieces here to keep in mind when it comes to your data. The first is the type of your custom fields. So the easiest data points to report out are numerical data points, and they are fields that are only looking for one prompt value, and the prompt values should be pretty tightly.

Helped. They should also be mutually exclusive as well. So if you have any fields that are looking for multiple prompt values, you know, perhaps it's comma separated. Maybe you're asking individuals about their academic interest and you're letting them select multiple things. That's going to be really difficult to report out on. So really be cognizant of the field types that you are working with. It will play a part in reporting. The other big area that is crucial for a solid data foundation is your data scope.

So again, I'm sure you've heard a lot about person scope data points versus application scope data points. Maybe you kind of get what that means, but you really don't have a full understanding of why it's so important. I'm going to give you another metaphor, and hopefully this helps you imagine why this is so crucial and so important when setting out your data in slate. So when I was at admissions Counselor, I was traveling, I was on the road, you know, I racked up a lot of hotel points. I was a I was a Marriott frequent flyer, stayed at Marriott's a bunch. I had a great Marriott.

Rewards, you know, set of points and Marriott. I am sure when they had data on me, they had data about me as a person, but they also had data about my particular hotel stays. So data about me as a person might be my name, it might be my e-mail address, perhaps it's my address as well. The data about my stays, though, is much more pertaining to the exact stays that I had. So let's say it was the hotel I was staying in. Perhaps it was the dates I was staying.

Perhaps it was the room number. The reason why this data about my stays can't be stored alongside my name and my e-mail address and my home address is because that data would be overwritten with every single new state that I had. So for reporting, for marriotts purposes, they could only look at that most recent information about my stays. So it does have to be on a separate data table from my person information. So what does this have to do with persons versus applications? Well, it's the same.

General concept. If you are getting data points from your application, they should be stored separately to allow for reporting from both applications. This would be things like financial aid information or decision information. You want to be able to get both data points from both applications. So if your data is miscopied this is probably OK for 70 or 80% of the students in your pool that only have one application. But if students submit multiple applications it will make reporting out.

On those data points, very tricky and also inaccurate because again, you're only looking at the most recent data points from whatever's most recent application the student submitted.

OK.

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, free, free advertising.

All right, so let's jump into the exciting part. Kick it back to the kitchen here for event error report.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much. So this is a view of a simple event error report and essentially what this report is looking at is various different report parts, various different report parts that are pulling in events that are most likely constructed incorrectly. So you can see here we have events that are missing a folder or a.

Template, or there's some discrepancy between the folder and the template setup. Perhaps there's a time discrepancy. Maybe there's students in the registered status for events that are happening in the past. We can see here that we see the event title, we see what potentially could be wrong with the event. We're also seeing the event user, and then we have an internal URL for that event, so it's very easy to correct these issues. All you're doing is copying that URL and putting it into your browser, and then you were brought to that specific event.

Essentially. So how exactly would a report like this be constructed on the back end? Well this is fairly simple and you will see as we are working through our reports we're starting off simpler. The value add is pretty good. We're moving on to more complex reports and also reports that are going to help make your instance run truly like a well oiled machine. So here we are building a query within our reports that is built on the forms base. We are looking for types of forms.

An event and scheduler and we are looking for a start date of today or after. Now we are bringing in one sub query filter. We are looking for the non existence of that forms form folder. We are doing something very similar for missing templates. The only thing that we're changing is that export here in the subquery filter for a form template.

Now how are we looking at that third report part which is the folder or template discrepancy? This really is up to your institution. This is going to be based off of your template hierarchy and your folder hierarchy within events and within scheduler. So the type here again is event or scheduler. The start date is today or later and then we essentially are passing in any incorrect combination of folder or template. So perhaps we are interested in events that are in the high school visit template that are not.

Any high school visit folder, perhaps we're interested in events in the College Fair template, not in the College fair folder. We're able to correct these and of course fix them in the system so that any sort of communication or any sort of source reporting or any sort of general event data that you were looking at is going to be correct when it comes to the template, when it comes to the folder as well.

Now this time discrepancy piece is a bit more complex, so let me walk you through exactly what this looks like. Here in the filter structure, we are looking at a number of different sub query filters for 1:00 AM, two AM, 3:00 AM, and 4:00 AM respectively. So when you are creating events in Slate and if you are not specifying whether they should be in AM or PM, slate will default that for you. Usually the default behavior for slate is for events that are 123 or 4.

They will default them to AM, but likely for your high school visits, for your college fairs, for truly any other event that you might be running, you're probably not that early. Unless it's a polar plunge, I guess, but even then, probably still not that early. So we do want to catch these events. All we're adding in here is a comparison. We are comparing the form start date time for that particular event with a literal. In this case. Since this is looking for event starting at 1:00 AM, we are putting in a literal of 01, but we can't quite.

Out there. So we do have to specify one additional data point with the form start date time. So the format type should be date time and the format mask here should be Capital H Capital H essentially what that does is it takes the start time of the event and puts it on a scale from 00 to two four. So anything with 01 is going to be starting from 1:00 AM to 1:59 AM all the way through that 4:00 AM to 4:59.

Am so again, here you can catch any event that is most likely at an incorrect time.

And that is more than fair.

All right, awesome. And we mentioned that we will be having a suitcase, so this will be hitting your inboxes a bit later, and that will be this first report as well as the third report we'll be showing here this afternoon. So keep an eye out. If you're watching this video over archive, just reach out to us. We'd be happy to get that for you.

Alright, awesome. So you can see this form submission report is generally broken up into two parts. So on the upper part, we are looking at our great partner universities general inquiry form submissions by quarter starting with 2018 and then we are also looking at short form submissions here on the bottom. So essentially these are inquiry forms that are placed on various program pages.

And we are able to see how all of those various sub sub forms are performing on the whole compared with one another. So again, perhaps you've got some great reports right now that are looking at data in table form. You do have the ability also to create visualizations in slate. So this would be an example of what that would look like specifically pertaining to form submissions. All right, so how did we create this report? We are setting up a base here for the upper part of the report as the inquiry.

Form itself. So we are going to form responses. We are clicking a specific form and that specific form is the inquiry form. That is how we've set U, the base of this particular report. Each column is fairly similar. It will take a decent amount of time to go ahead and create all of those columns, but essentially we are just specifying that the form submission date should be within a particular range. We have specified here that we should be looking at a number of submissions by quarter. You could just as easily do months.

Weeks, days, years, etc.

Now in terms of the visualization part, it's actually very straightforward. You are just bringing in a report part of chart and then you are specifying that that chart chart type should be line and that is all you've got to do to create that upper part of the report.

Now the bottom part is similar, there's just one or two differences. And again, if you remember, this is the report part with the various line graphs for each individual form. Now, instead of setting the base at the top of the report as the form itself, we are starting with a base of configurable joins form responses. We have one very important filter part at the top, and we are specifying that we are only interested in form responses in a particular folder, so we're linking to form.

And then we're specifying what folder, what folder that form should be. The next thing we are doing is we are introducing a group by here within the slate reports module. So if you are familiar with SQL, you already know what a powerful tool that group by statement is. If you're not familiar with SQL, that is totally OK just know that that group by statement in Slate is crucially important and allows you to do a lot of different, very exciting things. Now in the reports module here we are grouping by the form internal name.

Or the name of the form and this allows us to get each individual line graph within our report and voila, there it is. So again, fairly simple, but it will yield you a lot of great actionable results.