Dive Deeper with Underscore: Mind the Gap: Popular Pitfalls in Slate Projects

Good day everyone and welcome to our dive deeper session today you are in for a real treat I have with me none other than the finely talented ladies of underscore, a Carnegie company and today's session will is entitled Mind the gap. Popular pitfalls in slate projects. So before we get started I'm just going to read a bit about today's session. Then we'll do some housekeeping. I'll introduce today's guests.

And I'll be out of your way so we all know that it can be challenging to implement change, but we are here to share our expertise and setting your team up for success when starting or growing your institution in Slate, a panel of our consultants have consolidated their experiences with schools of all shapes and sizes and are ready to provide a blueprint to strategize your next slate project. Today's session will cover best practices to avoid pitfalls, guiding your team to more.

Impactful implementations, trainings, communications portals and more. Like I said you're in for a real treat. Our presenters today are none other than Emma. Heck did I say that properly, Emma?

Close enough hyak.

Hi Eric, I have to get it right. Emma Hyack and only Krauss and Laura Murnan.

So again, before we get started, just a few housekeeping points, this webinar is recorded and will be made available for viewing at a later time. Closed captioning can be enabled by clicking the closed caption button at the top right corner of the share window.

Full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button at the top right corner of the share window. Should you need to re sync audio and or video, please refresh your share window. Questions may be posted in the chat. The chat may be turned off by clicking the chat icon at the top right corner of the share window.

And without any further ado underscore a Carnegie company.

Thanks, Jordan. We're going to do some quick intros here before we dive into each of our sections and we thought a fun way to introduce ourselves and our roles here. Underscore would also be to share one of our kind of broken record slate topics that we bring up in calls with partner institutions. So there are some things that we just kind of keep bringing up. Have you tried this? Have you implemented this? Did you hear?

This is a new feature, so we thought we'd kind of share our current fun thing that we find ourselves bringing up all the time. So my name is Emma Hayek. I am asleep implementation strategist here at underscore, so working a lot with institutions who are new to sleep, helping them implement it as well as doing consultations and audits as well. And my current slate kind of broken record. Fun. Fact is, the configurable joins query library, which I'm such a broken record about. I will also mention.

In my presentation here in just a few minutes, so I'll take it over to Laura.

Hi everyone, my name is Laura Murnan and I am a senior sleep strategist and training manager at underscore and my broken record or what I bring up is an oldie but a goodie. I love using liquid markup to personalize messaging within deliver and how will pass it to Emily.

Thanks, Laura. My name is Emily Kraus. I am a slate strategist on the portal team here at underscore as well. My favorite thing is not necessarily a single feature, but that slate is always evolving and one of the things that really excites me is active scheduler. We all just learned a little bit about that recently in a web and R and I am not constantly.

Like my partner schools keep your keep your ear to the ground. There's always something new and it can always revolutionize the way that you are operating. So that's my fun slate fact.

Wonderful so we wanted to give you all a sneak peak before we got started so when we were thinking about popular pitfalls and justice, how that what we see in our different business lines and we thought about it in three different phases. So implement, grow and enhance. So we'll be looking at those individually as we talk through it and talking about those popular pitfalls and how you can alleviate that gap.

Perfect.

So we're going to get started with implementation starting from the beginning, before everyone who's already implemented in Slate tunes me out for the next 10 minutes. Keep in mind that these are a lot of really fundamental things that are important to keep in mind as you're growing and enhancing your instance as well, and maybe you have implemented for the enrollment side of things, but maybe you haven't implemented for, say, student success, so you may not actually be done implementing in all of the ways that you possibly could.

I am also going to share a few just fun tricks as well, so things that are definitely applicable to those who are new to slate as well as those who have been inflated for awhile.

The first big pitfall of implementation, and one could probably say a big pitfall across the board in a lot of different industries. It is saying the phrase it's how we've always done it, so whether you would be implementing into slate from another system or maybe from a slightly more antiquated paper based application system or a combination of the two just because it's how it is currently set up does not mean that that's how we want it to be set up in the future.

So taking a step back and saying what are the pain points, whether that's from the student experience, whether that's from the cleanliness of the data that you're collecting, there are lots of different angles to say. Did we have to build it this way? Because the system that we were in had limitations? Or have we just grown as an institution since we implemented that?

Now another big piece, as you're asking those questions is to have the right people in the conversation for those both kind of explorers, where conversations as well as actually making the decision to potentially collect information differently, change a process. So making sure that you have the people who have both the institutional knowledge as well as the power to say yes, we're good with making these changes is really important to make sure that you're staying on track with the timeline of your project.

As well.

This is really the pitfall that we're going to kind of focus on in the conversation today, so not positioning your instance for the future, essentially wanting to have that wider scope and saying not only is this going to work for us right now, but it will work for us in the future as well, so wanting to grow the instance, wanting to expand things, making sure that it's sustainable. There are some really cool things that you can build out in slate, but you also need to know how to maintain it.

We always like to tell our partner schools that if we continue working with you, we want it to be because you want to work with us, not because we've built something so complicated that you're not sure how to update it yourself. So it really is that partnership to build things out together and to figure out what the best solution is for your instance.

Now whenever we mention this, the most common question that we get is how am I supposed to know how to position myself for growth? I'm new to sleep, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing or not doing as we're as we're implementing our instance. So as you might guess, that's where we come in. So all of us have higher Ed background. So honestly, some of these pitfalls are from her own experiences having been in the positions that a lot of you joining the webinar or watching the recording art in so saying, man, we really wish we would have done it.

This way, hindsight right? So kind of giving you that that wider perspective. Or maybe it's not quite as black and white. Maybe it's just having a conversation to say. Here are some reasons why you might want to do it this way. Here are some cons to doing it this way and This is why your other option might be a little bit easier. And walking through that conversation together.

So we're going to go through some example pitfalls. Uhm, some of these are pretty simple, but really important things to keep in mind as you're building an instance, making sure you have both a strong and a clean foundation when you're building out that instance.

So wanting to make things be system fields when they really don't need to be system fields. So if we're not going to need your height for your graduation gown in the system, let's just keep that a form field. There's no reason to have this be a system field.

Naming things strategically will get into the naming of folder ring later on, but naming the actual fields themselves so you can see in this example, this is a great example. This is the green check mark thumbs up example. So this example is actually really clear both in the scope of the field, so we can clearly see what is an app slope field and what does that person scope field as well as the group. So you might be able to infer from this that this is a shared instance that this is a.

Screenshot from so being able to clearly see this is an app UG academic program field versus my grad program field or my accepted academic program field. You can see we've got those two app scoped fields there.

I'm going to piggyback off of this example and use it twice, so this is the exact same screenshot here, but what we're focusing on is that prompt list, so this is a great example to use this same prompt list when you can, so we're all pulling from the academic programs that this school has to offer. There's no reason to have a different prompt list for each of these three fields we were working with the school and they said we didn't even know you could do that. We didn't know you could share prompt lists, so keeping things clean as possible so you don't have as many places.

To update when there are program changes.

Don't create what's already been created for you, so there are a lot of customized slate fields you can. Standard fields. You can certainly customize them if you need to, but there's no need to recreate your citizenship or other biographical fields that are already created within Slate, so this knowledge Base article is a really great place to be as you're going through your fields list and determining what you need to add and what is already out of the box for you.

This next one is kind of more to keep in mind for those who have been in their instance for longer, so hopefully we're not creating any fields in the beginning that we don't plan on using anywhere. This is typically more after you've been in your instance for a while, and things may have changed, so this is potentially a future use slide to be able to reference some different standard queries, field searches, those sorts of things to be able to go through and say, you know we're not using this anywhere. This isn't storing any data.

Kind of going through and doing that more audit type of cleanup.

The big one that we're going to kind of dive into some tips with a pitfall is not learning or implementing configurable joins more and more. There are some really cool things and more places inflate. You know it's been a few months by adding configurable joints to forms. There are lots of different places where you're going to unleash the power of the data that you have inflate. If you use configurable joints.

Now, I also couldn't resist kind of including some of the tips that really have schools kind of light up when we are walking through an implementation with them of Oh my gosh, this is so cool that slate can fill in the blank. So I wanted to include some of the things that we see our partner schools get really excited about and one of them is pretty simple, but it really can save a lot of time as you're assigning decision codes or monitoring queries for any.

Errors using the estimate output feature within queries. So if you have, you know a number of decision assignment queries, but maybe you don't have a student fall into that every single day when you're running those queries so you can see in this example we have an accelerated nursing program decision release query. There are zero records in that query, so we don't actually have to click into that to see there is euro records. Or, as I mentioned, if you're doing some error monitoring, maybe you just want to take a quick look.

And say great that dozen list of queries all has zero students in them. I can move on. We're good to go.

Make configurable joints easier for beginners to use and save yourself from duplicating work. So as I mentioned, this is kind of my my broken record tip with inflate.

Build out complex filters and exports within the CONFERABLE joins query library. So essentially it's like creating your own prebuilt filters and exports as long as you're using this same base. So this example here is our configurable joins app base and we're calculating that the.

T super sports within here, so I think it's fair to say this is probably not an export that most you know, regular slate users are going to be able to just pull out of thin air, so make this as a query library list. You can do your share permissions just like you can with in a lot of other places within Slate.

The cool thing about this also is we built a an export that was looking at students based off of rating. You know, greater than a 10. Whatever this scale is when you go to pull that into a query, you can actually edit. No, actually want to look at anyone who has an 8 or higher and you're not going to be changing anything that's in this query library, so you can kind of start that that template and then you can edit it as you pull it into that query, but you don't have to.

Know how to build it from scratch.

Another place that I love to implement configurable joins is your main dashboard. So some schools still like to keep everything that is person scoped really separate from everything that is app scoped in terms of our dashboards. But now that configurable joins exist. We don't have to keep them separate, so maybe if a school determines that once a student is an applicant we don't really want to see their inquiry, program of study or entry term, we want to look at whatever their rank one app is.

I was just discussing with the school the other day that they actually allow multiple applications to the same round, so they're not just looking at rank one. If a student has two applications in an active round, they would actually want to see both of those, so it's whatever your institution determines is relevant. But essentially saying, you know the example liquid markup here. Basically, if you don't have an entry term for an application, then we're going to show your person scope entry term. Otherwise, if you have an app entry term.

That's what we want to see so that front end user maybe that student worker or a counselor who hasn't really fully grasped the difference between ranks and scopes yet, just sees kind of whatever that most relevant information is for that record.

I'm also not going to talk about dashboards without talking about color coding. Anyone who works with me knows that that is one of the fun things that I like to do on dashboards. I. I know there was a webinar awhile ago that talked through existences with hex codes and I love using this on dashboards. Basically to say the left side will show whatever is designated as the graduate color and once again we're looking at the person student type if they don't have an app student type, but if they do have an app student type, then we're going to be looking at.

Their app rank one student type, so the left side would be for graduate and then the right side is going to be for undergraduates. We've got that quick visual color code for those dashboards.

Last part with dashboards that all talk about with configurable joins. It actually makes it so simple to pull in account in configurable joins of all of the events that a student has either registered for or attended, or you know all registration statuses. So if you do a join to form responses and you choose all forms and events and then you joined to the form, you can narrow it down to either just event or event and schedule or whatever your preferences.

So the left hand side you can see that we're not looking at registration status and then this right hand side you can see that we're looking at events attended, so I'll just skip back here to my dashboard so you can see this example. Now I do have a little bit of liquid markup in the back up, so it's skipping any of the no shows if they haven't no showed, so it just keeps it a little bit more clean. But the great thing about doing it through this method is you're not having to specify either the folder or the template for those events.

So this is completely Evergreen as you grow and add more events in different templates, you're not having to update this. This will stay accurate forever.

Now I'm going to pass it back to my colleague Laura, and she's going to talk about. Once you have your strong foundation for implementing how we're going to go through and grow our instance.

Thank you Emma. Appreciate that. So now that we've talked about the build or implementing, I'm going to cover those pitfalls that we commonly see within deliver and ways to alleviate that graph. The gap when we're growing our instance. So our first pitfall is actually going to cover the transition really nicely because it talks about build, but also a little bit about growth as well too.

So creating a detailed cycle prep strategy, but for excluding your past and future communication in that plan.

So when we're thinking about campaign strategy for the year, it's really good to create a campaign checklist even if it's communication that you've already created this past year. Looking at it and growing it for the future. So whether this is new campaign or an old campaign really looking at these these items and really again enhancing growing that communication. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is going to be audience. So who are you communicating to?

It's easy to want and see the need for every part of the funnel and student type to want to be communicated with. With robust segmented personalized messaging, right? You may not have the resources available. This may not be feasible though, so really understanding your top priority who you want to communicate to or this is a great place you know for underscore to come in and partner with you on those campaigns that you really see is top priority, but you may not have the resources available at the time, but looking at that audience within Slate

solidifying your entry terms in student type and really understanding your audience and who you're trying to engage with.

Once you know who you want to communicate to, then discussing action, what do you want this audience to do so that CTA that call to action? Do you want them to inquire? Apply visit. It's probably going to be a mix of these things, and once you determine that that's been really going to help build out that messaging for you.

Next is timeline. This could be a pitfall of its own, and I like that Emma mentioned that we've all had experience on the other side of things and and knowing that the pitfalls that we've we've fallen into right and this is one of them where I think about any messaging that I've had that's been running on going until suspended. You know, we really should think about timelines when we create campaigns. So what is the start and end date for a campaign that you want want to create? If you have that timeline in place?

This really sets you up nicely for a camping refresh, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but since we've already addressed audience and you determine entry terms, this should be very easy to determine because those entry terms are really going to guide you in this decision.

Personalization I feel like this is continuing to grow and grow as a topic in campaigns as we see more opportunities to really engage students in messaging, that really means something to them and and is personalized to them. So are there opportunities for personalization within the message messaging that you're creating? So whether you want to create specific messaging for those students who are in your backyard versus those who are maybe a little bit further away, out of state.

Perhaps you want to do some more specific academic messaging using an academic interest field and bringing in that academic school or division to create content blocks to talk about that division or academic school a little bit more? Or using Carnegie darts. This is a great thing that we since our merger, we've been incorporating more and more within communication, building communication with darts involved in them, and for those of you who don't know what darts are they, our student persona is unique.

To your institution, which are created through Carnegie through a combination of qualitative research and enrollment data, and it's really neat reveals where your students are matriculate ING, who your students are that are matriculate ING from where, why, and what these students need to hear to increase conversion.

And finally consolidation. So once you have all of these, figure it out. Can you consolidate? Is there overlap? So utilizing again segmentation, like content blocks, liquid markup or conditional logic to be able to consolidate, cut down and messages and communicate more effectively. Great example of this is international versus domestic students, so there might be certain messages that make sense for both of them to hear overall for those two populations. But maybe you have an affordability message and you want to communicate.

The FASFA to domestic students, but you want to communicate international scholarships to those international students. So this is a great way to consolidate a campaign but still keep it personalized for the different student types.

And then, once that's done, once you've figured out these different components, you have a game plan, a campaign strategy. You can create something like a communication flow. This is something that our account management project management does, and it's so helpful involves a variety of different items of the campaign that helped us build out messaging. So potential launch date once you know, say you have an admitted student campaign that you want to launch in December, perhaps so you have your launch date.

And then if it's running a drip marketing campaign running on time stamp days, what day is the initial send of each mailing and what is the time stamp day, so you know that ahead of time? What is the subject line or topic of that email? And then is there anything else to consider for the specific mailings? Certain notes, like plain text versus templated? Maybe you have a counselor mailing as part of that campaign that you want to use as a plain text mail instead of templating. Maybe you want to include segmentation in a certain mailing.

Do you put a note of that? Or perhaps it is very date specific and you only run a run that mailing until a specific date rather than the whole campaign length.

And then something to do too. If you're a really visual person, make yourself your own yearly campaign calendar so that you can help. Plan ahead again for those campaign refreshes.

Alright, so I've said campaign refresh a couple times already, so now we're going to jump into that. So our second pitfall is really speaking to that, so building out of convenience in the moment.

No, you'll have to reorganize in the future.

This is something again that I've, you know, been guilty of in the in the past. I just need to make a quick deliver folder or I need to create a quick rule, but really planning this out is really great way to continue to grow your delivery module and and update those existing communication assets that you have, so that's that's where we're going to fill in that gap by first starting rather than recreating. But updating those communication assets. So rules and populations are a great place to begin, and I have an example.

Here that I want to show you all and I have a specific rule in specific population that use within application generation campaign. So for the rule I'm going to name this term specific so that I know every year I need to update this so this specific rule out here is set to 22 underscore application generation. So this is again a reminder to tell me each year as I look at that rule. I know that I need to update it for the next year for application generation. So next year I name it.

That 223 underscore application generation, then the population I'm going to keep it more general. I'm going to use it as a placeholder as a bucket for that rule each year, so creating a very general one so that I don't clutter up my instance if I created a population name for every single year for every single campaign. So I said 23 underscore application generation 24. I'm just continuing the clutter. My instance instead of creating a little bit more of a streamlined process.

And then once the messages are done running for that year, once they're completed again, the way to refresh this, you set that rule to inactive. So right now I have my certain rule to enact it. I'm going to retroactive refresh on an inactive rule. It's going to pull everyone out of the population, and then I will update the rule. So for this one I all I would need to do is update that entry term.

And then make it active and retroactive refresh and it's going to pull the right students into that population so that I can then communicate with them. Now coming into the next year.

If you are one of our partner institutions and you've worked with me on delivered before, you know that I love a good deliver folder restructure, so making making your deliver folders work for you. It's critical to keep your instance clean and also it really helps out worth reporting, so the two examples that I have here are a restructure that I presented to a partner institution, so making that primary folder funnel base with some specific folders as well some specialized.

Folders and then subfolders make them a little bit more specific, so really looking at this seeing these primary folders you'll see here I have an admits folder prospects increase, so again based off of that funnel and then our secondary folders for admits. I have first year and transfer as my sub folder, but then for prospects I have senior and junior because I'm potentially in that system. I only had a senior and junior campaign that I wanted to report on and then if I continue to build that I could put underneath that.

Sophomore freshman and continue to grow those subfolders.

And then for events and other items you can, you know be be as general as possible so that you can fit multiple mailings into those subfolders. Some tips as well to avoid using acronyms.

No, from experience I've come into a new institution. I don't know what the acronyms mean right away, so keeping staying away from that just so that you can be clear on what messaging is falling into those, deliver folders and then also stay in waste from specific staff names you know due to turnover, then you're going to have to either move or archive mailings, and that's always you know an additional step for you. So trying to put them in a more general, potentially funnel based structure.

And if you are looking to restructure your deliver folder using batch management and delivered to update that, and if you've never used this before, it's so helpful at such a game changer. So looking at these two screenshots I have for you, it's super simple if you just control click, you'll see a little cogwheel show up right next to new mailing and deliver and then you can select as many mailings as you want to move over or rename. There's actually a ton of actions.

Options underneath that. So if you go to action you can also select archive and you can archive the mailings that you need to. But there's also the action of folder and this action you can move them to either a new primary or a new secondary folder.

So keeping clean deliver folder structure really helps alleviate time spent updating reports, so I've got a report here that's a perfect example of this. Our campaign performance metrics reports that we build these are just to show us you know, how did a campaign, how did it perform during the year? So unique opens and clicks and showing that those click and open rates as well too. So if I have clean folder structure then I don't even have to update this report year to year. If I have the current mailings in underscore application generation.

Each year, no changes need to be made. Just once my campaign start running. This will be updated as well too.

Then if you have those reports that are perfectly updated young to do anything with them, you can have a little bit of fun. Add additional exports for some additional data. I'm going to go actually back to Carnegie Darts. Something cool this year that we did. I had an additional export to a couple of my campaign performance metrics reports so we could see how the different student personas interacted with the different mailings, and it's given us such neat insight and really has helped us as far as.

Bring our mailing in that specific campaign.

Another report that you can keep a little bit more simple and that will help if you have that clean folder structure is camping conversion reports. So when we look at this, this campaign really helps to see how your different campaigns are contributing. Contributing to your overall numbers. So again, keeping that deliver folder for the report filter. That's going to be your overall filter, but potentially another tip would be using round key instead of round. If you have at. This works for your institution, obviously.

So having round key you don't have to update that you could just keep that instead of having to update round each year.

And then another thing that could be really neat if you had a campaign that ran for this year and he wanted to see year to date metrics, copying this data and adding instead of applications created date which I have right here, you could do less than or equal to today minus one year to see how is my campaign performing this year versus how it's performing last year and using that data to grow your mailings for our your campaigns year to year.

And that leads into my last pitfall, which is lacking detailed reporting for deliver.

Which is causing you to refresh your campaigns without using data driven decisions. So bring it full circle to data so you've built some campaigns and deliver and hopefully this is this is shown. You kind of a few things that you can do, but once you build a few campaigns, give yourself some kudos. You know you don't have to rebuild each year. You can use data to enhance those campaigns and and I'm talking about enhancement a little bit and I'll leave it really nicely into all the really amazing things that Emily is going to talk about.

In just a second, but gathering the right data is really going to help you with those campaign refreshes every year. So we've already talked about performance and conversion metrics. But also, we're looking to your year to date funnel. Every instance that I'm in, I know that people have their all of our clients have their year to date, funnels built out, and those are really great to look to see. Where are the holes in your communication. So not only just looking to those specific within deliver, but definitely the year to date. 'cause then you can see.

OK, maybe our inquiry to applicant conversion rate is great, but we're seeking a really low submission rate this year. Or maybe our completion rate is lower than we wanted to, so potentially we need an application complete shame campaign next year that we didn't have this year. Also, using things like AB testing to be able to try out some new features and see if they actually will affect and have significance on your open or click rates.

So once you do all of that again, enhancing so using that information, whether it's additional personalization within your messaging, potentially. Maybe you're adjusting that con flow and that could be a number of things. Maybe it's changing the subject line because you realize an AB test that one with emoji actually performed better than one without. Or maybe you had a mailing that was towards the end of your campaign. Maybe it was email number 10 and it had an incredible opening click rate. May be moving that.

A little bit earlier into the calm flow so that you can engage students earlier and see if that has an effect on conversion. Or maybe again, you realize that you need a different campaign that perhaps perhaps you want to build a mini campaign, for example to like something based off of ping, where you can really enhance that and again grow those touch points to be able to engage students across the funnel.

Alright, so now that I've talked about growth, I am going to pass it over to Emily to talk a little bit more about how we can enhance.

Thank you.

Thank you, Laura. That was wonderful and such a great segue so could not ask for more. I am going to be talking about how to enhance slate, so we're coming from a place where maybe you've implemented your minimum viable product. Maybe you've even been in slate for a few years and you're just looking to push that envelope and really maximize the investment that you've made in this technical tool. And so I have a couple of pitfalls.

For when you're at that stage and you're looking at what the next step is, so my first enhancement pitfall is designing an impactful student experience, but forgetting to design an effective internal process. So what do I mean by that? Obviously we're all here in the enrollment management space or some adjacent space, and most likely our primary focus is going to be the students that student centric philosophy is.

A beautiful thing and it powers so much of what we do in this industry, but I think a lot of times we can build out that experience and then stop there now. I would encourage you to consider a very important second focus and that would be that administrative internal processing. So how do we build things that don't just impact our students positively but build a process that is sustainable and effective for our staff as well? And the more that our staff?

Can do the more bandwidth they have, the more of a personalized and impactful added value they can bring to the parts of the process that can't be streamlined. So the first idea here is to build your process into your assets. Most of the out of the box functionality that we see in Slate is usually usually talked about in terms of again that student focus so forms and events are really built with the focus on.

What do we need from the students? What do the students need from us, and how do we deliver something that accomplishes that task? But I encourage you to also consider how do we use this tool that students are already engaging in as leverage for us to have a process that works a little bit more smoothly. So I'll go into more detail on that. In a moment. The second is to automate everything you can. I know that this is sometimes.

A blind spot for a lot of partner institutions because we're so used to the processes we have, Emma touched on that perfectly in her section. This is how we've always done it, and I think there's a lot that we can take for granted in our processes that that we just assume have to be done, because that's how it's always been. But Slate has so many powerful tools and powerful data points that can be used to work smarter.

Not harder, so that's a great thing to keep in mind as you were building out your process. And the last is to consider building assets specifically for staff. So like I said, we have these out of the box functionality's forms events all built to collect data to collect registrations, and again, we're usually implementing those for students, but the functionality is still there to be used internally as well.

So instead of collecting things in Outlook or Google or in your brain or on notes in a meeting, slate has the availability of function to now collect that all internally in a centralized place. And so I do encourage you to think creatively about how you can use this tool that you already have to enhance other areas of your process that might not be directly student facing.

So the first one I'm going to dive into is building process into your assets so we all know that internal fields exist and a lot of times in my partner institutions or even in my own experience there's there, but we forget about them, and so I would encourage you to take another look at how these internal fields can be used to your advantage. So here I have an example form where in this form it might be embedded in a student portal, a status portal, etc.

Come and there is an option to request a major change, so a program major change so a student applies. Maybe they are a bio major and they want to change to philosophy. They fill out this form and they request that major. Now one of the added benefits of slate is that instead of delivering you what it thinks you want, you want, it's giving you the opportunity to make these processes both external and internal completely.

A personalized and specific to your institution. So let's say that you work at an institution where a major change is something that needs to be assessed before it can be approved. Maybe there are prerequisites, or there's prep work that needs to happen in order for them to be eligible to even apply to that major. Maybe there are some majors that have slightly different application requirements, and therefore you can't just switch into them.

At.

You're going to want to make sure that you have a process in place to not only collect these requests, which this this late form so well does, but you also then want to have a process in place to process them, and so here we see some internal fields we have. We have status of the change request itself, some notes if you want to give some context to this request, maybe it's been reviewed, but it needs to go to a specialty committee for.

Additional comments, maybe there's a follow up that needs to happen with the student that gives you the possibility of collecting that data and hosting it centrally, and then also completed by. So if you want to know exactly who set this request to approved now instead of having to guess or having to keep a running tally, you now can collect that data in Slate. Maybe for your process you want to assign this to someone again.

As internal.

Field can be used to do that.

So one of the things I want to note. Again, Emma brought this up and it is such a good point. We want to make sure that we are using a form field whenever that is appropriate. So in this case we don't need this request to be on their record. We want to process it and then the decision would be posted to their record and we also don't want to automatically update their major. So this definitely needs to be a form field. And so here there's no system field value we can give it and.

Export key that makes sense to us and then the prompt list again. This is the beauty of slate. This can be as molecular as you need it to be for your process. If there are multiple stages that this needs to go through in order to be approved or denied, you can build in steps that exactly correlate to what your process is. And then of course we have internal only. That's very important. Of course you do not want this to be showing to your student. You want to make sure that this is.

In fact, only viewable from the administrative access side of the form, so those are the key things to note when you are configuring internal fields on the other thing you can do, like I said, was to also have a completed by or an assigned to field that corresponds with a staff member. So what I did here what you can see that is highlighted. We have all of the staff member names. These are all the users in our database, but then we have this up carrot.

So if you're familiar with prompt lists and system prompts versus non system prompts that up carrot is essentially indicating to us that everything to the left of the up carrot is what we're going to see in the dropdown list. Everything to the right of the up carrot is what is actually being stored in the table. So whenever we're using a user prompt list the identity of that table is the user name of the user. So if I were to build later down the line.

A user scoped portal where all of the assets related to that user are individualized and personalized. In that view. I would then be able to use a configurable joint query, a comparison filter to say the completed by equals the portal identity and because we are collecting that username, it's going to match the identity as it exists in the user table. So that's like Slate two or 3.0. So if you're not.

Following that, don't worry if you are interested in an asset like that, but it's a little bit out of your depth. Let us know. Definitely something we can help you with, but it just leads you to the opportunity to really grow your instance in in scalable ways. If you're using data that is easily transferable. So that's just something to keep in mind is like how you collect this data is going to determine how flexible.

It's going to be in the future if it matches criteria that you're going to want later, so you might be scratching your head and thinking why. Why go through this process? You know why, not just have a Google form?

Uh, there's a couple of really exciting reasons.

One is that by having this in slate by building internal fields that are standardized, you're streamlining this process and you're also making sure that it is the same for every single student, and this kind of goes back to that point I made earlier where we often take for granted some of the parts of our process that have just always been that way. Things that are in our outlook, things that are in just our brains, things that we know and we hold as an intellectual capital.

But might not necessarily consider how to make that more more transferable to others, and so having this form and all of its pieces and stages in slate documents it and puts it in a place a centralized location where not only is there historical record of it, but it is standardized, and it's also centrally available to a larger group of staff. So instead of having to be on the same shared.

Well, that these requests are going to now. Anyone with access can go in see this historical record of submissions. See where it's at in the process, and be able to act upon those requests if need be.

Uhm, so here the big added value is to have this molecular breakdown of where something is in the process that you have set up for your institution. So rather than again having an email inbox where these are coming in and you have to kind of note who's assigned to it, you need to know when it's been approved and have some sort of external process to make sure you're not doubling up on efforts now. It's all in one centralized place, we know.

It's it has been reviewed. It hasn't been reviewed. It has a decision. So all of these metadata points are helping us make sure that we aren't duplicating efforts so that there's not two staff trying to work on the same request, etc.

So again, I I mentioned this earlier, but the beauty of slate is that it's so customizable, so I can say I want to know whether or not someone has looked at this or not. I you know, maybe someone looked at this and approved it, but they need to go into the SES and actually make that change, or they need to go into slate and change the record. So rather than having a staff member mistakenly come in and start working on something that's already been decided or already been viewed, we now can indicate to everyone who has.

Access to this instance. Hey, don't worry about this one. It's already been under review. Why don't you work on one that is not yet reviewed, and so that helps streamline the process? Likewise, it's very hard to tell without these very specific.

Stages to know if something has changed. The changelog is not quite that molecular yet, so by having updated statuses we know OK this was approved. It's since been denied or even we approved this. We sent the message to let the student know, but we had to go back in and change something else and we don't want to trigger that communication and I'll get to that in a second with automation. But updated is another section of the statuses that can be really helpful.

And then of course, this approved send email denied to send email. What is that? All caps send email mean well along with the added contacts that you have for your process. You now also have a data point that can be a trigger for automations. So instead of having to continually follow up with students to let them know hello, yes we have received your request. It has been accepted. It has been denied. Now we have this.

Beautiful datapoint telling us this request is ready to be responded to and we know what the response is which then positions us really well to send an automated communication. So just like any other triggered communication with a form or event, you can go to the communications tab and configure a mailing here. Of course the the trigger is going to be upon update, so obviously the student has to have submitted this form in order for us to have changed the status.

So it will be an update and then the second thing that we want to make sure we do is admin entry only. So what this means is if the student goes in and changes, they're not going to get a message. That seems like it's from us telling them that they've been. You know that they've been accepted. Their request has been accepted or denied. What we really want is to make sure that this is an update that is coming from the administrative side.

Uhm, but we do need to go one step further and make sure that not only has it been approved from the administrative side, but that it does exist in that send email status. So come upon update is one of the triggered mailings that allows edit conditions so you can see here on the right side if we click edit conditions it gives us configurable joins if it is implemented in your instance for forms and events and I can now create a filter that says only send.

This mailing, if it is also in approved, send email so this is where having the correct prompts are great because if I were to send this email and then go back in and maybe change the notes section, technically that is an update from the admin side and the status if not changed would be in send email. So we want to make sure that we would then be using the updated approve no email so we know OK the email was sent. We don't want to send.

Another one there has been another update to this record, so we're going to use the updated approved which basically tells us the same thing, but because it's a separate status, will not trigger another email. So just a recap, the criteria to send an automated email like this would be the mailing settings are upon update and admin only, and then we add a message condition that says status in approved send email or whatever status makes sense for the message.

And the process that you want to use this for.

So not only is this one less email for your staff to send, it's more than one less email, 'cause obviously this would be multiplied by however many requests you need to respond to, but the secondary benefit of this is that one you can send a branded message. It looks official, it is official. It's coming from your email account. It has your branding on it, and another great benefit to this is that it's standardized.

So rather than spending your time training and doing quality assurance to make sure that your frontline staff is giving the same answer and the same information every time they're addressing a request like this, you don't have to worry about that because it is built into the triggered mailing, so it is automatically going to be a consistent informational resource for every student that receives it, and you can use all of the merge fields that you would normally use in a delivered campaign, so this can be still.

A very highly personalized message that is controlled from a centralized location.

Beyond even that, we also have data points that can help us prioritize. So for instance, in this theoretical world where we have this request form, slate knows when it's been submitted, when every form has been submitted and Slate knows when every what today's date is so it can compare the two and tell us how long has this request been unfulfilled. So now we can start to get an even more detailed.

Understanding of the health of this process and how well we are.

Fulfilling the requests that are coming in. So this is a pretty simple formula. It's a date diff and then it's going to give us the day and the differential between the submitted date and the system current date and calculate that for us. Of course we don't really want to include in this anything that has been resolved since it's no longer open, so we're going to put, not in and then the statuses that indicate that it has been resolved. For us this is approved or denied.

Any approved or denied status and once we do this we get this beautiful number that is in our custom columns that not only can tell us how long we've been, something has been opened, but also it can sort. So that's an amazing asset to have. So when my staff go in here, they don't have to. You know. Click through to find what is the oldest one, but don't show me ones that have already been closed. I now can use this metric that we made.

Using data points available to us to prioritize and and beyond that. If you're a manager, it can get even more detailed. So of course with the full power of queries and reports we have the ability to look at this metric with a lot of other cross references, like what is the exact progress status, who approved it? If you do use an assignment structure, you could even say how many are still open.

That have already been assigned to, let's say, Emily. What is the average number of days that there are open requests assigned to Emily? So this is giving you a whole new world of data to do the work that you have been doing. But just do it better.

Uhm, and that kind of leads me into the last piece. There are actually two pitfalls, but this piece really focuses on portals, so I I talked about the excitement of having this super robust tool with customizable data points that can really molecularly reflect what your internal processes and the the flip side of that coin is that we have. This amazing tool called portals where we can take that customized.

Data on the back end and build a completely customized front end, and so we can pull that data in however we want and make it look and feel and behave exactly how we want it to. And that is the key. It's like the yin and Yang of slate of customization to put those two things together in a well strategized format is lepido resistance for slate.

If you can do that, you have reached really the pinnacle of what slate can do, and so under under utilizing portals is a very common enhancement pitfall. There are so many different use cases I mentioned one earlier staff or internal portals. This is where you can take assets from all different modules and slate forms. Internal forms. Student facing forms that have the user or a field associated with the user and you can put them all in one place.

So that your staff doesn't have to track those down individually in all of those different modules, you can have queries that find discrepancies in the way their their events are living in your folder structure and present those to them for cleaning. So there's just a whole endless.

List of possibilities that you can implement a staff or internal form internal portal. Excuse me for.

Virtual events and conferences. So you can use this portal to add an even more engaging interface for those virtual events. I know we're transitioning slowly, but surely back into in person, but there is an argument for that added value of virtual events. I think they're going to continue to be relevant, and so when you have a conference or virtual event, you can now build an experience along with it. You can have your event schedule you can have.

Titles of Sessions, BIOS of speakers. I've even made a conference portal that had a report and had graphs and charts about the different demographics of the students who had signed into the conference portal. So the the students get kind of an idea of those other virtual participants that they're sharing that digital space with.

External departments, if you don't want to give full access to an external department, but they have a legitimate business need to see data in your instance. A perfect way to do that is to give them portal access and to display that data in the portal parents. We know that they are kind of sometimes the forgotten population, but this is a great way to segment your information specifically for that parent population and give them information.

And messaging about your institution in a place that's just for them personalized viewbook. We've done this for a partner institution where we basically take all of that data. We're collecting about the student, and we put it to good work. And so the portal gives us the opportunity to make a fully developed web interface that takes that data and gives them an experience that matches what their interests or their demographics are. Executive reporting very similar to external departments.

If you have an AVP that needs to know up-to-date statistics and you don't want to require them to log in and access the query, or maybe you know they need to be able to answer a question in a meeting and a static emailed report will not do making a portal that is live and will refresh every time that browser is refreshed is a great asset for any entity on the campus that needs or wants access to data, but it's not appropriate.

To make them go search for that in your instance we have net price calculator, something that the underscore team also provides. So that's a personalized interface that takes your financial aid process and all of the scholarships and financial resources that your specific institution has and turns it into an interactive form that will then provide a calculation for what the cost of attendance is specific to your school and then.

The last thing that I'm going to really run through 'cause I know we're at time here, is putting everything into the portal, but not planning and strategy. So something to just keep in mind when you are making a portal, it's tempting to have scope creep and want to just put everything in there. We know that there is a finite amount of attention that any audience member has in a virtual space and then a physical one as well, but especially virtual, so make sure that you are speaking to the right audience you are.

Making the actions that you want them to take very clear and easy and you are making sure that the attention that you need them to have is being prioritized appropriately.

And then one that gets overlooked a lot is access. So making sure that this is accessible 88 compliance is increasingly more important, especially in the higher Ed space. So making sure that it's 88 compliant, that is something that our team always does for any portal that we make and last is again, that that administrative piece making sure your portal is also working for you, so compromising where you need to on that finite amount of attention to both get them the information they need, but also to facilitate.

Your processes in an effective way.

So if you're still here, thank you so much. I know it is exactly the hour, so thanks for being with us as a recap, these are some of the topics that we've covered implementation, growing and enhancing. If you do have any questions, screenshot this screen. It has all of our contact information and you're more than welcome to send us an email. Ask us a question.

Sorry, we were not able to get to all of the questions in the chat, but it looks like my colleagues were able to answer quite a few of them, so that's great and we look forward to hopefully working with some of you in the future.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you.