Reflections on Slate Summit 2024
Erin Gore, vice president for client technology
Slate Summit 2024 in Chicago featured more than 4,500 attendees and 149 presenters. Additionally, this year marked our largest pre-Summit RHB Academy training to date, with 150 Slate users from more than 70 institutions.
If that wasn’t enough, we got to celebrate the success of our friends at Mississippi State University for winning the Slate Icon Award for Best External Portal along with our very own John Michael Cuccia winning a Slate Icon Award for Best Slate Community Contributor.
Our expert team took the stage five times with our clients to present on several topics, including innovative approaches to portal design, tips for creating meaningful student and campus visit experiences, recommendations for structuring a Slate team and advice for transforming student success processes and outcomes in Slate. Like you, we know it’s impossible to remember everything you heard or learned at Summit, so we put together a recap of RHB Academy and our Summit presentations.
If you have questions or want to chat about something that inspired you at Summit and Academy, don’t hesitate to reach out.
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Abby Molen, senior technology consultant
RHB Academy highlights
The third annual RHB Academy in advance of Slate Summit 2024 covered a range of topics from portals to program datasets, all with a shared theme of helping users improve their work with the use of Configurable Joins. Here are some of our favorite takeaways:
Don’t sleep on Datasets and Entities. For graduate schools or larger undergraduate institutions that manage a broad portfolio of academic programs, a custom dataset can help wrangle disparate admission requirements and reduce the amount of logic in a Slate application. We reviewed how to use independent subqueries to create 1:1 relationships between student applications and the matching program record, allowing for use of program dataset filters inside application logic; this means you can reduce the amount of conditional logic items needed to manage different settings in your application. If you add entities to list term-specific deadlines and checklist requirements, you can further unlock the power of decentralized program management in Slate.
Solutions begin outside of Slate. In our Roadmap to Reporting session we discussed how defining a research question and end-user behavior can help with planning the layout and query bases needed for a report before you begin construction. Later, in Automation Troubleshooting and Rule Hygiene, our team reviewed recommendations for maintaining a streamlined Slate database and revealed some of the most common findings from our diagnostic and auditing projects. Both sessions highlighted the need to understand the intended capabilities and natural limitations of Slate tools before embarking on a new project or design; prior planning prevents poor performance, and sketching out a design before construction ultimately saves time and prevents frustration.
Customization is key. Our instructors highlighted ways to create more coherent experiences for students, from personalizing the campus visit experience to creating dynamic communications; but don’t forget about customizing the experience for your users. One major theme throughout the sessions was ensuring Slate is configured in a way that allows your team to do their best work. By addressing staff pain points, reducing clicks, consolidating objects and creating custom displays, Slate administrators can increase satisfaction with the system and reduce their own maintenance load.
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Dom Rozzi, senior technology consultant
Innovative Approaches to Portal Design
Sometimes, simple is better. This is what we found in our discussion and Slate Summit presentation on Innovative Approaches to Portal Design. At the onset of two particular conversations, the need was clear: find a way to provide flexible and functional design options for building portals and landing pages in a way that did not require a high-level understanding of website design for institutional users.
Through projects with our good friends at Portland State University and Skidmore College, we quickly discovered limitations familiar to an institution’s admission and marketing office: not enough hands or time, not enough resources and limited knowledge of how to design a beautiful portal. Still, there was a need, so we found a way: the Portal Parts Library.
This innovation, fully built within the confines of Slate, affords both PSU and Skidmore teams a drag and drop set of tools for which they can build beautiful institution-branded portals. The result: Portland State was able to fully replace a different tool and have more accurate, real-time information on marketing efforts, while Skidmore has been able to refocus their time on the important work in their office instead of spending hours trying to figure out how to format that one section in their portal to include a button.
What we learned is that when portal design and function come together, beautiful and memorable user experiences can be constructed. Consistently and continuously delivering this branded experience to your constituents or students builds your brand identity and enhances affinity to your institution. All of this can come from some simple, yet versatile tools in your portal arsenal which will elevate your portal game!
As the presentation concluded the summary slide said it best: Creative thinking + clear goals + [a little design help] = ELEVATED portals.
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Megan Miller, senior technology consultant
Be Known: Transforming Student Success Processes and Outcomes with Slate
Student Success was a hot topic at this year’s Summit; we heard from many institutions exploring opportunities to leverage the Slate technology they already know and love in ways that will improve experiences for their enrolled students, faculty and staff. Launching Student Success in Slate can be a massive undertaking that requires collaboration with numerous stakeholders, consideration of many enterprise systems, development of a suite of integrations and construction of a database structure that fully reflects the nuance of an enrolled student’s journey from day one to degree.
In Be Known: Transforming Student Success Processes and Outcomes with Slate, we unpacked Seattle University’s Slate for Student Success implementation project to identify the elements that contribute to a successful database launch. Our discussion highlighted crucial steps that schools should take as they prepare for and undergo the adoption of a Student Success instance. Key takeaways included:
Clearly define the reasoning and goals behind your implementation project. Before provisioning your new Student Success database (or repurposing an existing database), articulate your institution’s framework for student success. What are your current challenges and institutional priorities? How does your university’s strategic plan impact your approach to student success? What are the underlying structures driving current processes and patterns, and what needs to change?
In our session, James Miller, Seattle University’s Associate Vice Provost and Dean of Admission, described how Seattle U used the answers to these questions to develop their “postcard from the future”—a vision of how they hoped to manage and guide student success moving forward in Slate. This vision statement served as the impetus for their Slate for Student Success initiative and was relentlessly repeated throughout the launch and execution of their implementation project.
Start by fully exploring the context of Student Success at your institution. Seattle University began their implementation project with a readiness assessment and process analysis, where they engaged with RHB to explore the current student success landscape and identify the new opportunities that would exist in Slate. By conducting this exercise at the outset of their implementation, Seattle U was able to define their strategy for student success in Slate, develop the appropriate structures to support this approach, properly allocate resources for both implementation and ongoing student success operations, and create an effective plan for building and adopting their Slate system.
Develop your system iteratively and collaboratively. Seattle University approached its Slate for Student Success implementation with an emphasis on iterative system development centered around what’s known in project management as the minimum viable product, or MVP. In their project plan, Seattle U defined Slate’s baseline functionalities for their database, and this collection of requirements formed their MVP. Each MVP component was then built out in phases:
- Creation of an initial, no-frills deliverable
- Deliverable testing by key stakeholders to confirm its functionalities and identify any needed changes
- Modifications made based on stakeholder feedback
- Deliverable adoption by relevant user groups
- Enhancement requests submitted by user groups and evaluated/prioritized by implementation team
- Enhancements developed, tested and implemented cyclically
By taking this approach for database development, Seattle U saw significant stakeholder engagement, and this in turn established trust in the project team, instilled confidence in Slate as a system and fostered effective, university-wide change management for their student success systems and processes.
At the end of the session, the Seattle University team highlighted the wins they’ve celebrated: 36% growth in faculty note submissions, astronomical increases in Early Alert reporting, vast improvements to appointment management and communications, and student retention rates that are on track with its institutional goals.
While Slate is the system that has fostered these outcomes, these successes can ultimately be attributed to the thoughtful, intentional approach Seattle University has taken in developing its student success framework, defining its goals and processes and configuring a database that reflects these priorities.
To learn more about our Student Success partnership with Seattle University, we invite you to read our case study.
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More Causes for Celebration in Chicago
In addition to the presentations noted above, RHB joined University of Texas Permian Basin, Auburn University and Baylor University to showcase how Slate portals can be leveraged to create meaningful experiences for students and campus administrators.
The Division of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management at the University of Texas Permian Basin, in partnership with The University of Texas System joined RHB on stage to highlight their innovative student, which transformed and revolutionized how students engage with support resources, campus life and administrative services at a four-year public institution. Access the presentation and read our case study to learn more about our work with the University of Texas Permian Basin.
Auburn University and Baylor University presented alongside RHB to discuss tips and strategies for creating coherent, meaningful campus visit experiences for students, families and visitors. Each campus showcased how portals can be used to unify the registration process, communications, day-of visit itineraries and post-event activities. Additionally, RHB highlighted how innovative and sustainable solutions in Slate can perform kiosk-like functions to dynamically display visitor information as a part of the overall campus welcome experience.
View RHB’s presentation with Auburn and Baylor, and get the full story of our engagements by reading the Auburn case study and the Baylor case study.
