RHB Vice President for Enrollment Management Ken Anselemnt led a January 24 webinar as part of the Leading Edge Thinking in Higher Education Series by Bay Path University’s Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP). The journey to student success (and retention) doesn’t begin when students arrive at your institution—it starts when they submit their deposit to your institution. ⁠In the webinar, Ken explains how a student-first strategy can help ensure that every new student has an equitable chance for success at their institution. A transcript of the webinar is below. You can watch the recording (registration required) and download the presentation slides at the end of this transcript. 

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Transcript

Melissa Morriss-Olson

Before we turn it over to Ken, to give you an overview of his background, which is extensive. Having served at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, for eight years, his background in enrollment management spans nearly three decades, beginning at his alma mater, Marquette University. I will not read all of this, but I think something that’s interesting is to know that he has served as a lecturer, as a faculty member in the English department. And brings that perspective to his work in enrollment management, along with all of the other things that he is doing. And so with that, Ken, we are delighted to have you here today, and we’re going to turn it over to you and we look forward to everything that I know that we’re going to learn from you in today’s webinar.

Ken Anselment

Thanks, Melissa. So as part of my introduction, Melissa was very kind to give a little bit of background. On May 3rd, 2022, I joined RHB as its first vice president for enrollment management. On May 2nd, 2022, the day before that, I put a bow on a wonderful 18-year career at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, which for those of you who are good with geography, know that Appleton is within the Green Bay media market. I lived 20 miles from Lambeau Field, and yes, I’m still sad about the NFC game this weekend. We were that close, but nobody expected to be that far, anyway, so there’s always next year. Anyway, I left Lawrence after 18 years.

I did not get the memo of, “Allow yourself a little time between gigs.”

I was so excited to join the RHB team that the day after my last day, I got in my car and drove down to Indianapolis to join my colleagues. In my time at Lawrence… just to give a little bit more of the bona fides here before we move on. I served on the president’s cabinet representing the efforts of our admissions and financial aid and communications teams.

And in the final few years of my work there, I also headed up our strategic equitable enrollment management program, which was designed to organize the institution around fostering an environment where every Lawrentian—that’s what we called Lawrence students—had an equal shot not only at graduating, but at finding their people and enjoying the journey along the way. Today at RHB, I carry those experiences along with 12 years of admission experience at my alma mater Marquette University, into leading our Enrollment Management practice, which is one of four key practices in our firm. At RHB, as Melissa Morriss-Olson knows so well. She’s a friend of the firm. We have Executive Counsel, Institutional Marketing and Slate and Related Technology.

But really more often than not, RHB relies on the power of our multidisciplinary expertises to develop solutions that ensure greater relevance for our clients at every step along the journey that their constituents take with them throughout their lives at an institution. Whether it’s as prospective students going through the admission process or as current students persisting and thriving on their way to graduation or with alumni staying connected to and preferably donating to their alma mater’s. So today’s session, a little bit about what we’re going to be covering in the next seven hours that we’re together. Kidding, it will not be the last dad joke. But we’ll be focused on that segment of the journey where we often see institutions struggle, and this may be a struggle point at your institutions as well.

It’s what I call that “liminal space.” From the time a student says yes to the college’s offer of admission, whether it’s a first-time-in-college student, it’s a transfer student, it’s a graduate student, it’s a law student, dental student. But from the time that student says, “Yes, I’m coming to your institution,” to the time that they actually arrive. So that may be weeks, it may be months, but it’s what we call at RHB, the deposit to day one journey. And it’s where students go from this really highly curated and choreographed experience of the recruitment process. Where messages are carefully crafted with a friendly student-centered tone to deliver them content that informs and inspires and assures them at every step along the way to what’s often a cacophony of voices telling them to do a whole bunch of things to get ready for their first day of classes.

It could be the registrar, it could be student affairs, it could be the counseling center, the health center, you name it. But they all have things that they’re trying to get done. And what we’re going to focus on today is how an institution can align all of those institutional needs and voices with a coherent deposit to day one strategy that really fosters a sense of student belonging. So that they can arrive ready to thrive at a place that looks and feels like the place that they said yes to. Before we go any further, I’m going to have to trust that you’ll be able to do this because I cannot see you and I also can’t see your questions. If you have some paper available, grab two sheets, doesn’t matter the size, but preferably something that’s 11 by 8.5. And yes, if you want to do it in landscape fashion, that would be great. And then have a writing implement nearby, because we’re going to actually play along and do a couple of at-home exercises to really break the fourth wall of GoToWebinar.

So during our time together, we’re going to cover really five chapters in a brief squished down session because I’ve given a version of this that’s about three hours long. We’re compressing this to about an hour. So we want to make sure, for those of you on the East Coast, we take full advantage of your lunch hour. And for those of you in the central time zone, so you can get off to lunch at noon quickly. And those of you who are fellow travelers in Mountain and Pacific, well, you got plenty of time. So we’re going to cover what it’s like to foster student belonging, how to integrate your systems and your support, how to cohere your communications. You’re going to hear that word cohere and coherence a lot during this time together. Data reporting and interventions, and then the horizon, which is what happens after students arrive on campus day one to degree. I’m all about alliteration, you’re going to hear that a little bit later.

But deposit to day one, day one to degree, really thinking about those segments of the student journey. So sometimes institutions focus on this segment of the student journey mostly to prevent melt. Now, many of you, maybe most of you know what melt is. It’s that phenomenon where students who said yes to your admission or to your offer and are ready to come often by submitting a non-refundable deposit, decide that they’re no longer going to be coming to the institution. Now, the reasons may be they submitted deposits to multiple institutions, which unfortunately is not all that uncommon. Maybe they decided to take a gap year. Maybe they had an experience that turned them off at the institution and they’ve decided to reopen their search. In many, and I might argue in most cases, melt is a symptom of a larger institutional problem. It could be a disorganized or even non-existent onboarding experience for students.

It could be a lack of consistent communication from the institution after one of the highest points of a student journey when they’re excited to be coming to the institution where they made the commitment to attend. Or as we see at many institutions, it may just be a flood of inconsistent communication coming from multiple departments on campus that can really create confusion for students. So the reasons are myriad, but they generally follow a pattern of incoherence and result in a student no longer necessarily feeling that connection to the institution that they may have felt when they said yes. And that connection is really a key part of students feeling like they belong. So let’s go here. Connection leads to belonging, which leads to student success, which leads to retention, and which leads to hopefully persistence and graduation. But before we go any further, I would like to ask a couple of questions. And Jana, I’m going to have to ask your help to read off people’s answers, but this is an audience participation part.

What does student success mean at your institution? I will offer here that even at RHB, it’s kind of a contested term. What does student success really mean? Is it about a student moving from one part of their experience to the next all the way through to graduation? Is student success about improved retention rates? Is it about improved graduation rates? Is it about more revenue to the institution? When you’re talking about student success at your institution? If you’re talking about student success, what does it mean? Go ahead and type your answers in the question box, and we’ll use that. I would love to see what those answers are. But Jana, what are you seeing? Yeah, you can go ahead and paste those questions here in the chat. Thank you. Is it defined or is it a contested term on your college campus, on your campuses as well? Jana, what are you seeing?

Jana O’Connell

Well, this is what I’ve got, it’s not pasting.

Ken

Yeah, that’s fine.

Jana

That’s fine. Student satisfaction and willingness to promote the program to others. Improved tuition revenue, unfortunately only means advising for retention and persistence, depends on who is answering the question.

Ken

Okay, I love that one. And that is so true.

Jana

And also-

Ken

Go ahead.

Jana

Students that are positively academically challenged, satisfied, and solid well-being.

Ken

Okay, beautiful. Thank you. Here’s another question, which is, on your campuses… And this is just a yes no or… no, yes or no. Do you have a person in charge of student success at your institution? I’ll just leave it that way. Often institutions say, “Hey, student success is everybody’s business.” And then they don’t have somebody in charge of it. And as we know if something’s everybody’s business, it’s generally nobody’s business. So what’s your experience at your institution? Do you have someone that’s in charge of student success? Go ahead and put your answer in the question box and Jana, whatever you end up seeing.

What’s the predominant: yes or no?

Jana

It’s more yeses than nos. More yeses than nos. A couple nos, but mostly yeses.

Ken

Hallelujah. Awesome. Cool, you’re all set. This webinar is over. I’m kidding. But it’s good to know that you actually… many of you are in that space of having somebody designated as your student success point person. As I mentioned, far too often institutions will say, “Well, it’s everybody’s business, right? I mean, we’re here to take care of our students, make sure they graduate.” Which is true, but if you don’t have somebody who’s watching over the data, looking at trends, looking for gaps in service, it may be harder for an institution to be nimble and react and respond to what students of today might need to be successful. Okay, so the first part of our time in this session is really going to focus on students, your students. And our focus today is going to lean much more heavily on the strategic, sort of the high level rather than the technical.

I’m going to show you some technical stuff. I wouldn’t be doing my job at RHB if I didn’t show you some of the nifty things that we’ve designed to help colleges on their student success journey. But what I want to do is start with strategy, start with students. So let’s do this. I did mention, yeah, I have a history of alliteration as an English major. And so quite often conversations about student success start with systems. We’ve got to get this tool. For a lot of colleges, it’s Slate. For some, it’s Navigate by EAB. For others, it’s Starfish, whatever you’re using, sometimes people start with the tool and then get to other things later. What we’re often talking about though here is that the systems you use and the strategies you deploy are important places to start. And here’s where I really flex my chops in animation on PowerPoint is to encourage students to start on… encourage institutions to start the focus on people first, then identify the strategy to serve them well, and then build the systems that will best support them on their journey.

So we often talk about belonging, right? Fostering student belonging. And I would ask you, we’re not going to worry about going to the questions. Just think about it yourself. What does belonging look like at your institution? How often are you talking about fostering student belonging? And what does it look like when it’s happening? What does it look like for your students? What does it look like for your departments in let’s say, student affairs or residence life or advising or the registrar? What does it look like for financial services? What does it look like for the institution’s bottom line? So there are a lot of things that belonging, fostering belonging, a lot of benefits that accrue to the institution, but it starts by accruing benefits to your students. On the other hand, what does the lack of belonging look like? And I think that’s often where our energies go, which is at institutions, we’re trying to find ways to catch the students who are leaving, prevent them from going or build systems to stop them from heading to the cracks or going to another institution, which is fine.

But what are you doing as an institution to also reinforce those students who are, either they’re all in or they’re kind of in, but how do you build systems and structures so that you can foster that belonging where every student feels like they belong? So we’re going to talk a little bit about that, and it really starts not when students arrive on campus, but really at the point that students say, yes. Let’s talk about the lack of student belonging. In 2023, and I know I mentioned this in my mini-pod interview with Melissa a while back, but Titan Partners released a report called Driving Toward a Degree, Awareness, Belonging and Coordination. And it revealed a disturbing gap really in awareness about student support services by students and by employees at the institutions they attend. So the report was based on responses from more than 2,000 students and 1,750 employees at about 900 two-year institutions, two- and four-year private and public institutions. So they really had a pretty good swath, although with 900 students and that many people surveyed, I don’t think they were going deep at every single one of these institutions.

They were looking for sort of a high-level thematic view. But what they found is that while institutional employees are highly aware of what their institutions offer when it comes to student support services, the students they serve are shockingly unaware. So with one question, for example, they were asked about the awareness of academic and co-curricular supports available to students. 33% of the students surveyed were unaware of the academic and co-curricular supports that were available to them. And furthermore, it pointed out that only 60% of students were aware of the full range of mental health and financial aid and career services offered at their institutions. And the report notes that students aware of more of these non-academic support services express a stronger sense of belonging at their institutions. So data .1 from Titan Partners. So what this means is 33% percent of the students are unaware of the academic and co-curricular support.

Another 40% are unaware of the full range of other services, and you can be pretty sure that there’s heavy overlap between those groups. So you’re talking in general, about 30 to 40% of students enrolled in these colleges are not fully aware of what’s available to them, much less taking advantage of those things, which seems like a recipe for disaster. That may be overstating it, but not a recipe for student success. Let’s take one other. Look. The NSSE, National Survey of Student Engagement asks a similar type question. And what they found is that when students are asked that their institution places substantial emphasis on providing support to succeed academically, 30% of students disagree. Similar question, institution places substantial emphasis on providing support for their overall well-being. 40% disagree. So what do we have here? I will show my age. If anybody’s ever seen Cool Hand Luke, you already know where this is going, which is, and again, I will show my age.

Melissa, you thought my use of groovy earlier was revealing. But what we have here may be a failure to communicate. There are opportunities that students can feel better supported, and honestly, students who feel supported, feel connected, feel a sense of belonging at their institutions. And those students who feel a sense of belonging at their institutions are more likely to persist and graduate. And oh, by the way, if you keep more of the students that you enroll, whether they’re first-time-in-college students or transfer students or graduate students, that puts less pressure on the front end to recruit more students to replace them. It’s the virtuous circle of enrollment life. So at RHB, let’s talk about fostering this environment of student success and retention. At RHB, we like to focus on three objectives at different points along the student journey, we talk about informing, inspiring, and assuring students.

You heard me say that a little bit earlier. When your audience is unaware, your job is to inform them, give them the facts. When your audience moves from being informed and aware to interested, you want to inspire them to take action. And then once they’ve taken action, you want to assure them that they’ve done the right thing. So for example, you can apply that approach to application generation campaigns. Let’s look at so-called traditional first-year students. For those who are unaware of your students, of your institution, you may conduct a search campaign where you’re licensing names from the college board or from NCURA, or you’re working with NSSE. And you introduce your institution to them, and you share all the important facts and figures, your location facilities highlight your faculty. But once a student has indicated an interest in your institution, they’ve raised their pinky and indicated that they’ve opened a bunch of emails or they’ve clicked an RFI, you nurture that interest with application nurturing campaigns just to try to inspire them to take that next action.

Then when you offer them admission to your institution. You’re assuring them of their place in the community. And this inform, inspire, assure pattern repeats itself after students submit their deposit to your institution because your job as an institution now is to inform students of the important steps that they need to take. And we’ll get into that in a little bit. But because students are often taking these actions on their own or with their supporters, maybe it’s a parent, maybe it’s a coach or a relative who’s helping them through the process. Or maybe they’re by themselves, but it’s maybe they’re registering for classes or for housing or for receiving a bill. It’s important to inspire students with confidence as they complete those steps. And the assure part, I think, is moving those students from the singular experience of being recruited at your institution to a community of fellow students on the same journey with them.

So we’re talking about the informed part, it’s also ensuring clarity. On the inspire part, you want to give students confidence that what they need to do, how to do it, and how they can feel better about it. So one of the things you can do is start asking questions. I have a formal structure for this that’ll be coming in a little bit. I think they call that a teaser in the business. But thinking about the informed part, those are the classic five W questions, right? What is the action or outcome that you want the student to take or to achieve? Maybe it’s completing a housing form. Maybe it’s an advisor registration form. Maybe it’s registering for an online course that they’re taking. Hey, Melissa, I saw you come off. What’s going on? Oops, can’t hear you. I cannot hear you. You can’t hear me?

Jana

I can hear you.

Ken

Okay, great. Thanks, Jana. Alright. 

Jana

Other people are saying they can hear you just fine as well.

Ken

Swell. All right. Okay, thanks. I’ll keep rolling. All right. Anyway, so on the front end with those clarity questions, you’re asking the big five W questions. What’s the action? Who is responsible for the action? Is the student responsible, but also what department is responsible for pulling them through? Registrar housing, you name it. When does it need to happen? Are we clear about the deadlines that students have to meet? Where does it happen? Whoops, there it goes. Where does it happen? Where in the tech stack, for example, are they going to a form in slate? Are they going to your SIS? Are they going to a calendar app to schedule an appointment with an advisor? So being really clear about that, and then why does it matter? You have to, even though we believe we’re communicating to students that they need to do a thing and they’ll say, “Well, of course they’re telling me to do it.”

Sometimes you need to inspire them to action by informing them what the consequences of that decision are, or also what the consequences of not taking that action are. On the confidence piece, it’s thinking about “how does a student need to get this done?” It may be crystal clear to those of us who work at our institution that, “Well, of course you go to this form and you do this thing and this thing and this thing.” But we do that over and over and over again. For these students, this is the first time they’re doing it. And you can be pretty sure that some of them are really worried about doing it right. So how can we put ourselves in the mindset of students to think about creating ways for them to know that they’re doing it the right way? Maybe it’s with instruction, maybe it’s giving them a thumbs up after they finish it.

But how can you reinforce the behaviors that you want students to take? And then how can you encourage good feelings about that? Or how do you stave off feelings of fear or doubt or imposter syndrome? Or you have students quite often who feel like they’re just one click away from a college realizing that they’ve made a terrible mistake in offering them admission, and we’ll tap them on the shoulder and say, “We’re sorry. We reconsidered our decision.” So how can you remove those moments of self-doubt and move students towards a sense of confidence, which helps foster that sense of belonging? And then the community piece of it is what sort of signals are you sending to the student that you see them as a person? It may sound corny and it may not given some of the conversations we’re hearing on college campuses of students not feeling known or not feeling heard or seen, which can reinforce feelings of feeling alone.

So what are the ways that we can build communications, structures, systems to reinforce that students are part of a community and that they have people around them that can help? All right, one way you can do that, and we’ve done this at RHB, is to personify student data. Because not every student comes from the same background. Not every student comes with the same experiences or expectations to help them be successful when they get to college. One of the things that when I was at Lawrence, we did with RHB was take student unit record data and create personas. And many of you’re doing this yourselves at your institution. Personas are really helpful tools to aggregate person types. When you’re dealing with a thousand students or 10,000 students, it’s tough to cater to the needs of 10,000 students. But if you can put them into large identifiable buckets with common themes, common expectations and experiences and needs, it may help you organize what may seem like a totally complicated process of multiple different communications that you need to go out. Looking for patterns and teams that apply to large groups.

It may be students that are part of ROTC or international students, or it may be first-generation students. It may be students who are coming from a great distance to your institution. It may be students who have gaps in their financial aid award. But thinking about those things, I’m going to show you an exercise in a little bit about how you can take those data from a student and use it to really think deeply about what the student journey is like from deposit to day one. But it starts with knowing who your students are. So this exercise we did at Lawrence, and I’ve scrubbed out some of the identifiers, is take students who compose, compose, comprise, compose, comprise, is containing—whatever, English major—who compose a significant part of the student population. And so it may be students of a certain academic rank or need rank, financial profile, where are they from?

What high school did they go to? And you take these data and then you start to build what we call baseball cards, right? Antonio Piñero is not a real person. He may even be an AI-generated student, I’m not sure. But what we did was take information about that student, what the GPA is like, non-submitter on the ACT or SAT. He identifies as Hispanic, as male, sex assigned at birth and as gender expression. Parental degree attainment, he’s a first-gen student. The numbers on the left may be a little inside baseball, but looking at the AGI is, adjusted gross income. So what is the parental financial structure or the household structure? What at least then was the EFC? We don’t have the EFC anymore, it’s SAI. It’ll be interesting to see what the student aid index tells us about students and what it doesn’t tell us.

And then we had some information about what the student’s academic prep was like on the right side and their academic interest. From that, we build out a story and stories matter. It helps motivate people across campus to identify maybe what a student might need. Because a lot of times people become accustomed to working with a certain type of student and believe that a one-size-fits-all approach is going to be appropriate. This helps an institution at least systematically think about listening, listening differently for student needs. So you’ve got Antonio Piñero’s story. We have another student, no surprise, they’re all from Denver for some reason. This was actually before I moved to Denver, but maybe they were telling me something. Luca Dobson, another student. A large group of students at Lawrence, for example, were students who were gender-fluid or on a journey of discovering what their gender identity was.

And so we had a student, Luca in this case, again, a compilation of students representing a mindset that the institution might think about. What are the sort of things that Luca might need to feel a sense of belonging at the institution that maybe Antonio doesn’t need? What are the things that both of them would have in common? And then how can we build communications, interactions with the institution to help Luca feel seen and to help Antonio feel seen? And so it’s a really helpful way to personify student types. You’re not going to cover every single type of student, but if you can start by organizing your students around larger general types, you’ll be going in a good direction. So play at home exercise. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on this because I know we don’t have a lot of time together this morning, although maybe it might seem like a lot of time to you.

I’d invite you to spend a little bit of time, regardless of what your role is in the institution, thinking about a large cohort of students that you serve. And I’ve got some prompt questions on here that might help you think about that student. A lot of times we think about attributes, which is the front side of that baseball card. Where are they from? What’s their level of academic preparation, ethnicity, race, citizenship, blah, blah, blah, all those things that are facts about the student. But then what’s their story? And this is not a comprehensive part of the story. This is really narrowing it to what’s the story germane to their interaction and relationship with your institution. How did they enter your institution? Are they first-time-in-college students? Are they graduate students? Are they transfer students? Are they re-enrolling at the institution after taking time away?

Why did they choose your institution? Do you have an admitted student survey of some sort that tells you what their reasons were for choosing your school? What are they looking forward to? Now, you may not know the answer to that, but you might be able to project what that might look like. Are they looking forward to making new friends, being away from home for the first time, really pursuing astrophysics because the thing that they’ve been super jazzed about and have been on a path? So what are they looking forward to academically, socially, culturally, at the institution? Oops, hold on a second. Sorry about that. What are they worried about? Again, this may involve some projection, but you might be able to take a pretty good guess at what they might be worried about. Doing things wrong, not fitting in, not finding my people. Some may be concerned about their personal safety.

They’re going away from home for the first time. So thinking about those sorts of things. Who will their people be? That’s an interesting one. They’re all interesting ones. I’m biased. But who will their people be? Thinking about maybe their students that they might find, but more importantly from your institution, is it going to be a faculty advisor? Who’s going to be someone who is their go-to when they run into a problem? Is it their admission counselor? Hopefully not. At this point in the game you probably want to be weaning students off that admissions interaction and relationship as strong as that might be, and moving them towards other trustworthy people on campus, right? Because your admissions folks need to go out and recruit that next batch of students, but thinking about who they’re going to get connected to. One of the exercises we did at RHB, at Lawrence, was develop this web of support that students … it almost gamified the way that students could find out who their people were.

So who’s my financial aid person? Who’s my person in health and wellness? Who’s my person in the student success office, my academic coach? Who’s my faculty advisor? That way you knew who your people were. The student did, also their supporters did, but also we on the campus side knew who their network of support was. So that when you’re starting to build out referral systems for your students, you know who the players are. Last thing is how do they feel about your institution? Are you their second choice or their third choice? How much work do you have to sort of recruit that student year after year to feel even better about your institution? So maybe you take a snapshot of this screen and think about it later, but this can be a helpful exercise. And this is one we’ve done on a bunch of college campuses to walk a whole bunch of colleagues from a bunch of different divisions through an exercise of discovering more deeply who the students are that they’re serving, and then building out personas.

Generally it’s going to be five to seven personas, and why does that matter? Because we’re going to put them into a journey. But first, a couple of things. I mentioned coherence is something that we talk about a lot at RHB, and what we’re talking about is developing a coherent student journey. But what the heck are we talking about when we’re talking about coherence? Here is our definition, and this was actually developed by Richard Harrison Bailey himself, the eponymous RHB. Coherence is the discipline of ensuring a transparent connection between your constituents expectations, your brand, and the authentic user experience. It’s the result of discovering and telling the truth about the one place your institution occupies in the higher education universe and aligning behaviors with that position. Aligning behaviors with that position. So are you a Jesuit university that is all about social justice? How does that express itself in the way that you treat your students when they come to campus?

Thinking about the type of school that you are in your institutional mission, are your expressions consistent with the way you’re perceived and portrayed in the marketplace? But answering these foundational questions, what’s true about us? What do we say is true about us and what do others believe to be true about us, helps you establish a roadmap for you to arrive at coherence and even greater relevance? So let’s move on from that. You can operationalize that in some key ways, which is thinking about what your institution stands for. That may not be your mission. It may be your mission, maybe you have a vision statement or a value statement, but what does your institution stand for? Do you have a highly structured DEIB program? And if you really planted a flag that you’re trying to create an equitable experience for all of your students and your faculty and your staff. Okay, well, that would be a place to make sure that you are expressing values.

You have processes that support that higher goal of being a truly equitable place that fosters a sense of belonging for every member of the community. What were the promises that you made to your students when you were recruiting them? Now, promise may be a strong word, but what were some of the expectations that you may have created in the minds of your students, right? How did you express your institution’s values through your institutional behaviors before a student said yes to your institution? Keeping in mind, that’s probably going to be the admissions office. Maybe the financial aid office. Could be faculty who were involved with the recruitment process, but it generally tends to be fewer channels, right? So how did you express your institution’s care for students before the student said yes? How about after the student said yes? And that’s the part we’re really talking about.

And how soon after, that matters too. Because sometimes you’ll see institutions who spend an enormous amount of energy getting students up to the yes. And the student says yes, let’s say in February of their senior year of high school. Again, just going with these so-called traditional model, but this could apply in any case. May one is typically the deadline. School year is still going on at many institutions long after May 1st. Sometimes they’re not even ready to engage with students until the summer. Meanwhile, you’ve got a student who said yes in February and they’re waiting maybe three months to start to get some love from the institution. I gave a seminar out west a couple of months ago, and I had a person at the seminar come up to me afterward and say, “When you raised this, I was curious. So I went in and looked at our student records to see what our melt was like for students who deposited before May 1st, and it was several data points lower.”

Now that may have been students who submitted deposits at multiple institutions, but I would argue that if you’ve got a student depositing to your institution a couple of months before the national candidate’s reply date, that’s a pretty interested and engaged student. And that’s someone you’re going to want to engage when they’re ready to be engaged, not when you’re ready to engage them, which is an important distinction to keep in mind. So here’s another play at home exercise for you, and you might want to take a screenshot of this one. This is a student journey map, and this is something we’ll often run colleges, anytime we do a deposit to day one journey or even a student success journey beyond that. But walking an institution through all of the milestones that a student is going to hit on their way to your institution. So it might be the first thing that they do is fill out their housing preferences form.

It may be sending in their health information. So it can be a little tedious, but it’s an important exercise, especially when you get multiple colleagues around campus together in a room to talk about the things that they’re doing. And you put them on the map. And these questions on the left may look familiar to you because we showed them, I showed them a little bit earlier, which is to start with the big Ws. What are the student populations that encounter this milestone? What is the desired outcome of this milestone? Who is responsible? Again, is it the student? But what does the student do? But also, which department is touched by this? Or departments? When should it happen? Is there a window? Is there a firm deadline? Is there a second window for people to take care of it? Where does it happen? What part of your tech stack?

Why does it matter? How might a student feel about this milestone? Are they excited? Are they worried? Are they disappointed? Are they neutral? A great test of this is what’s it like when they get their bill? If you can make somebody excited to get their bill, you’re winning the game. Also, let us know how you make people get excited about their bills. Unless of course the amount they owe is zero, then that’s wonderful. But how might a student feel about this? Because that can also help you think about the sort of communications you need to build around that. Or interventions you need to build around that to make students feel as positive as possible, or at least as neutral as possible. How might a student fail at this milestone? Where can things go sideways for them? Do they miss a deadline? Are they on vacation for that part of the summer when you have that window open

Think about things that you’ve put in place that might make it difficult for a student to complete the milestone. And then finally, if a student fails to complete the milestone, what is the intervention because it’s not just on the student? I think a lot of times institutions will say, “Well, it’s the student’s responsibility?” Sure it is, but it’s also our responsibility to help them understand their responsibility and the steps that they can take to fulfill that. So what’s the intervention? And who is responsible for the intervention? This is a great way and a great time for colleges to become good aggressive outfielders in baseball with that fly ball coming towards them. Who’s going to call the ball when the student is coming towards them? If you’re waiting for the other person to catch it, chances are that student might fall to the ground.

But if I know that that other outfielder is going to catch the ball, I’m going to back off and let them do their thing. But sometimes you gotta make sure that you’ve created a dynamic even among your staff and faculty colleagues to know who’s got that ball. So I would encourage you, maybe take a picture of this. You can do this exercise at home on your own, but you can also do this with other colleagues on campus. So take those, and then you take those student personas and put them through here recognizing that some of the milestones may be different. Some of the ways the milestones need to be completed are different based on the type of student, the type of academic program they’re in, but thinking about all the permutations around these sorts of things. And it’s a really powerful way for you to organize your community around that student journey, right?

Okay. So I would be remiss if I did not quote the great Erin Gore from RHB who often… she’s the head of our Slate and Related Technology team, that technology is not the strategy. We’ll have a lot of people that come to us and say, “All right, we know we need to do student success. Or, “We know we need to do this deposit to day one thing, and we just bought Slate. Help us do it.” Like, “Cool, awesome, let’s do that. But first, we have to think about the bigger picture.” And then the technology becomes something that’s going to support your strategy and support your students and staff rather than the other way around. So let’s get to the next phase. I said we’re going to start with fostering student belonging. These last sections are much shorter than the first one, but I think it’s important to really lay that foundation, that student-centered approach, and then use that to inform these next pieces in the process.

So let’s start with integrating your student support. I use Slate up here as an example. Colleges use all sorts of CRMs, but the principle here is this. The people that form support networks, academic advisors, and student success coaches, counselors, financial aid officers and so on, need to have easily accessible information so that they can focus on best serving your students. Unfortunately, as we’ve heard many times on many visits with clients who have asked for our help with Slate over the past few years, I think there’s significant friction in the process when staff have to use multiple systems. So maybe it’s the SIS. There’s one for scheduling appointments, another for viewing financial aid. That’s something for recording meeting notes, another for referring students just to do their jobs, right? Learning management systems, all those things. With counseling loads already heavy on many campuses, managing multiple tools like this to do essential work only further can slow down the process and create more friction for people. And really create more dissonance with the work.

And if it’s rough for your staff who know how to use these things all of the time, or most of the time, imagine what it’s like for your students who in many cases have been living in this environment with the admissions office through a CRM. In this case it’s Slate. And then once they say yes to the institution, they’re often sent off into this universe of, or a constellation of a bunch of different pieces of your tech stack trying to manage what for them is a single stream journey. And so we encourage colleges to flip that around and really take… there are ways you can take all of those parts of the tech stack, run them through your SIS, whether it’s Banner or PeopleSoft, and then keep students in Slate. Let Slate be the interface, this thing that they’ve become comfortable with and confident in as they’ve been moving through their student journey from first learning about you to applying, to getting their offer of admission, to accepting their offer of admission. Keep them in that familiar environment. It takes the variables out of it.

You can have calendars and financial aid and residence life and all those pieces feed in through your SIS because they generally do. But then you can keep that user interface of a Slate to keep that confidence level going as long as possible. If you’re extending it into that deposit to day one piece, it really gives students that strong foundation to build on. Here’s some examples of some things that we have done. This is a whole bunch of Slate screens, but things that we have done for some clients. This is from our friends at Seattle University who have given us permission. James Miller, if you’re in the audience, thank you. But have given us permission to show some of the things that we’ve created that help institutions see the full view of a student. So we’ve got, for example, in the upper right corner referrals, and these are things that are generally happening after students arrive on campus.

This is a full student success implementation, but it has practical applications even for that deposit to day one piece. So for example, if housing is seeing a group of students who have not yet completed their housing selection form, but they’re eligible to do so. What’s the interaction? Does the Dean of Admission or the VP for enrollment or the VP for student success know that there’s a group of students out there that have not completed the process? What’s their story? How do we reach out to them to make sure that they do complete that process? Have they ghosted us? Are they leaving or are they just not sure what to do and not sure who to ask for it? So this is the internal view, this is the faculty and staff view of what this particular invented student, Mallory Isabella test active, really great name, what her story is, or the broader story for her.

This is yet another example where this is a faculty or this is a student facing view, I’m sorry, for a fictional student named Jolene, but shows all of her academic advisors, all of the different things that she can participate in on her way to the campus. But the other place we would… Oh yeah, that’s right, this one moves. It’s pretty neato. This shows, for example, how you can take all of those separate things that you might have a student do and pull them into a single place using Scheduler, for example, to set up appointments, which then feed into somebody’s… Oh, this is running on its own, cool… feed into somebody’s academic or Outlook calendar so that a faculty advisor knows that they’ve got these slots available. Jolene in this case doesn’t have to look at that faculty advisor’s calendar, but can actually do it right through Slate. So it cuts down all the friction points and keeps them in a single stream.

Let’s go to the next one. Oh, so that’s sort of integrating your systems on the front end. But I do want to show you this other piece, and this is helpful really to cohere your communications. I’d mentioned earlier about this cacophony of voices where you go from admissions where things are pretty tightly controlled. There’s a clear tone of voice and a language and diction that’s used by the school to a bunch of different folks who maybe customer service is not their default mode. It’s getting things done that they need to get done to do their jobs. That’s great. It’s all fine. It’s all well. It’s all good, but how can we take the stuff that they have to do and bring it into a language and a tone that’s familiar to students, again, to foster that sense of belonging.

We talk about cohering your communications, and there’s a screen after this where I want to pull some pieces out of the book, Coherence, yes, Rick Bailey wrote the book on Coherence. Highly encourage you to get it. I’ve got about 11-ty copies on my shelf down here. You can email me and I may send you one, or maybe I’ll have a drawing, who knows? We’ll see how it goes. But Coherence, it’s a great book that helps institutions think about how to organize themselves around this really important journey of making sure that the values you express are in alignment with the values that are consistent with your institution. And some of the things you can do to apply Coherence to communications after a student makes a deposit. And again, feel free to take a screenshot of this. These are questions to sort of conduct your own communications audit yourself on what those communications are like. What’s the registrar saying? What’s housing saying? What’s the president’s office saying? What’s the dean of students saying?

And really trying to make sure that there is a consistency, a feel, a tone, a look. And again, you do that in Slate,. That’s one step. But let’s also think about the structure of the messaging. How dense is the copy? But here are even something as simple as if you look at the third bullet, how many times do we use you and we language in the communications versus the third person, the dreaded institution and the student? How many times do we use words that end in A-R, like bursar and registrar, words that students may not have ever heard in their lives or much less know? Although if they’ve seen Hamilton, they know what bursar is because it’s defined there, which is great. But think about where your language may not be familiar to students, and how can you make it more user-friendly? How do you treat your guests? What’s the customer experience? But these are great questions that you can start asking to conduct an audit of the way you communicate with your students after they say yes.

It’s something we do at RHB all the time, really conducting a coherence inventory or communications audit from that deposit to day one space. We also do it on the front end, but we can help institutions see opportunities that may be right ahead for them. Here’s a great example. Agnes Scott does a wonderful job of keeping their students… Yes, those are flying Scotties. But Agnes Scott does a wonderful job of keeping students in this experience long after they make their deposit. But it’s this beautiful reaffirming experience. And yes, RHB designed it for them, but Agnes Scott is also an exemplar of controlling the language, which can sometimes be difficult when you’re working with others… Yes, there’s a Scottie break. Students can actually take a puppy break. But they do a wonderful job of co-hearing their communications so that even though it may be coming from a different person, the feel, the warmth of it that they’ve been expressing at the point of recruitment is also consistent all the way throughout. I realize I’m running up against a time boundary, and let me get through the rest of these other pieces.

So we have this, this, just further examples of how to co-hear your communications. Oops, sorry. This example from the Permian Basin, I get really excited about. It looks like a website, right? This is all designed in Slate, and it takes all of the pieces that students have to complete and puts them into a single container of student portal that they can use to navigate all of the things that they need to do as they arrive on campus. So advising and registration, financial resources, events, international students, there are ways you can turn things on, turn things off based on who the particular student is. So let’s do this. I want to move through so that if we have questions, I make sure that I’m answering them for you. You can also, of course, use a central system like this for data reporting and interventions. Going back to that piece I said earlier of, if you have a number of students who haven’t completed their housing selection form, what is your intervention?

And how can you use the data to intervene at the right time to do so proactively rather than, “Oh my gosh, we’re short on students registering. How can you build in structures?” And there are ways you can do it with Slate, for example. How can you build in systems and workflows so that you’re intervening early enough in the process so that students can continue or get back on track? Okay, and then finally, I’ll leave you with this, which is looking to the horizon. I think sometimes institutions, and I know I’ve been guilty of this myself, look at the big giant task of bringing an entire institution together around student success or about rethinking the student journey. And that can be a daunting process, right? You’ve got a lot of people who have their own way of doing things. And what you’re doing is you’re inviting them sometimes to become vulnerable in front of each other and step into spaces that they’re not necessarily comfortable with. Whoops, sorry, I keep scrolling a little bit.

And sometimes I think the thought of what that requires frightens colleges into inactivity. It’s too hard to do it, so why do you start at all, or we’ll kick the can and deal with something that’s more urgent right now. I would argue that beginning the journey, getting your institution into a coherence around the deposit to day one journey, much less the full day one to degree, all the way to graduation, is not only healthy for your institution, but it’s good for your students. And it’s difficult work, but it’s important work. And the point about the horizon, I would underscore here, or I would emphasize here, and it’s something I hear Rick and Tammy Bailey talk about a lot. It comes from Dan Sullivan, he wrote a book called The Gap and the Game. And I think sometimes when we’re looking at the horizon… Rick Bailey wrote the book called Coherence. Thanks for the question. I just saw that come through.

And it is available on Amazon, or it’s also available at rhb.com if you’re really interested in picking up a copy, the library at rhb.com. So on the horizon, long story short, we often focus so much on the horizon of the journey that we’re on, that we forget to look at the shore behind us and see how far we’ve come. And that’s the difference between gap and gain thinking. If we’re focused so much on the gap, it can be dispiriting and you can sometimes forget about the gains. We have already done this, celebrate your wins. When you celebrate those wins, it gets a lot easier to take that next step into the gap. But I will finish with this, which is the key piece is beginning the journey. And so with that, thank you for your time and your attention. And I think this is the part where I turn it over to all of you for any questions, so that I may try to venture and answer. And again, since I can’t see the questions, I’ll have to rely on my benevolent overlords off-screen to tell me what the questions are.

Jana

Ken, can you discuss the Slate portal on the items students need to complete?

Ken

Yeah. Well, and that’s the slate portal that I had shown earlier, a number of slate portals. It’ll be dependent upon the institution and the processes that they need to have students go through. And that’s what that student journey map is all about. That’s where you take all of those milestones, and then you start thinking about what forms the content that you build into your portal. So for example, if you have an on-campus registration program or an… yeah, on-campus registration program that you do over the summer and you’re not mounting it online, well, are you going to do registration for that in Slate?

Great. And then you can start to build out a data set there. We’ve seen some colleges build out a gamified version of, “Okay, here are all the steps you need to complete.” And then as you get each one, they light up and move you closer and closer towards completion. There are an infinite variety of ways you can configure your portal in a way that expresses your institutional brand, your institutional values, but also is highly functional for your faculty and staff, but also for your students who need to complete those steps.

Jana

Thank you.

Ken

Yeah. What else?

Jana

Questions?

Ken

I know we hit the top of the hour and I understand people are probably moving off and totally get it. I’ve been there myself. Any other questions, Jana? 

Jana

Not at the moment.

Ken

Cool.

Jana

Oh, here. When we think about student onboarding, all of these systems working together sounds great. But until then, what do you recommend for timing of communications of steps to take for students and families?

Ken

Well, thank you. Great question. If you haven’t begun that journey of integrating everything into Slate, for example, that’s fine. And again, know some people who would be very happy to help you with that. You can still queue up your communications and having worked at an institution where that was very much the case, that student journey map can be a really helpful start. So what you do is you start with the map and then you really lay out what all of those steps are. And then you put them into the sequence that they need to happen, and then you start to build the communications around them. So for example, you can also build elevated communications. For most students, your email flow is going to be just fine, or if you’ve got it in a portal already for an admitted student experience, that’ll be just fine. But for other students, the email may not be reaching them or it’s just not hitting home with them.

So what’s your next step? Are you using SMS to reach out to them, sort of a more interruptive form of communication. And if that’s not working, what’s the next escalation? A human intervention, who is going to be making that phone call, for example, so that you build those things out ahead of time and it’s just kind of an if-then decision tree. If they’ve taken care of it, cool, you’re great, they’re moving along. If they haven’t, then a trigger is sent, it triggers an SMS message or maybe two SMS messages within 48 hours of each other. If that fails, then maybe there’s a phone call that comes in that 72nd hour. So really building out a timeline so that it’s not creating urgency for the student. You want to do it enough ahead of time so that there’s still a window if you’ve got a deadline.

So think about it may be urgent for you, how do you move them without freaking them out and letting them know they’ve got enough time to take care of it. Because if it’s after the deadline, you’re already behind the eight-ball. So how do you build proactive communications before that? And let’s not underestimate the efficacy of paper mail at this point too. You’ve got a captive audience, they’re going to be opening things from you. Might not hurt if you’re sending out a next steps brochure or other mail or a postcard or a magnet that you’re putting up on a refrigerator so students know what’s coming next. So use your multiple channels that you have available to you.

Jana

Thank you. Another question we have is where do you start creating strategies for offices outside of admissions to actually buy in and not make it overwhelming?

Ken

Yeah. Yeah. That’s the key, right? I think that’s the process I was talking about though. And again, sometimes it can be difficult, especially if you don’t have somebody that’s in charge of student success on your campus to convene that. Because it’s like, “Who am I to be the person to convene this?” Sometimes you need to have a conversation with the decision makers who can do that. Maybe it’s your president and it’s making the case for why retention matters and how that can reduce pressure on the front end for recruitment. How it can actually make you not have to lean on financial aid maybe as heavily in the beginning because you are chasing students. So it’s thinking of the storytelling of like, “Okay, here’s the problem. Why is it relevant to the decision maker? And now what?” I think Harvard Business Review just came out with a story about that, about the three points of storytelling being a great way to motivate people.

“Here’s the thing, here’s why you should care about it. Here’s what we can do about it.” But often those can be difficult in institutions where there’s not a designated person, and that’s where somebody like us can be helpful in, for lack of a better word, refereeing those conversations. But it’s creating as safe an environment as possible to convene people. We’ll give them an entire agenda of what we’re going to be covering and tell the college, the institution, who can speak authoritatively on each of these matters. And let’s get them in a room and we’re going to start asking them questions about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. Maybe think about doing it this way. And it becomes a real “scales from the eyes’” moment for a lot of institutions where they hear for the very first time from a colleague across campus who’s been doing this thing for years because they didn’t know how to do it otherwise. So it can be amazing just convening the stakeholders who touch that student experience, what that can reveal in terms of opportunity, but also help you find common ground.

Jana

Great. Another thing, another option, the other can be just as bad when the silo of admissions is completely separate from the director of student success and the one department isn’t good with data. This sounds like a critical step is to get a better culture buy in to data.

Ken

Yes. Yes. Yeah. This is not the time for gut work. This is for data informed decision making, right? And sometimes it’s just because people are afraid or they don’t know what to do with it, and that’s where Slate… again, this is starting to sound like an ad for RHB, but oh well. Rather than dumping a bunch of data on people, it’s building out reports with relevant information and then saying, “Okay, now that you’ve got this, here’s what this is telling us and here’s what you can do with it.” Again, going back to that storytelling, what is it? Why does it matter? What can we do about it? It may be oversimplifying it, but I think some people are so afraid of data or data-averse that they don’t even want to get into it. Fine. How can you use data visualizations to tell a story instead? You can show really quickly with a chart if there’s an equity gap with Pell grant students versus non-Pell grant students, when it comes to first year to second year retention.

Okay, that’s a problem, and what do we do about that? So it’s really leveraging those data to motivate your colleagues, but also make it safe for them to hear the information they need to hear. Because I think that’s another thing that often happens on college campuses. We’re so worried about collegiality or hurting other people’s feelings, and sometimes we don’t have those difficult conversations. So you got to pull a little Brené Brown on them and sometimes just invite the rumble, but know that you’re doing it. I think the way you can do it though, is when you pivot to students, when you’re focusing back on students again and again, it’ll get old, but if you say, “What does this mean for students?” It gets people out of defending turf and gets people out of silos and gets them thinking about students, and it makes it safer for them. Again, that’s the theory. The practice may look a little bit different, but always coming back to students is a great place to start.

Melissa

Yeah, I think that’s a great word to end on. So to invite the rumble and pivot to students. So thank you so much, Ken.

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