Background

Baylor University recently completed construction on the Mark and Paula Hurd Welcome Center. The building serves as an inviting front door to Baylor’s physical campus in Waco, Texas, and as a threshold to the University’s distinctive traditions, faith and history.

The Hurd Center houses the McLane Family Alumni Center, a 1,000-seat ballroom, Varsity Coffee and Soda, the Baylor Spirit Shop, and spaces devoted to student life activities and networking events. The front door of the Center opens into Carlton Hall, a 19,000-square-foot space filled with digital signage, kiosks and four 96-foot pillars that start on the floor of the building and extend beyond the roof. Inside each pillar is a distinctive and immersive digital experience tied to a theme–Aspire, Connect, Reflect and Amplify–designed to connect visitors to the Baylor story.

While the Hurd Center was nearing completion, Baylor contacted RHB to help design a campus visit experience for the admissions team’s presence in the Center that would match the technical sophistication and grandeur of the building itself.

Challenge

Because the final stages of construction on the Hurd Center were still underway when RHB began our engagement, certain components of the in-person experience weren’t yet solidified for the Baylor team–hardware hadn’t been installed and IT systems were still being finalized. However, Baylor had a vision that they needed RHB to bring to life. They asked us to devise a solution that would:

• Make events and campus visit options easy to navigate and register for before the students arrived on campus, allowing anonymous browsing so that students, parents, counselors and others could peruse the event offerings available
• Include a login-based aspect so that certain personalized information–like upcoming registered events, past attended events and personalized recommendations–could display (and to do so in a way that wouldn’t require students to remember a username or password)
• Be highly customized to each student
• Reflect the value of a Baylor education as well as the investment that students and their families make in the university
• Enable the Baylor team to control, in real time, the information displayed on the monitors, kiosks and video screens throughout the Hurd Center during the campus visit

The RHB team analyzed blueprints, photos, architectural renderings and other details supplied by Baylor to understand basic but necessary information about the Center–from how people would enter and walk through the facility, to what technology they would encounter at each touchpoint of the experience, to the sizing and specifications of the hardware that would eventually be installed.

We strove to create a solution that was seamless and intuitive for visitors, a meaningful and coherent extension of the storytelling happening throughout the Center that would deliver on-demand, personalized information for every student on their campus visit. Finally, we sought to create a sustainable solution that the internal Baylor team could maintain with as little effort as possible, and built in such a way that it could grow and adapt as their use cases expanded over time.

Solution

RHB created visitBAYLOR, a unified Portal-based experience serving as the hub for all admission-related events–including registration, day-of itineraries and post-event surveys–as well as dynamic components that serve the digital signage in the Hurd Center.

The visitBAYLOR experience begins before students arrive on campus, with a clean and easily navigable listing of events for which students can register. What was once a process that involved multiple landing pages and links for different types of events was streamlined into one unified interface. What’s more, visitBAYLOR provides dynamic and ongoing suggestions, similar to streaming platforms, beckoning a student to check-in frequently for “what’s next” at Baylor for them.

visitBAYLOR enables prospective students to login without a username or password, check-in with QR codes and save or update an Aspiration (which is later displayed in the Aspire Pillar, along with their name and hometown, during their campus visit). In addition, visitBAYLOR allows students to share read-only access to their portal, receive prompts on where to go along with their itinerary, print their own badge on-demand through Slate, provide feedback on events and receive recommendations about which events they should attend.

Starting with the Welcome Pods visitors encounter when they enter the Hurd Center to check-in for their campus visit, continuing to the display screens behind the John Cheng Welcome Desk (where they’re greeted by members of the admissions team) and ending with the auditorium screen where the Baylor team delivers their pre-tour presentation, RHB created dynamic content controlled through Slate, including:

• A welcome screen displaying the names of all students scheduled to tour campus
• Maps showing visitor counts from states and countries
• Personalized badges printed on-demand directly from Slate upon check-in
• QR codes to take quizzes (the results of which dynamically appear on subsequent screens)
• Functionality that highlights connections between visitors–like shared hometown or academic interests–that encourages visitors to connect with one another

Once the presentation is over and their campus tour begins, students have access to a day-of app experience, complete with an itinerary, campus map, information about their tour guide and alerts that help them stay on track.

visitBAYLOR was intentionally designed to be a seamless and intuitive experience for prospective students–and for all members of the Baylor team charged with controlling the screens in the future. As the team adds events, they can easily create new arrangements of content for the screens and expand the use cases for visitBAYLOR, even beyond admissions.

Results

visitBAYLOR enables the University to make deep and personalized connections with campus visitors long before they apply by communicating to those students that they are more than just one of many students shuffling through campus on any given day. These students have been seen, referred to by name and received timely notifications about each component of their visit experience. visitBAYLOR is an extension of the welcome they receive from the Baylor staff in person, and a manifestation of the University’s dedication to a Christian understanding of hospitality: “Hospitality is both action and affection, receiving and loving a stranger.” It entails treating friends and strangers alike.

“Thanks to the Hurd Welcome Center, the prospective student and guest experience at Baylor is levels above what it was before,” said Ross VanDyke, associate vice president of enrollment management recruiting, marketing and innovation at Baylor. “Prospective students are greeted with a personal connection to Baylor earlier on in their campus visit experiences. The campus visit experience proves that, at Baylor, these students will be seen and known right out of the gate.”

While Baylor timed the deployment of visitBAYLOR to coincide with the opening of the Mark and Paula Hurd Welcome Center, RHB can tailor Slate-controlled experiences such as these to any physical environment. Making students–or donors or alumni–feel seen and welcome, and doing so in a way that is coherent to your institution, scales.