The Mobile-First Campus: Implementing SMS to Drive 46% Growth in Enrollment

Welcome everyone to today’s webinar. We’re really excited to have Gina and Sean from
Post University joining us today. We’re going to go over some of the methods and
tactics and programming that they built internally to really drive what I consider to
be a masterclass in enrollment and admissions inside of their university, post
-university. When we started working with them, it’s been over 10 years in our
partnership, and the having a front row seat to this has been quite an adventure,
and I think that in my perspective has been a true partnership in that how we
built and managed a lot of the things that are currently in our offering today to
specifically meet post needs. So without further ado, I’m gonna turn it over to Gina
and Sean, who are gonna walk us through their starting point and how they got to
where they are today, which has been substantive growth. Gina. – Thank you so much,
John, and thanks for having us. We do wanna get into a little bit of the journey
of post -university and I know when we hear 46 % growth we’re thinking oh my god is
that even possible and when we think back through the last decade there’s a lot of
moving parts and pieces to how those results came about and it wasn’t always pretty
and we weren’t in a fantastic place in terms of collaboration in building a truly
extraordinary student student experience about a decade ago. So we wanna go back a
little bit to how that journey began. And we can’t do that without talking about
the silos across the university and where those were located and how they were
impacting the growth and the success overall in growing our student census.
So we look at that next slide here, we’re talking about the common disconnect. And
in order to have true success, this common disconnect has got to be figured out.
We need to understand what elements of the organization are not functioning and not
connecting to truly be extraordinary. I’ll always say you can have a team that
doesn’t really connect, doesn’t have that vibe, and you can have pretty decent
results for a short period of time. But to look at a 10 -year continuous cycle of
continued growth and working together and finding out ways to be extraordinary, it
has to all come together. There are no exceptions. And so for those of us in the
education space, there is a common finger -pointing relationship that occurs between
marketing and admissions. In my experience, I started at Post University in 2010 as
one of the directors of admissions. And so it’s very near and dear to my heart,
and that has transformed into working across all of enrollment. And so when I
started in 2010, the common thread was, well, marketing’s not providing us the
inquiries that are going to convert. And the marketing response was, “Of course we
are, you’re just not converting them.” And so it was a back and forth dynamic that
could have lasted forever until somebody said, “You know what? We’re actually on the
same team, and if we’re going to do this, we have to have just a blind faith and
trust that what you’re providing is the best out there, and what we’re doing in
terms of working those students through this experience is best in class. And we had
to have a little bit of blind faith in order to begin that foundation of trust. We
call that foundation the engines of success. If you don’t have the fundamental
relationship, like I said a moment ago, forget about the long -term consistent
results. So the marketing admission dynamic started to shift. And then we had the
admissions financial aid, right? So we kind of kicked the can a little bit down
into the enrollment team. And this is prior to the enrollment team concept even
being formed. So it was admissions over here, financial aid over here, advising over
here, and you had more of the finger pointing. So admissions would say financial
aid, I don’t wanna send you my student, you’re gonna lose my student. Advising would
say, well, gosh, admissions just keeps sending students that are not going to be
successful. And so those dynamics, the same thing with the admissions marketing
transition, had to shift. And that enrollment team was formed in about 2015 -16 when
we said this is one team with one result to generate an extraordinary student
experience throughout all of enrollment, all the way through to graduation. Now,
there’s a lot of touch points in that journey from inquiry to graduation. But it
was a challenge that we knew we had to figure out and make sure we were best in
class in all areas of the journey. So when we look at the next slide here,
we can see how we were functioning. It was all about me and I don’t mean me
personally. Every associate across their independent function was focused on themselves
and maybe even their department. So it was this siloed leadership of admissions
doesn’t talk to financial aid, advising they’re the problem, academics forget about
it, they’re not even in the same location. Financial aid, student accounts,
it was all working with each other. And unfortunately, the systems that we had at
the time were reinforcing those behaviors. So there wasn’t the common thread of the
one -stop shop to house information, to house student information,
student conversations. And when we’re talking about our texting solution, now think
about this, you know, 2015 -16, we were just getting into the world of how we can
more effectively communicate with our students. And so we knew we had to figure out
texting. And so we started to think, what are some options out there? And this was
just independent within the admissions team. And we found out real quick that the
world of communication and texting has an entire compliance and regulatory element
associated with it. And John, I know we talk about this a lot. And we wanted it
so desperately, but we also had to figure out how to do it right. and at post
-university we have something called a decision tree. And the decision tree is, number
one, first and foremost, the safety and well -being of all. Number two is,
are we fully compliant? We do not engage or move forward in any activity,
regardless of how beneficial it is to our business, if we are not fully compliant.
The third thing is, is it the right thing to do and is at the right time to do
it. And the fourth part of the decision tree is if you’re going to do it, make it
extraordinary. And so every decision we make has to go through those four elements.
And when we started thinking about texting, we certainly were not understanding number
two, which is how do we remain fully compliant first and foremost? John,
I don’t know if you or Sean wanted to add anything to that when we were just
thinking about what texting could do to our growth in our business. Well I can kind
of layer in and it’s interesting in that both of you came from the admissions side
because Sean before he became the head of marketing operations was on the admissions
side and was one of the early pilots that we enabled over on post -university and
it’s I can attest that that is the form and function of every decision that’s made
inside of your university. Because first of all, there were some holes in compliance
that Sean was tasked and his team were tasked with applying. And that when a
student was opting out, there wasn’t a consistent opt -out process across all mediums
of channels. And that included marketing, that included admissions, that included
finance. And so the first kind of foundational layers of what Sean and Amanda,
who is another member of the admissions team at now, and now is the person who
trains all of the post -university users on our system on how to use it, came to
us and said, “This is our desired state. Can you help us meet it?” And that was
the foundation of the system for education that we built today. And believe me,
But I tell you that post -university gave us a lot of challenges along the way. All
were in the effort of becoming exceptional, and it has been a privilege and to see
how minds work in the application and how, you know, what a lot of universities are
just turning to today have been in place and commonplace inside of post -university
for the last 10 years. So
I can layer it on with regards to the challenges that you supplied us with and the
solutions that we presented often came back with, this is a good start, but it’s
not excellent. And we need you to add this. And I think that, you know, a lot of
the things that our customers love about our application set today, foundationally
came from users like you, Sean, Amanda and the management and uh,
marketing teams there at post -university and how we can, how we helped in the
mobile first strategy, which was also part of your growth initiatives.
I completely agree. Um, the only thing I would add to that is it was quickly
identified that texting was the preferred medium of communication that was very
quickly identified And that just is extrapolated year over year that this is the
preferred medium. And we equally were met with the TCPA regulations and compliance
matters. So with one, you must take on the other. And that was the journey with
true dialogue and the associates internally was understanding what was the product
that we needed? How can it be most effective from a communication standpoint to the
end user? How can it be most efficient?
of building the infrastructure of people, process, systems was starting to form.
And so we had the admissions marketing dynamic. Then we had, it’s not about
admissions, it’s about enrollment. It’s not about a star, it’s about student success.
It’s about student performance and engagement and graduating and beyond graduation.
So we took that small siloed lens and opened it up to what we called through our
strategic planning was the imagined future. And we joke sometimes, you know,
not to be confused with the imaginary future. But if we took down all the barriers
and we said, what can we really accomplish here with the right people in the right
place doing the right things at the right time and the efficiencies and the systems
and the ability to connect with our students, what are the real possibilities? And
so to John’s point, yeah, we were around 5 ,000 students. Thinking about 25 ,000
students was not reality for most.
And so again, that brought us to a point where we have to evaluate the folks and
the leadership and the mindset and really create a new way of thinking. And so this
image on the left shifted the way that we were functioning and operating.
And we said, “It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s not about any of us.
How foolish. How selfish of us. We’re here for one reason and that is for our
students.” And so how can we figure out how to come together, create the systems
that can support that way of thinking and really do this growth thing. And so if
you look at the chart on the right, you can see we were starting to form those
things. And I call this the hockey stick image because you’ve got the stick part on
the bottom that hits the puck, and then you have the stick part on the top that
you hold. And that’s that hockey stick image. And it’s a way to really get into a
position to create the ability to grow and to grow quickly. And so when we started
thinking about, well, how are we gonna communicate? We were still in a very one -to
-one approach. And for those of you who don’t know, Post University is driven by our
driving tenant, which is Post makes it personal. And it’s not just something we say
or part of a marketing ad. It’s how we function as an organization and everything
we do. We make it extraordinary by making it personal. That goes to every single
touch point. When we started talking, well, what is this mass communication,
this short code texting? Many of us thought, well, that doesn’t really embody who we
are. We’re personal. We should have a personal form of communication. We brought and
a new chief information officer, and he was having a conversation, John, I think it
was with you and your team, saying, hold on a second, we can still make that
personal, but connect with a larger volume of students. Let’s look into this.
Let’s really see how this can transform our business. And we had some late adopters
on the admission side as well. Well, no, I like to text my students, I have
personal connections with my students, it’s all about that personalization. And we
said, sure, but think about the efficiencies and how we can take that same message,
create a cohort of students in the same status, if you will,
and connect with them in a personalized way and utilize this texting solution as a
feeder to ensure we have that personalized voice conversation.
F F F F
Je
we were able to, I mean, there’s no shortage of demand. We just couldn’t capture
it. Well, now we can capture it. And Sean, you were front and center in creating a
real way to make that happen. Now, imagine future -wise sounds pretty simple, but all
of the pieces and the elements and the integration and figuring out how to find the
right solutions to solve the problems that we needed was crucial. And we didn’t go
the easy route, Sean, and then I’ll let you get into specifics because you’re much
more eloquent than I am. But when we looked at the options that we were given,
we were going through a total SIS transformation,
and texting was a part of it. And the admissions team, after having been working
with true dialogue for the last several months prior, months prior,
they almost walked out. When we said we’re thinking about shifting to the SIS
texting platform, they said, “Not if you want us to continue to do what we do.”
Because it was that crucial to the business and to their process and to ensuring
student satisfaction. And Sean, I’ll let you really explain a little bit more there.
It was a Pivotable moment. – Yeah, it really was and Gina’s not lying.
People don’t like change. Associates just do not like change.
Even if it’s for a better product, they don’t like change. They get comfortable with
what they’re using. In fact, it took a while for us to get into the swing of
starting to use true dialogue in their interface. There was pushback. always going to
be pushed back when you’re implementing any sort of change.
So, you know, we had established true dialogue. There was a lot of effort in
developing this interface that works so well for the associate and for the associate
at all levels, which is a key point of this. This is, you know, we’re talking a
lot about admissions and you think of admissions and recruitment. This is a tool
that’s used across the institution in every department and all of the information is
collected and stored so everybody has a lens on everything but we do have other
systems as Gina mentioned our new SIS system and most systems most CRM’s most
student systems they most telephony systems even they do offer some form of a
texting solution And that was the case with us. We brought on a new SIS.
We brought on a new telephony system. And it made sense to try to, even using
TrueDialog as the gateway provider of the messaging, because their service is second
to none when it comes to that, we still wanted to try to use some of these other
systems text interfaces. And that lasted maybe a week with people testing.
They would not use the other systems because they are not designed for efficiency.
They are not designed for transparency. They are not designed for efficacy. And that
is what, I mean, the team created this over years. So, you know, when You’re
dealing with that. Now, TrueDialog has the ability to integrate into your systems as
well so that you can preserve that interface. But people don’t like change,
and they certainly don’t like change when it’s clear that they are going in the
opposite direction and what will improve their operations and efficiencies.
I can kind of layer in one thing, which I found very interesting. Again, watching
and participating at a distance was the two challenges that kind of came after the
initial build out for post on their one -to -one was number one, there was a ask of
the marketing team to say, well, this is great that all the one -to -one stuff works
so well. However, we want to incorporate an ability to do mass outreach, but at a
personal level. So along with post -university, we developed our systems to be able
to send out very large broadcast messages from an enterprise level short code that
we had procured on their behalf. But then also route all of that traffic back to
the appropriate person inside of post -university and continue to make it personal.
We call that the stickiness of the student journey. I your your your technical team
came up with the stickiness component of it. Yeah that that that became one of the
challenges and the second challenge came to be that well this is great but it’s
also important for us as we build out all of these different teams over here on
the left that as we built out and gone to a team structure that as we’re
maintaining it from one team member to another along the student journey that we
also have a histrionic view of the student journey as well. So when admissions picks
it up for marketing, when marketing picks it up, hands it off to finance, that
there is a threaded conversation between the student and all the groups inside of
post -university to make a much, oh, I see that you just got off the phone with
our admissions department. Are you ready to start your FAFSA application? And
providing that insight, number one, allowed I think a much more personal journey for
the student in my assertion and viewpoint, seeing the growth internally that post
went through. And the second thing, which kind of goes unnoticed, and I think a lot
of people don’t pay attention to, but one of the things that they think that the,
you know, a lot of texting systems all can send and receive text, the threading of
the conversations. But the second thing is that we really built in some nifty
notification systems. So if the reps were not sitting in front of their desk, they
had both a mobile app notification as well as email notifications. And we went
overboard as well as in -app. So as they’re inside of our application,
providing a ding and a bell notification that there’s incoming conversations for them
to address. Most specifically, I think that this went along with another piece that
Gina and Sean and team at post -university, and I’ve heard this time and time again,
which is the speed to lead. And that really became highly important for marketing
because I think the things that they’ve determined was, is that you have three
minutes to respond to an, it’s specifically on inquiries to respond to a prospective
student without them immediately losing interest and moving on to finding another
institution because they’re also address. They’re also, you could find them all over
the web today. So if you apply and they don’t have that immediate gratification of
getting a response, they’re on and off to the next one. So there were a lot of
challenges flown into us and and an interesting story, and it still makes me laugh
today. I’m sure Sean doesn’t laugh quite so much. This is that when we turned on
the personalization of the short code, the first campaign that they did, I got a
call about 10 minutes after they had launched their initial outreach out of
marketing. And Sean said, “Can you please make it stop?” Our call centers are
flooded right now with people that are and inquiries and we’ve got 400 people inside
the organization and we can’t keep up. So just an interesting anecdotal story but we
learned over time how they were able to disperse those in a more even fashion and
not their student teams. I just want to add one thing to that,
John. Thank you for bringing up that
But you know, speed to lead, we hear that often, you’ll hear that colloquially
across the industry, and I don’t think it just applies to EDU, but you know, very
much so free to you. But it really goes beyond speed to lead. That’s the first
touch point. It’s critical. But we actually just saw a an industry study where the
students and mostly I was surprised that it’s just the traditional undergrad student,
it’s even the graduate student, they’re looking for acceptance within the first day
at a rate of 25 to 30 percent. Now, is that ridiculously extreme and probably
something that we should be striving for? Yes, but that’s the mindset. That is the
mindset of the customer now in the new world is they are looking for that kind of
movement with that kind of expedience. So that’s where it’s so important.
And you mentioned something about the mobile app, which is another critical component
of the true dialogue service, especially in this work from home world that we are
now in. Now I know people have different levels of that, but most companies that I
speak with have some portion, if not a large portion of the company that are
working from home. With that, there’s some different times that people are working,
there’s some adjustments that are made, having that ability to have that notification
in real time and being able to communicate with students in that real time.
It’s not just that speed to lead, it’s that speed to touch point. And that is
something that is critical when we’re talking about any sort of progression in any
of your businesses, but it’s very, very critical and in EDU. – And anecdotally,
one other thing, as Gina mentioned, the compliance side, the other challenge that you
gave that was difficult on the mobile app was, is that we want a mobile app, but
there can’t be any student data in there for ramp security.
So if we turn it off, there can be no student data resident on the phone. All it
is is an app that basically will pull in student communications and then when the
app is shut, there is no student data that actually resides on the device. So that
was a fun other little twist that you guys threw at us that we were able to help
accommodate. But one of the many regulatory layers and components about the entire
process is those little nuances that are very, very important.
– Yeah, we do a great job of keeping track of what those are and how to still be
successful, even with all of the rules and regulations. And John, what you’ve been
able to do is respond very quickly in how we can solve potential compliance
concerns. And that’s another key element that when you don’t have the right solution.
I mean the idea of losing text for a short period of time is catastrophic to the
student’s success and to what we do in the eight -week cycles and the monthly cycles
for nursing. And so to be able to have a solution that can adapt and pivot and
move and move quickly with how we function, how fast we’re going all the time is
absolutely crucial.
So when we look at Sean you were talking about exactly what I was thinking in that
it’s not about speed to lead anymore while yes that’s necessary it’s about speed to
connecting with the student when they want to connect and in that presentation we’re
referring to the new student whether traditional or online as the modern learner and
students are shifting the way that they want to learn and how they want the
platform to be
to be 24 /7. And if we’re not having an option for a student to connect at a time
that’s convenient for them, we think about a nursing population working overnights.
And the best time for them to think about school and ask questions about their
enrollment process is probably one o ‘clock in the morning, when it’s a little bit
slower and they’re in between doing rounds. And so having, and we are overnight from
about 1 a .m. to 6 a .m., 7 a .m., exclusively through tech.
look like in terms of creating all of the functionality around getting the routine
and the precision and the technology in place with the right people in the right
infrastructure. When we move this forward, I think a big piece of this on the next
slide is looking at the communication plan. And so we talk about breaking down those
silos, but Texting in the right systems and the right communication with students is
crucial, but how do you organize that? How do you get operational and tactical with
how to be as efficient as possible? So what this team has done across enrollment is
every Friday they come together. It’s departments across the organization, and they
come up with what the communication plan is for the next week. So you’re
understanding, okay, what populations are we looking to communicate with? What, to
your point, John, you mentioned earlier, what are the campaigns that we have running
in the background? Those nurturing campaigns that are targeting different populations
to make sure that we’re still there and we’re connecting with them. Then we say,
well, what’s unique about this time? Is it start week? Do we have uh midterms
coming up? How can we engage communication? Now what did we send students last week?
You know we don’t want to double up and we don’t want to be repetitive and you
know students have opportunities to opt out and we never want to over communicate
and we want to make sure it’s an impactful message. What’s the overlap in the
communication? Is admission sending something that’s going to directly impact financial
aid sending something? And is it the same population? What time are those going out?
And then there’s a repository. So there’s all of those key pieces, very complicated
if you really want to have a successful communication plan that is taking all of
that into consideration. And this team has gotten so, it’s amazing to sit on that
call and just listen and watch all of the pieces and how so personalized you can
take texting, let’s say 100 ,000 text messages, but they all have a point,
they’re all going to the right place and it’s all mapped out. And you’d think this
call was four hours, it’s 30 minutes. It’s an agile, quick call to watch the key
stakeholders come and make sure our students are getting the right communication at
the right time. And then There’s a repository of data around the communications that
we’ve sent historically. We all know email, very limited in what it receives and the
clicks and the response, and we have it for all of our texts. What texts did we
send out at what time and what was the response rate? So when we’re sitting there
on that call and we’ll say, “Well, what’s a good text we sent out last Halloween,”
Or, you know, you try to engage with what’s occurring at that moment and,
oh, this one did really well. Look at the data and the metrics surrounding that
one. So okay, well, let’s revamp it a little bit. Let’s add this key piece to it
because this week is a little different than last year this week. And so you have
all of these pieces that are credibly organized with data arounding it, driving the
decision in the communication plan every Friday for the future week. And once you
can build the cadence around that, it becomes a necessity to utilize your resources
and get the optimized, the most optimized results. Again,
that hockey stick growth, all of these key elements had to come together. – So I
just wanna– – You’re part of those calls sometimes too, yeah. – Yeah, I just wanted
to piggyback on that, your spot on. You don’t need to be at that level to start
to see a return in success. The return in success that you start to see immediately
is what drives you to want to get to that level of excellence,
to continue to feed that growth. Because once you just embark in this ecosystem,
depending on what level of texting that you’re currently using, whether you’re using
it at a small scale, one -to -one, not at all. Once you start really starting to
leverage the power of the technology, you will, ’cause your people know the business
and you’ll start to see data that helps drive your decisions. And from that data,
from those decisions, you’ll be able to formulate that cadence, that communication
tree or all you’re doing is revamping rather than constantly creating.
But you know what you start to see really is the fuel to help you get to that
level that Gina was referencing of those conversations that we have now. Hey you
don’t want it once you find that consistency that’s it’s a killer. You’ve got to
keep figuring out what’s that next iteration of how we’re going to keep taking this
to the next level. And getting this fully integrated in what we’re doing,
having all of the text messages in the conversations part of a very quick and easy
way to see the student journey. And so that’s our next iteration. So if we want to
move to the next slide, just a little bit more on driving retention and
satisfaction. And so how can we utilize this? It’s not just a marketing enrollment
admissions to generate interest. It is part of the communication plan for students
throughout their entire journey at post. And those students who, and you know,
we’ve partnered with a with some behavioral analytics and predictive analytic tools
that can really support us in figuring out different populations. So you’ve got that
student who’s getting always, they don’t want to connect all that much, they’ve got
this, they’re an individualist, they’re doing their thing, but it’s good every now
and then to give them a little boost. And so you have this population that can
send a really personalized, targeted message to that student who doesn’t really want
to communicate too often, but every now and then gets a little bit of a motivator
that says, ah, well, they do care. You know, my great results aren’t going
unnoticed. That’s just one example. And there’s examples for many different populations
throughout the journey. And our students love that. So when we look at our retention
and the way that we manage that team, on the next slide, there’s a visual that
really shows how POST has said, okay, we’ve got different students at different
learning places. And it’s not a one -size -fits -all. Again, we’ve got to personalize
the communication. And so we look at that first -term student. That first -term
student is just trying to figure this out. They need a lot of communication. They
need to figure out their time management. They need to understand how to really make
school a priority and fit it into their busy schedules. They need a lot of
potential hand -holding to understand the blackboard and how to navigate through their
course. And then we figure that out. We get three six credits under our balance.
Okay, all right, I’m figuring this out. We go into that first year. And again,
this is managed differently across the enrollment team. And so there’s teams,
individual teams for each of these, supporting each of these areas for students.
So if a student is in their six to 24 credit, it’s a different advising team. And
they can relate to, this is a crucial point in your journey to graduation. Getting
this first year under your belt, I mean, even the statistics will say, students
who’ve taken five or six classes, their likelihood of continuing to persist and
getting to that end goal is significantly higher than prior to those first four or
five courses. And then we get into what we call career and programmatic student
success advising. And that is where we start to really enhance the conversations
around what’s life after graduation? How can we support you? And so the communication
here is really around global market, business world,
things that that are relevant, articles that are about the specific majors,
I mean we can pull a list and get every student who’s majoring in psychology and
shoot them a really cool article or text around what’s going on in the world of
psychology, what’s going on in the marketplace outside of it. And so those get
really fun and creative in building a repository about what’s really inspiring
students at that point in their career. They’re persisting incredibly well. How do we
continue to enhance and make them engaged and happy?
Sean, you’re a big piece of this as well, working with our Vice President of
Retention every day and making sure that our communication is exactly where we need
it
Um, you know, these are conversations that, you know, are ongoing, um, but it’s it’s
really in a refinement place right now is, you know, the work has been done,
but it’s ever evolving. And we, we are our data driven institution. The data that
is provided to us helps us pivot as to where we need to enhance where we need to
change. Um, so, you know, that’s the value of those ongoing conversations, but,
you know, through the years of of refinement in, in these areas, it’s more so in a
kind of wellness, you know, place right now, just maintaining to making sure that
there’s not any holes in, in, in the ship.
I just got a message in, and I think it’s an appropriate time to kind of lay it
lay it out for you guys.
But one of the people attending just said,
this is wonderful information. They’re saying, how did you start? ‘Cause you guys are
so advanced at this point that I think trying to think back and just think, well,
we’re quite advanced at this point, but there was a starting point. And how did you
start? Because I think that’s probably one of the biggest hurdles that everyone has
in getting along this path. But, you know, when you start looking at building these
repositories, it doesn’t, you didn’t need a, an analyst, I’m assuming at the
beginning of doing things that you’re doing now, it just basically trying to
determine what KPIs were important and then starting to collect them. If it were in
charge of, I am one of the least organized directors when I was a director.
And so lucky for us, we had an incredibly organized director of admissions on the
main campus and a VP of admissions across online. And we didn’t have the systems
that were dashboard click of a button giving us all of this data. I mean, this is
SharePoints, Excel documents, Microsoft Word. We had something called,
we still have it sadly called the S drive, which is just basically a file on your
computer that has thousands of Excel documents that has just been how we’ve gone
about tracking it. And so that’s where it all began until we said,
you know, we’re really need to invest in some tools to make this easier. And I’d
be lying if I said all of those things that I just reference didn’t still exist
today. There is no one click easy. We’re building it in five years.
I’ll say something very different. I promise you that. But today it really is just
an investment because it’s so important. It’s an investment of time, communication,
weekly daily dialogue around how to leverage the way we communicate to support
student engagement. And it’s embedded in everything we do. I wish it was a silver
bullet, but it’s embedded in our entire makeup every week.
– I think the other thing that I’ve noticed that’s important to the person who asked
that question is that the one thing I saw inside of POTH, with exception to
compliance, which there was no room for failure there, but I think one of the
things that I saw as they built this program out as well on the analytics side is
that they weren’t afraid to fail. And as long as the failures provided learnings for
future optimizations as far as what not to do, but not collecting information and
failing was not acceptable. Failing and collecting important information along the way
is important too. But the biggest thing was is that I saw a concerted effort to
just And I think that it seems like an overwhelming task, having built a business,
I think that anytime you’re doing something new, it’s hard to figure out how to
start, but oftentimes it’s just putting in the effort and getting a start in
establishing baseline and seeing how you guys did it at a very, you know,
I would say, you know, you weren’t always a masterclass, it was 101 in 2000.
And lucky for everyone on this call, we took the brunt of the failure already.
Well, the other key piece is that these folks,
we hired three people, I will say, that exclusively run the lists and send the
messages. And this has to be very controlled, because John,
you mentioned it earlier, when you send 300 ,000 text messages and try to stop it,
it’s not the easiest thing to do. And I would be the last person you want sending
a text to a list. I’d have to check it 400 times. I’d be nervous about it. We’ve
got people who are so built for that role that they have all the confidence in the
world. They pull the list. They know it’s accurate. They write the text. They check
it and they send it. And so you have to make sure you have the right people in
that role auditing and confirming that the information is correct. We still make
mistakes. We still make mistakes and we send a very specific message to a population
that’s gonna have no clue what we’re talking about. And then we come together and
we say, okay, do we retract it? Do we send another message? Do we just let it go?
You know, what do we think going to cause more problems or less and we have a
discussion about it, we make a decision, we move on. It’s okay.
This has been a great discussion. I have a couple of questions that have come over.
Can I go ahead and ask the first one? Please. Really quickly. Great. In your
experience, what has been the most, what has been the effectiveness of text campaigns
over other channels?
Not even close. Okay. There is text.
But I think one of the people, your head of marketing once stated,
and very eloquently, email is a great way to talk to parents. It’s a horrible way
to talk to students. Yes. That’s a great point because I do sometimes focus more on
the online than the traditional main campus. But yes, email is crucial in parent
communication. In 15 years, will that still be the case? – Who knows? – And being
more in the marketing side of the house, there is still value in email.
It is just dwindling year over year over year. But is it important to keep that
alive so that you’re checking all of the boxes? Certainly. Is it more valuable in,
it’s almost more valuable to confirm an email via text so that somebody goes in and
checks it for the bulk of the information that they might need. So emails are an
information dump. They are not a call to action driven medium like they once were.
If you’re really looking for something, and I think the keyword is engagement. So
when we’re looking for engagement, texting is second to none. And to Gina’s point,
there’s not a close second. – No, And we still stand by, and maybe we’re a little
archaic in this thinking, but we connect voice to voice with every single student
that enrolls at host. And so while texting is crucial to continuing conversation and
being quick to respond, it is, in my words, a feeder to have a real true
personalized connection. I think the other thing that’s interesting when you talk
about the other channels as well and to Sean’s point it doesn’t diminish those other
channels but you know one of the things that we heard early on as well as is that
your reps were doing one -to -one communications and saying I’m going to call you
from this number in five minutes and we can finish the rest of our conversation and
the completion rates on those phone calls almost doubled from when they were blindly
calling them uh saying same we’ll call you tomorrow.
You know, one thing that students today don’t do, it seems that I’ve learned from
watching all of our EDU students, but paying special attention to post is is that
students do not answer telephone calls unless they know who it is. And they do not
check their inbox with the exception of once a week or without prompt, as Sean
mentioned, please check your inbox. There’s some important information waiting for you
in there. And we all know you can be engaged in a text conversation with someone
for 10 minutes and they say, I’m going to give you a quick call and you’re like,
ah, why I don’t want to talk. I was just doing just fine,
just texting, right? We student or not, there is an ease to,
to just continuing the text call. There’s a lot of times I just won’t You know,
I’m sorry, I’m not in a place where I can can really communicate. I just I can
text better than the best of them. That’s great. Well,
then the next one is, and you spoke to this a little bit earlier in the
presentation, but what advice do you have for other higher ed institutions to start
their SMS journey or to to improve their SMS journey. The best thing I can think
of is don’t make a decision based on what’s available or easy.
Figure out exactly what you want and don’t really settle. I mean,
there are student information platforms that are going to provide certain solutions,
but they’re the experts in the student information platform. And so we’ve always
wanted to know.
system and so it doesn’t have to all come from the same company. You find the
expert, define the ones that can pivot and adapt to exactly what you want. Many
company, oh, we can’t do that. We can’t do that. They can do it. Somebody else can
do it, right? And figure out a way to integrate and get the absolute best solutions
that make the most sense for you and go with it because it will revolutionize the
result. And that was something we learned a little too late, but it’s transforming
the way we even operate today in finding the expert in creating the solution that
makes the most sense. I got another one that’s in here on the side and thank you,
Gina and Sean, but the question is, did I hear you correctly? One area of pushback
from admissions was them having to share phone numbers for texting as opposed to
having their own individual number. If so, could you elaborate more on that topic?
And he had a follow -up as well. It says also, who else did you look at before
bulk texting solution and what made you go with true dialogue? Yeah,
so I think my comment was about admissions giving pushback on getting away from just
one to one texting and engaging in the short code texting. But the beauty about it
is with this solution is we can say, you know what? We’re gonna send out this
message and then we’re gonna route it to these seven people or this one person,
which can be the original. You don’t wanna route a 400 text message to one person,
you’ve gotta make sure that it’s protected properly, but that’s the next level of
being able to route it. Now, Sean, you can speak to, I mean,
our current SIS provider came with a texting solution.
And again, we were in the mindset of we want one system. And so of course it
makes sense, you know, from a cost analysis, it was close
and we went with it. I think for a moment, we piloted it. You know, we’re never
gonna make a decision without a definitive AB test, but we went for it and that’s
when the admissions team as a department said, if this is what you’re giving us,
either cut the goals in half, the expectations in half, or I can’t do this.
So, there was no mobile element, nothing was filtering into the same section,
so if Sean spoke to a student and then I spoke to a student, you weren’t going to
see any of the discussion that he had already had. So really from a text
perspective, you were starting a conversation with a student fresh each and every
time. And then they tried to fix that and it was just clunky and the communication
was like a 37 -click process. And it just didn’t serve the personalized approach for
a student. How can I pick up? – It was cumbersome at best. – It was brutal, yeah.
– It was really, really poor. And we were in the same experience with our telephony
system. They offered an SMS component to it. It just was not suitable to the
business needs. and, you know, back to the, you know, true dialogue, you know,
there were a couple of companies we were looking at. It was still kind of new.
We just knew that we didn’t want what we were offered back to Gina’s point of, you
know, this is, this is an area of the business that you don’t want to be
disjointed. You don’t want to fit a square peg in a circle hole when it comes to
sexing. It needs to be an exceptional experience for all parties involved, not just
the student for the associate, there needs to be fluidity there, it’s a must have,
but you know true dialogue from the beginning, you know, they were always very, very
willing and excited to work with us and build the product that we needed and wanted
over time. and that was not the feeling that we had received from other places that
we had spoken to at the time. – And quickly. – Yeah, it was more of a, well,
you’re gonna get what you get and we’ll see what we can do. And you’re gonna find
that with a lot of agencies, not just texting, but very much so in that space. And
that has never been a feeling that we’ve experienced with True Dialogue. – I think
the other thing, if I and kind of piece things together a little bit and answer
that question. And I thought that this was kind of extended across the organization
change. It’s, you know, sometimes you have to force change ’cause people don’t like
to change. There was another piece that I think kind of goes off and unlooked at
across organizations who are using bulk texting in one capacity for part of their
business. And they’re using one -to -one texting through their call center application
or something else. The thing that was most important to post was maintaining
continuity of opt -outs. Again, it drills back down into compliance and I think that
their method was if a person opts out that there is a level of continuity
regardless of what platform they’re opting in or opting out of that there is an
understanding and adherence to the rules of which their admissions,
financial aid, marketing people, there is a there’s a standard of compliance.
They have written rules with regards to here’s how it works, here are the rules
that we want in place and adherence to those rules and training to those rules that
are started at a legal level, go over to all the other teams, but it is with the
focus of mitigating risk across the organization. Because to Gina’s point early in
the conversation, no matter how good it is for the business, it might be to say,
well, if they opted out of marketing, we still want to be able to do one -to -one
or understanding what the rules on the field are and saying,
here’s what our tolerance is, and here’s how we’re going to address each of these.
Post -university wrote it first and then built their communication strategy after they
built their compliance guidelines with regards to the rules of texting inside of post
-university.
That’s really well said because it can be a full -time job if you don’t have that
partnership between the texting vendor and the inside team and you’re not managing
that it can get away from you very quickly. And that is not a place with the new
guidelines that anybody wants to be. And when we look at, we have a thing that we
say across IT is no shiny new toys, right? Everyone’s out there with new things and
new vendors and new ways to do something. We have a lot of solutions that we
haven’t really optimized or figured out how to use. And so we went through this
journey of really understanding our IT, we’re still doing it. And part of that was
no shiny new toys. And so what that means is we already use this vendor for this
and this vendor for that. And if they provide texting, we should use them because
we already are engaged with them. And that was kind of part of our strategy until
we recognize that every strategy has an exception. And if you really look at what’s
best for the business and truly understand the ROI on it, you don’t always have to
fit a solution into an existing vendor. It could be much better long term to engage
in something new that can, again, integrate with some of the things that you have,
and that’s just where technology is headed. And so we had to reevaluate a little
bit of our thinking and recognize that it doesn’t have to fit. We can we can
create something that has a much better return.
Well, I want to be cognizant of time Yes, I know that we have a couple of minutes
left and thank you again so much Gina and Sean always enjoy getting to listen to
you and and and not only getting to listen today, but Having had a partnership
that’s lasted close to ten years and seeing the accomplishments that you’ve been able
to accomplish over the last 10 years and have a sliver of contribution in that has
just been a pleasure. So thank you both very much for taking time today. Thanks for
having a show. Likewise, thanks so much. Thank you. Take care everyone.