How Slate for Student Success Helps Higher Ed Connect Recruitment and Student Success
About 10 years ago, campus users of Slate for Admissions started asking Technolutions a question:
Could we use this thing to talk to current students?
The answer was essentially, “Well, it wasn’t really built for that. But there’s no reason you can’t.”
And the snowball started rolling toward what we now know as Slate for Student Success.
Today, institutions can use Slate for Student Success in a shared instance with admissions or in a standalone instance focused solely on continuing students. Either way, there’s a compelling opportunity to use the same platform that helped manage the recruitment journey to keep the conversation going well after that process transitions from admissions to the rest of campus.
There are plenty of reasons to do that. Here are a few that stand out.
Create Continuity for Students—and for the People Supporting Them
Think about the experience a student has during recruitment.
If you’ve used Slate, these students have spent months interacting with an institution through Slate-powered portals, forms, emails, texts, and other communications. They become familiar with how those experiences look, feel, and work.
Then they enroll.
Suddenly, they may be handed off to an entirely different system with a different interface, different credentials, different limitations, and a completely different experience for accessing the resources they need.
That handoff doesn’t have to be so abrupt.
With Slate for Student Success, institutions can continue using familiar portals, forms, and communications throughout the student journey. The experience can look and feel like a natural extension of what students have already encountered during recruitment.
That continuity matters.
If you’ve invested significant time and effort into creating a sophisticated, personalized experience for prospective students, it makes sense to think about how you maintain that experience once they become enrolled students.
And the benefit isn’t limited to students. A consistent platform can also create continuity for the people supporting them.
Keep Your Data Working for You
Continuity isn’t just about the user experience. It’s also about data.
Keeping as much information as possible in one place offers a real advantage. When admissions and student success operate with connected data, institutions can begin to see a more complete picture of the student journey.
Consider everything you learn about a student during the recruitment process: how they interact with your communications. Which channels they respond to. What pages and resources they engage with. What interests or questions they demonstrate along the way.
That information doesn’t have to become irrelevant once a student enrolls. It can become part of the context you use to support them throughout their time on campus.
You can use that history to better understand how individual students prefer to engage with your institution and which channels are most effective for reaching them. You can also see where students are spending time across your Slate instance and website.
That information can help institutions develop more targeted outreach, promote relevant resources, and potentially identify opportunities for earlier intervention.
The goal isn’t simply to collect more data. It’s to make the data you already have more useful.
Reduce the Number of Systems You Have to Maintain
Higher education institutions are managing an enormous number of systems, platforms, integrations, and vendors. Every additional system creates another environment to maintain, another contract to manage, and another user experience to support.
Slate for Student Success can help reduce some of that complexity.
With a solid single student information system (SIS) integration and a thoughtfully designed Slate instance, institutions can bring a range of student-facing functions under one umbrella, including early alerts, advising, registration, financial aid, housing, and other support resources.
That means fewer disconnected systems for users to navigate and fewer places where information and processes can become fragmented.
And if an institution already has Slate, there’s another obvious consideration: the platform is already there.
The opportunity is to think beyond how you’re using it today.
Scale Slate Across Campus Without Giving Everyone the Keys to the Kingdom
As Slate for Student Success expands across an institution, the number and variety of users can grow quickly.
That’s where tailoring user experiences becomes particularly important.
Your power users may need access to the deeper, behind-the-scenes aspects of Slate. They’re working in records, entities, availability templates, workflows, and all the other pieces that make the system work.
But a faculty member, orientation leader, or other tertiary user probably doesn’t need all of that.
They need the specific tools and resources relevant to their role.
Slate allows institutions to create tailored portal experiences for those users, giving them what they need without giving them more than they need.
That can help reduce permission headaches, keep users focused on the work in front of them, and limit the inevitable “permission creep” that can happen as a system spreads across campus.
It’s essentially the principle of least privilege applied to a campus-wide CRM: Give people access to what they need to do their jobs, and no more.
Recruitment Shouldn’t End at Enrollment
These are just a few of the reasons Slate for Student Success can be such a useful resource for institutions.
But together, they point to something bigger: the opportunity to keep the relationship with students going after the admissions process is over.
Recruiting a student doesn’t stop when they enroll. Institutions still have to keep students engaged, connected, and moving toward graduation. Making the data, tools, and communication history from the recruitment process available to the people supporting students can make that work much more connected.
That’s why I think of this as a kind of re-recruitment throughout the enrollment life cycle. You’re continuing to make the case for your institution, continuing to connect students with the resources they need, and continuing to give them reasons to stay engaged.
Slate for Student Success gives institutions a way to do that under one roof, while reducing the number of systems and handoffs students and staff have to navigate.
And in an environment where higher education institutions are being asked to do more with fewer resources, that’s worth paying attention to.
Want to Talk More About Slate for Student Success?
If you’re thinking about how Slate could support students beyond the admissions process, our Slate team would be happy to talk through what’s possible and what might make sense for your institution.
See Slate for Student Success in Action
Chapman University expanded its use of Slate beyond admissions to create a more connected approach to academic advising and student success—with significant gains in student engagement and advisor efficiency.
See how Chapman and The Parish Group put Slate for Student Success to work.
