These are notes from a talk by Mark Mazelin and Joshua Erlandson titled “Personalizing the New-Student Onboarding Experience” during the HighEdWeb 2015. Cedarville University

View Presentation:

http://www.cedarville.edu/Offices/Web-Development-Services/Presentations.aspx

• Onboarding without Waterboarding (hahaha)
• Why: the common goal is to move admitted students to matriculated students – to get them to board our train.
• Change from a static site to a more dynamic and relational site.
• Solution Key Tenants
  • Create our own private Facebook groups
  • Create a device-agnostic website
  • Centralize communication
  • feature their personal counselor
• High School student Confusion: how do students want to be communicated to during the onboarding process? A personalized portal experience

Phase 1

• Create a private Facebook group
  • establish community
  • increase relational touch points
  • got good participation
• Some hurdles:
  • Normal vs App/Game group (used App/Game group)
  • You cannot just add users, the user has to authorize this action.

Phase 2

• Communication and Personalization
• Mapped out the rough wireframe and task flow
  • Four basic sections: quicklinks to resources, their admissions counselor, announcement section, then the personalize to do list of tasks.
• Incorporated most of the original ideas into final product
• Support for task dependencies
• Tasks can be delivers on certain criteria (commuter, etc.)
• Tasks that can autocomplete
• Created layouts
• Ending: Pilot Group: Selection of incoming students that we knew would come even if their MyCedarvill experience bombed.

Phase 3: Production

• Surveyed the incoming class that went through the application.
• Many of the students that came to campus ended up using the portal often.
• Half gave their login to their parents.
• Most connected with the Facebook group.
• Email, Postcard and Texts were used to encourage people to log into the portal. Email was the most responded to and viewed as the most helpful.
• Overall, the response was positive to the portal.
• Communication plan phased in the tasks (so they weren’t all in there at the start).

Version 2 and What’s Next

• Added more Google Analaytics event tracking
• Expanded to handle future terms more gracefully.
• Expanded to handle no valid applications.
• Starting much earlier (fall instead of winter).
• Rework the UI and backend (aiming for AngularJS and API which will enable a mobile app).
• Broaden the types of notifications they can send (Facebook/Twitter/Text/Push/etc.)

Key Takeaways

• Integrate Social media at a deeper level
• Increase relational touch points
• Evaluate data that can be personalized

Peace
– KS
Web Developer at Benedictine University near Chicago