HCRC Success Story: University of North Florida
Background
Human Capital Research Corporation's experienced team helps University of North Florida accomplish their case management and advising goals in Slate.
The University of North Florida (UNF) is a large public university serving over 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. After using Slate for Admissions & Enrollment for several cycles, UNF decided to implement Slate for Student Success to enable a more holistic approach to their current student support, integrating data and processes in one enterprise CRM. UNF partnered with HCRC to help them leverage Slate tools to enable new opportunities for communication and intervention with students, faculty, and advisors, streamlining processes that were previously done manually in a disconnected way.
Approach and Methodology
The implementation had a clear goal: empower staff to solve problems themselves—reducing dependency on legacy, custom web applications and portals developed by IT—freeing up time to focus on supporting students. HCRC’s Slate instance for Student Success is strategically designed with a robust managed data structure and integrations that serve immediate needs and pave the way for future growth.
The implementation team partnered with several campus stakeholders to ensure a smooth and integrated solution:
IT to establish sustainable data integrations with other campus systems, and Marketing and Web Design teams to ensure student-facing interfaces were seamlessly a part of UNF’s brand identity and existing portal structures and navigation.
An employee-facing custom portal was also created to serve both faculty and advisors and improve the user experience for submitting and managing student alerts. Reports were interwoven into administrative dashboards to provide real time data analytics.
Conclusions and Outcomes
Using Slate for case management and an early alert system simplified campus processes and eased access for faculty and advisors, streamlining appointments and simplifying the capture of attendance and notes. Related communications were automated, enabling tracking of all relevant actions. Most importantly, the new system closed the loop with faculty so they were aware of student outcomes in real time. Additionally, student notes were centralized and streamlined across many departments and schools to provide a consistent way to record student details, with specific intention shown to creating metric-driven note forms, role-based security views, and downloadable “note diaries” for audit purposes. Lastly, student self-service interfaces are now consistent across the lifecycle, continuing familiar Slate tools from Admissions and Enrollment through to Student Success applications.
"After working on several project implementations over the course of my career, HCRC has by far been the easiest and most responsive implementation partner I have ever worked with. HCRC listened to our goals, even at the earliest stages of the project; what a breath of fresh air this experience has been!
Not only has HCRC consistently listened, but they have identified innovative solutions for our student success portal. Our discovery sessions have uncovered inefficiencies, and our consultant-partners have been an absolute pleasure to work with throughout our very ambitious project timeline. If I had to do it over again, I would not change a single thing, and would select them again in a heartbeat. HCRC has helped our team and me realize the vision we had for our Slate student success portal, and optimize it in ways we didn't know were possible."
– Erin L. Richman, Ph.D., Associate Vice President, Student Success, University of North Florida