Success Story: Washington State University
WSU’s Global Campus leverages Slate to support students from inquiry through graduation
When Washington State University (WSU) consolidated the different recruitment and application submission CRMs for its 6 different campuses into one system-wide CRM, its online Global Campus faced a transition as well. The decision to merge platforms meant that Global Campus could no longer use its own CRM for current student communication and processing, but a small operational staff meant they had to find the right solution.
Enter Slate. Chosen as the system-wide WSU platform for recruitment and application submission, the Global Campus staff team found, after testing other student success CRM options, that Slate's easy-to-build forms (with built-in SSO capabilities), as well as the incredible power of configurable joins, was transformative to their daily work.
WSU's Global Campus office manages 2,500 undergraduate students' communication and daily processing throughout the student lifecycle, all with a team consisting of only two Slate builders, two marketing team members, and two administrative staff supporting eleven advisors, four recruitment staff, and three student government staff. Slate's liquid markup, content blocks and snippets have made the creation and management of these communications and email/SMS templates incredibly easy. The staff have also been able to use interaction codes to create simple workflows and support liquid markup in customized messages to students.
Additionally, Slate’s Portal Builder has allowed them to work toward transitioning outlying processes under the Global Campus umbrella but not directly related to advising, including orientation information, scholarship processing and Student Government event registration. The team is also creating a current student portal that will feed information from a website customized to the student’s major, credit total, advisor, and hold status. Their goal is to reduce the number of emails that a student may receive.
While WSU system-wide student success functions still exist outside of Slate, the Global Campus office is focused on efforts to feed data into the Slate system so that both student and staff experiences continue to be as seamless as possible.
“The flexibility of Slate has been amazing! Global Campus staff at WSU joke that if any project or process comes up related to student services, our answer is “Let’s build it in Slate.” We have all our day-to-day operations for student services and advising managed out of Slate. We cover everything to support a student from point of inquiry to point of graduation out of Slate.”