Purpose-built for higher education enrollment management
Whether you're emailing prospective students, managing an event, or customizing a record, Slate makes your life easier. It's the only solution purpose-built to handle the evolving needs of admissions and enrollment management.
One Comprehensive Platform,
Endless Possibilities
All licenses to Slate include all features and functionality. No matter your role, office, or institution, Slate’s unrivaled feature set empowers you to achieve your unique objectives.
Slate is trusted by more than 1,700 colleges and universities worldwide.
Admissions & Enrollment Management
Slate is a powerful all-in-one admissions & enrollment management solution designed exclusively for higher education.
Communications and Outreach
Multiple Communication Channels
Connect with your audiences via fully-integrated text messaging, email, voice, social media, and print communications.
Whether you send messages to one recipient or to thousands, Slate’s Deliver module gives incredible control over all message components. From the initial design to sending configurations to unlimited segmentation potential, Slate lets you spend less time creating your message and more time achieving your communications strategy.
Dynamic Marketing Automations
Set it and forget it. Create automated, sequential communications to target specific populations based on real data. Targeting STEM prospects? Creating a campaign for first-generation students? Population filters let you dynamically send messages based on when individual records meet set criteria. Mix and match various communications channels—a single campaign can combine email, text, and print messages.
Within any campaign or email message, incorporate dynamic content using merge fields, Liquid markup, and custom content blocks called Snippets.
Unlimited Drag & Drop Forms
Collect data from many sources using Slate’s drag-and-drop form builder. With our easy-to-use palette, add fields directly to a form and watch it update in real time. Use conditional logic to customize entire sections, individual questions, and answer choices. Make custom RFI forms, declaration of major forms, event registration forms, and more.
Customize the confirmation page or the message users receive upon submitting a form. Craft your mailings so the right message gets delivered to the right person at the right time. Create forms that exist on their own or embed them within your institution’s web properties. Either way, your branding elements make it feel like it’s a native part of your website.
Embedded Statistics & Analytics
Capture detailed communication analytics natively within Slate. In addition to standard data points (opens/clicks/bounces/opt outs/etc.), generate delivery reports about the device, location, and other details for enhanced tracking. Slate also provides email address deliverability and validation, helping you understand why particular messages may have bounced or skipped in transit.
Slate fully supports Google Analytics and other analytics platforms with JavaScript APIs for registering page views and conversion events.
Ping, Slate's proprietary analytic service, enables the tracking of remote web access across institutional web properties outside of Slate and correlates browsing behavior with records. Use this data in queries, reports, and predictive modeling as a measure of engagement, areas of interest, and initial point of contact.
Inbound & Outbound Communication
Slate’s Inbox allows you to manage multiple office email accounts and incoming text messages. Administrative users may view, reply, and centrally manage messages. Create automations to route messages to specific users or role groups. Inbox automatically captures inbound messages and subsequent replies and associates them with records.
AI Chatbot & Live Agent Chat
Automated chatbots are supported through the Inbox Live feature. Your institution creates a list of questions and answers. An artificially intelligent bot uses natural language processing to converse and return appropriate answers. Staff users can provide the opportunity to connect to a live agent to answer questions in real time.
Customized Constituent Portals
Ever wish you could make your own specialty website that leverages your institutional data? With Slate portals, you can construct custom-built web pages that access, shape, and otherwise customize content based on underlying Slate data.
Use the included portal templates for alumni, coaches and athletic staff, school counselors, and admitted applicants. Portals can inherit an institution’s branding or be built with branding specific to an individual portal as desired.
Event Management
Simple & Complex Event Structures
With the ability to create, schedule, and invite attendees to events, Slate’s event management functionality consolidates office processes into a single system. Event templates let you create recurring events en masse without the need for additional configurations.
Slate can handle multiple event registrations with a single form submission using our related events feature. You can also accept payments as part of the registration process. Get ready to streamline all your campus events—information sessions, campus tours, admitted student days, homecoming weekends, and more.
Event Communications
Automated messages associated with an event can be triggered upon registration, waitlist registration, and hours before and after an event, just to name a few. Use any of the multi-channel methods allowed within Slate such as SMS, print, or email.
Embed QR codes and location-aware within event reminder messages for registrants to check themselves in once they’re within 2km of the event. Alternatively, event staff to scan their codes, automatically marking them as attended.
Appointments & Interviews
Slate's Scheduler manages interviews, appointments, donor meetings, and other important one-on-one events. Use templates to easily handle the registration, communication, and details of individual meetings.
Students sign up for individual slots through a landing page or by accepting an RSVP request from a staff member. Link these slots to a trip within Slate, and submit a post-meeting report forms that connects back to the student's record.
Trips & Travel
Trips allow for the aggregating of multiple events, applicant interviews, notes, and flight information in a one-stop environment. Events and meetings are displayed on a map and details are easily accessible by a staff member. Users can search points of interest directly within a trip map and then add them as stops on a trip.
Self-Service Management
Aggregate and display events on custom event landing pages or embed them directly on institutional web properties. These landing pages display events on a calendar, map, or as part of a list. Empower registrants to sign-up, reschedule, or cancel their own registrations in a completely self-service way.
In addition to physical events, you may host online events and webinars directly within Slate.
Calendar Integrations
Need to sync all your calendars? Add external iCal feeds into Slate events and scheduler. Users can easily add institutional calendars, staff calendars, and more directly into Slate including any free/busy information, allowing for a single, comprehensive view.
Badge Printing & Mobile Passes
Slate's Mobile Pass and Badge Editor lets you customize mobile passes or printable badges for event registrants. Badges are automatically downloaded to the scanning host machine for high-speed printing. Mobile passes can be saved to an Apple Wallet.
Mobile App
Using Slate's portal builder, a custom event app can be created with a schedule, map, speaker information, and integration with social networks. Provide attendees with all the information they need at their fingertips.
Queries, Reporting, and Data Management
Any Data Point. Anytime. Any User
The powerful query builder uses drag-and-drop functionality that lets end users build queries without the need for IT assistance. Any data point throughout Slate is easily accessible with just a few clicks. This query tool is used throughout Slate—promoting robust capabilities in all aspects of Slate’s functions.
Native Drag & Drop Reporting
Slate provides powerful reporting tools for year-to-year, predictive modeling, and crosstab reports containing data tables, charts, and geo maps. All data points and communications in Slate are available for reporting, including first source/contact with a person. Schedule and send reports to specific individuals on a regular basis.
Users can copy pre-built reports and modify them for each institution’s own business process. These include funnel reports, daily visit reports, and more.
Data Visualization & Analytics
Voyager is a powerful data visualization tool that lets users to plot and view data spatially. User-built queries create custom layers on a map, so users can see where people live, organizations are located, and events have been held.
By overlaying census data from the American Community Survey (ACS), Voyager creates data visualizations for existing territories and explores areas with growth potential. The layers update dynamically as users navigate the map, allowing for an easy visualization of effectiveness across a desired geography.
Slate supports activity and engagement scoring, from simple additive methods (for example, 1 point for opening an email, 2 points for clicking on a link, 10 points for a visiting campus) to gate-based methods (for example, level 1 for opening an email, level 5 for visiting campus irrespective of any other event) to polynomial regressions.
Document Hosting & Management
Drowning in documents? Slate can host an unlimited number of materials—and have those materials associated with a person, application, school, and or gifts. In addition to hosting the material itself, material metadata can also be captured and stored.
Users can upload materials manually through a self-service portal, or an administrative staff member can directly upload materials to the person record. Upload documents en masse through a document import process or through Slate’s Batch Acquire tool. This tool lets users import physical and electronic documents via scanner or upload directly from a computer. Within Batch Acquire, documents can be manipulated and assigned to an individual’s record.
Duplicate Record Management
Consolidate Records identifies potential duplicate records and lets users consolidate records easily. Slate offers more than three dozen sets of criteria immediately upon provisioning. Criteria are split into categories: high confidence—for automatic matches (e.g., first + last + DOB and first + last + email)—and lower confidence matches that require review from staff members before consolidating the records.
When matched, all data is aggregated together, with higher-quality data taking precedence over lower-quality data.
Open Access
For those who may be more comfortable reading SQL, Slate supports direct SQL access (ODBC/JDBC) to an institution's database along with unlimited service accounts for SFTP and web service integrations. All data transmitted via the web is encrypted using 2048-bit keys with TLS 1.2 as the protocol and HTTP Strict Transport Security. Slate cannot be accessed online without the use of TLS. All data is encrypted at rest using AES encryption.
System performance and reliability dashboards within each database show real-time metrics about the health and performance of your individual Slate instance including CPU usage, database requests, database disk queue, web server requests and response time, network status, and Slate release version.
Search and filter through access logs and error logs that record every action throughout your database.
Additionally, institutions can generate their own retention policies—used to delete or purge data in accordance with state or federal laws (such as FERPA), adherence to institutional retention policies, or simply for the batch deletion of erroneously-imported data.
Automations and Integrations
Plays Well with Others
Many institutions transfer data bidirectionally between Slate and their SIS—and other databases as needed. Data is transferred via SFTP or RESTful web services.
Slate has integrated successfully with a wide variety of software applications, including Banner, PeopleSoft, Colleague, Workday, Jenzabar, as well as business intelligence solutions, CMS solutions, and more.
SFTP Batched Import/Export
Batched exports are built in the query tool and involve the generation of flat files (fixed-width, delimited, XML, JSON, etc.) on a scheduled frequency. Any code and value translations can be configured within Slate but outside of the query, so the query can be stable and immutable even when new entry terms, majors, and other code changes are introduced. This also ensures that the process on the campus system (e.g., SIS, ERP, etc.) side remains stable year-over-year, too.
Web Service Import/Export
Leveraging the graphical query tool, any data point can be selected and formatted into a desired export type—including XML, JSON, JSONP—and a RESTful web service can be created to export on a regular basis. Data can be pulled from Slate or pushed to an external endpoint using web services. Likewise, data can be imported into Slate by being pulled from a remote web service or pushed to a specific Slate endpoint.
Automate Anything
Build a wide range of business rules to automate and support business processes and operations with the rules editor. For example, users can automatically set field values, apply custom checklists, place records into populations, calculate values according to user-defined formulas, apply application statuses, assign staff to individual records, and so much more. You’ll feel as though you have an extra staff member handling the former manual day-to-day processes.
Project & Task Management
Projects (comprised of tasks) let users to create tasks that execute business processes directly in Slate.
Tasks are user-aware, display to the appropriate staff member, and can be linked to specific records within Slate. Set associated user either manually or through an automated process that evaluates the task assignee based on custom criteria such as staff assignment. Each task can have a unique status, deadline, description, and task notes,which provide an additional level of detail.
For example, an institution may assign tasks to maintain the Organizations dataset. Should a student register for an event or form without matching to a school, a task could direct a staff member to either correct the school entry or add the new school to the Organizations dataset.
Application, Evaluation, and Review
Custom Applications
Slate supports multiple application frameworks within a single database, allowing organizations to design a unique experience for various applicant groups and purposes. Undergraduate, graduate, certificate, non-degree, non-traditional, financial aid, and scholarship applications can all be managed in Slate. No need to maintain multiple applications—create just one application and dynamically display content throughout the application for each population.
Collect any supporting documentation, including school transcripts, test scores, activities, essays, resumes, employment history, recommendations, and counselor information. Additionally, applications may include rich media capabilities such as video essays, video interviewing, and digital portfolios.
Using Slate’s self-service application tools, craft a customized and responsive application experience by dynamically controlling the display of whole pages, questions, or individual answers within each question. With a bespoke application experience, applicants quickly and seamlessly complete their application.
Import Applications from Anywhere
Already integrating with a third-party vendor? Slate provides a direct and automated data and document integration with many providers including: The Common Application (Slate is the largest consumer of data and documents from The Common Application), the Coalition for College, Universal College Application, CAS applications such as AMCAS, CASPA, LSAC (ACES), PharmCAS, PTCAS, SOPHAS, and VMCAS, as well as QuestBridge and state application services. Data and documents are automatically downloaded in a nightly process and are imported and available to staff upon arrival.
Custom Student Status Portal
With the applicant status portal, staff can customize a pre-built structure to communicate with applicants. Applicants can manage application checklists, fees, and enrollment deposits; change mailing or email addresses; upload materials; register for events; complete additional forms; view decision and financial aid letters and correspondence; and receive additional information about programs. Provide a personalized experience to each applicant by dynamically showing content and embedding social media feeds.
Automated Read & Review Process
Ever wish you could manage the entire review process in a one-stop-shop? Look no further! Slate streamlines all aspects of the application review process.
The Slate Reader centralizes the materials necessary for the entire review process. Determine which documents are viewable based on a reviewer’s role, as well as the order in which they are displayed. Each reviewer has a queue where files are stored for reading and evaluation.
Reviewers can submit review forms—either sending the application file on to the next reviewer or back to a general reading pool—while providing ratings and overall comments on the applicant. Reviewing files on the road or 35,000 feet in the air? The Slate Reader works online or offline without plug-ins across all modern browsers and platforms, including PC, Mac, and the Apple iPad.
In addition to the application evaluation process, simultaneous review processes can occur in parallel with workflows. Examples of workflows include I-20 review, scholarship evaluation, athletic review, and transcript review.
Step-by-Step Decision Release & Reply
Designed to put your mind at ease, the decision release process follows a step-by-step safeguard system to ensure proper assignation and delivery of decisions and decision letters. Once decisions are ultimately released, applicants are instructed to visit their applicant status portal and authenticate themselves prior to viewing their decision letter.
Institutions may designate any number of decision letters, and an applicant can have a series of interim decisions that are released as they move towards a final Enroll decision. Apart from the initial decision release, subsequent decisions (such as "accept" or "deposit pending") may automatically be released based on the applicant completing an online reply form.