Personalised Portals: The Path to Student Engagement: EVMS- t44u 2014
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All the hard work that has been done to recruit students yet so many universities & colleges take their eye off the ball when it comes to continuing the engagement. What about student retention? How is your institute creating an environment that keeps the student invested? Don't take their commitment, participation or fee for granted. East Virginia Medical School's Natalie Semmler outlines how its personalised student portal has been developed to encourage engagement, communication & retention. Click here to watch the presentation on YouTube: http://bit.ly/1yN7jwI
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Personalised Portals: The Path to Student Engagement: EVMS- t44u 2014
- 1. The path to student engagement PERSONALISED PORTALS Presented by: Natalie Semmler, Web Technologies Manager
- 2. Who we are
- 3. Get students to Apply Matriculate Return Graduate Become donors Challenges
- 4. Challenges
- 5. Addressed too many audiences Challenges
- 6. Various student audiences Challenges
- 7. External vs. Internal Websites
- 8. External vs. Internal Websites
- 9. Personalization levels Role: Student Program: Doctor of Medicine Cohort: MD2019
- 10. Personalized experience Alerts Policies/Forms Events News Resources
- 11. TerminalFour Site Manager Page layouts Content Types Lists External data source
- 12. Results 50% fewer phone call & emails On-campus endorsement Policy & procedure library Inventory of all additional applications used on campus
- 13. Inspired??
Editor's Notes
- Eastern Virginia Medical School is located in Norfolk, Virginia in the United States. We recently celebrated our 40th anniversary. In the 1960s, civic leaders in Hampton Roads wanted to improve health care in the region and took on the minor task of to building a medical school. We opened our doors 1973. Today, EVMS is one of the only schools of medicine and health professions in the United States to be founded by such a grassroots effort. The institution has grown steadily from a mere 1 program with 23 medical students to 15 programs with over 1,500 students.
- Why is it important EVMS has many challenges and areas of focus, but as with most Higher Education Institution our primary challenge revolves around student engagement: Our goal is have our engage individuals in the complete student life cycle to: Entice prospective students to apply Get accepted students to matriculate. Get our current students to return We want our Returning students to graduate and become Alumni donors supporting the next generation of students. In the United States, heavily marketing to prospective students has been important. Our higher education institutions to prove the benefit of our tuition costs for years. As I understand it, when tuition rates recently increased in United Kingdom Higher Education institutions it led to a decrease in the number of applications received. Which really affects the entire student life cycle. Most of us have websites to entice students to apply, but the job is not finished when a student clicks the Apply Now button. Once accepted, the student must choose to attend. Making the matriculation process easier helps students know they made the correct choice and actually attend your institution.
- EVMS has addressed the issue of student acquisition and retention partly with our websites. Now, no website can guarantee acquisition and retention but it can provide a more personalized experience to students. Back in 2011, We began a total redesign of our current website, which had many problems. It wasn’t so pretty, but more importantly it did not provide a clear message to our various audiences.
- As with most higher education institutions we knew we had a plethora of audiences: Prospective students, Faculty, Staff, Current Students, Potential Research Partners, as a Medical Institution, Patients, Donors, Alumni, and specific to EVMS’ core mission our community members.
- We also decided to focus on the various types of student audiences we had including: prospective students, accepted students, current students, and alumni
- First we decided to address the different needs between our internal and external audiences. We took a look at each of our student audiences and decided whether they were members of our external or internal population. Our external facing or public website provides content for Prospective Students and Alumni only. Unlike Pierros very interesting view of specific messages for returning users, we kept it relatively simple.
- Our internal or myPortal site is where we really focused on personalized messaging. myPortal focuses on our accepted and current student audiences. Once a student is accepted, we want to ensure they send in their matriculation fee and actually show up. Where our public site is our primary Marketing tool, our myPortal site is more task based and the tasks are specific to a user’s role at EVMS. With the myPortal site, we are able to provide messaging specific to a student’s program and graduation year. For our accepted students we provided a hybrid of marketing and task based layout.
- Roles and Cohorts are the basis of our portal. We use our eDirectory credentials to identify the student at log in. Messages to our students can be personalized at varying levels. We developed new vocabulary to define these levels: Role (such as student, faculty, staff) Program (Doctor of Medicine, Public Health, Biomedical Sciences) and Cohort. A cohort is the program and graduation year for a student. We do not personalize down to the student level.
- On the myPortal site we are able to customize what content is displayed for every piece of content. This includes our XML search. One of the best functions of our portal is the ability to find documents specific to a user’s institutional role. We display campus alerts, news, resources, events, and quick links specific to a student’s cohort.
- To implement this site, we worked very closely with TerminalFour’s Professional Services. As with most projects, our senior leadership wanted to see results far sooner than we were ready to launch the full solution, so our project launched in 2 phases. Initially we could display content based on major group. The first phase was completed in 3 months. The second phase took a little longer, five months. We spent a lot of time both identifying requirements and implementing the code (translation a lot of money). All of the page layouts on myPortal check that a user is logged in prior to displaying any content. Each piece of content can be tagged for a specific cohort. We use a TerminalFour list to manage our content tagging Finally, we utilize a data table to manage the connection between a user’s eDirectory designation and the content tagging as well as the hierarchy of cohorts to programs to group.
- By implementing this portal, we have had the following results: 50% fewer phone calls and emails from our incoming student population Students have become our advocates for getting more information on the portal We have been able to inventory the majority of Policies and procedures used by different departments We have also been able to inventory all of our on-campus applications and find redundancies Each audience is able to focus on getting the job done rather than searching for tools.