Datasets, dashboards and portals are big opportunities to personalize resources/information for your end-users and prospective/current students.
In the world of Meta, big data, Amazon, and others, every aspect of our lives is highly personalized and interconnected. If we are on one page of a site, we automatically expect that even if we navigate away and come back, that site would remember who we are, what we need and where we need to go next. Generally speaking, higher education tends to lag far behind in terms of technology. However, with Slate’s introduction of custom datasets, dashboards, and the ability to connect portals to a multitude of record types, we enter a world where we can start to know who a student, parent or prospective donor is and what their next action should be so we can display the most up to date and relevant information to them with ease.
Prior to this year, building custom dashboards on a student record was something you had to do in 3+ places within your Slate instance. Information regarding classes or classrooms or advisor names all resided in your SIS and if you did bring those to Slate, it wasn’t even close to real time information and it was quite muddy on the person or application records. By creating a dataset (think about it like a container of records that relate to each other in a particular way) containing all your program information, you can query one place and dramatically reduce query and filter processing, easily answer questions from your staff members about requirements, and allow staff, students, or donors to see real-time data changes within a portal. Dashboards and Datasets give you, the administrator, a simple way to be in one place in Slate to create custom snapshots of a student (or donor or advisor or course) that can display on particular records.
5 Datasets That Could Be Useful:
- Users:
- You can track performance metrics or help desk ticket submissions over time.
- You can connect these to other datasets or records so that they are related in some way to a course or an event or a person/application.
- Event Spaces on Campus:
- You can allow individuals to register and reserve rooms on campus for large or small events and track when that space is available.
- Programs:
- You can have all the information needed about a program in one place for someone to look at and update instead of 10 disparate places to remember. This one location would then be able to feed other locations easy data about requirements for applications, filtering, form data, etc.
- Support Tickets:
- You can keep track of the types of requests you are receiving at any given time and report out on the number of hours or number of requests received per week or month as required.
- You can utilize this to plan training sessions (live or virtual) for your staff members as certain topics rise within the question set of requests.
- Vendors:
- You can keep track of their rates, allow them to update them easily as well so that when you go to plan an event, you can pull a cost analysis prior to deciding on vendors to bid or staff an event.
- You can easily place this list elsewhere should you wish to display the list of vendors to outside constituents who may be selecting a vendor for their needs.
5 Things to Put on Your Custom Dashboards to Make Your Staff’s Life Easier:
- Color code student risk.
- Color code likelihood of yield.
- Engagement factors (# of times portal visited in last week, # of emails opened/clicked, etc.)
- Date of last contract.
- Date of last engagement (donation, email, call, event attended, event registered, etc.)
5 Portals to Personalize your Constituent’s Experiences:
- Program Explorer:
- Microsite that allows prospects to research different programs and what they might be interested in studying at your institution.
- Your program administrators can update this information for you through their own portal so you have less maintenance and responsibility for it as a Slate administrator.
- Alumni Connector:
- A way to have an alumni directory connected to prospective or current students.
- Allows your advancement and career services department to know current and/or past employers of alumni to connect students.
- Staff One-Stop:
- Convenient staff onboarding, training.
- Place for them to see documentation.
- Help desk ticket submissions, status, and updates.
- Important information about upcoming events.
- Important memos.
- Student One-Stop:
- Self-explanatory, but a place for students to go to one place and reach housing, the registrar, financial aid, enrollment, and advising so they aren’t bounced from one place to another as they try to find the information they need!!
- Event One-Stop:
- If you are planning events for outside stakeholders, you can create a portal that displays up to date information that you have from them and allows them to submit changes or information to you about said event so everyone is “in the know” and changes can be made as needed for event capacity, catering, etc.
Now, every instance of Slate won’t need all of these items, but you can see how they all build off of each other – weaving in and out and utilizing multiple pieces of data that exist in Slate and functionally and appropriately displaying the information that people need to know when they need to know it. It’s not an easy task to take up and requires a lot of planning, but the time you spend now will give your team time back in the future because you can continue to iterate on these ideas and add more information to different datasets, dashboards, and portals as needed.