In late 2021, the College of Western Idaho (CWI) needed to address a consistent enrollment decline and improve student retention. With an ambitious vision to improve and optimize its technological infrastructure and student outreach, CWI sought to build a best-in-class system to enhance student engagement and elevate enrollment strategies. To ensure that data and technology were aligned with CWI’s growth objectives, the college partnered with Collegis Education to analyze their combined impact. Were its data and tech aligned for impact, or were gaps hindering progress and creating unnecessary burdens across the team?

Key Takeaways

• Six consecutive terms of YoY enrollment growth
• Experienced the highest YoY increase in persistence in history of the college from Fall 2022 to Fall 2023
• Consistent improvement in term-over-term retention

CHALLENGES:

• Declining enrollment
• No established retention strategy
• Lack of CRM
• Underutilized LMS
• Siloed technology and data systems

SOLUTIONS:

• Connected Core®
• Advanced analytics + business intelligence
• LMS support
• Website optimization
• Data-driven outreach and support for students identified as at-risk

Strategy

Collegis Education and CWI began collaborating on building a best-in-class student journey from the point of initial inquiry through graduation.

A comprehensive evaluation of existing CWI systems allowed Collegis to assess the college’s digital readiness, technology infrastructure, and enrollment ecosystem to understand how they aligned with its growth objectives. The partnership quickly proceeded from consultation to implementation.

Collegis prescribed a set of solutions to enhance student engagement from first contact and elevate the school’s enrollment strategies:

• Connected Core® to unite siloed systems, data sets, and other enrollment technologies, providing more accurate, actionable, unified institutional intelligence with clear visualizations to support data-enabled decision-making at all levels.
• Website optimization to improve conversion and deliver a student-centric digital experience that supports the objectives, goals, and mission.
• Prospective student nurturing campaigns with a messaging protocol designed to drive conversion and prospective student engagement with CWI.

Collaborating closely with CWI, Collegis developed a well-defined student retention strategy that established meaningful student-advisor relationships early on, ensuring students felt supported from their first interaction onward.

• Enrollment conversation training gave student-facing staff the tools to drive positive experiences for CWI learners while embracing a liaison approach to student engagement.
• Collegis student success coaches conducted proactive outreach to engage students while leveraging an at-risk alert system to drive intervention. This early alert system flags students needing support based on learning management system (LMS) data on attendance, current grades, and assignment completion.

Results: Average YoY growth each semester since our partnership began has averaged 5%

By working with Collegis, CWI could focus on its student journey and how it could better use data and technology to deliver superior student engagements and reach its growth targets. This has helped not only stop, but reverse historical enrollment declines. In 2024, CWI projected year-over-year growth for the sixth consecutive academic term. The school has achieved an average year-over-year term growth of 5%, with a trendline for fall 2024 of over 9% growth.

Value-based conversations with prospective students have resulted in increased applications. Further, pre-start engagement from the advising and student success coaching teams has increased registrations from admitted students.

By fostering a culture of meaningful interaction and support for students, CWI paved the way for improved student retention. The LMS-based at-risk model has driven 19,000+ proactive student engagements and interventions in one academic year.

Within just one year of implementing these targeted strategies, CWI witnessed a remarkable increase in retention rates, all while alleviating the workload on faculty and staff.  Similar retention strategies deployed by other Collegis partner institutions have yielded term-over-term retention rates exceeding 90%, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.

With a proven retention strategy and access to a proactive model, CWI can now build out its internal retention capabilities and plans to take over the student success coaching function.

The Future

CWI’s commitment to embracing change and being agile is demonstrated by the school’s evolving partnership with Collegis to exceed industry best practices and realize sustained growth. Ongoing services and incremental work are targeting LMS initiatives to stabilize, standardize, optimize, and transform CWI’s instance of Blackboard Learn and redesign its new student orientation, among other things.

Institution Type:
Community College

Location:
Treasure Valley, Idaho

Total Enrollment:
30,000+

Celebrating expertise with creative digital campaign

In 2023, Saint Louis University’s (SLU) School for Professional Studies (SPS) celebrated its 60th anniversary. This offered a unique opportunity to highlight the school’s six decades of leadership and innovation in adult and online education — an area most schools have only recently entered. SLU partnered with Collegis to develop an integrated creative and digital campaign to bring this new messaging to market.

Challenge: Highlighting expertise in adult and online education

SLU has a storied history and expertise in online and adult education — a key advantage for aspiring adult learners. Collegis was challenged with bringing this message to market in an impactful way, which was achieved through an awareness media campaign centered on newly produced brand video content.

Solution: Authentic video storytelling and strategic media placement

The videos amplify the authentic voices of real SLU students, showcasing diverse narratives about educational experiences and outcomes. Going beyond campus, the production captured moments at students’ homes and workplaces. These personal glimpses help viewers identify with the subjects and build trust in the brand, illustrating SLU’s understanding of adult learners’ wants and needs.

Collegis then developed a paid media strategy that included connected TV (CTV) and cross-device video to maximize impact through multiple touchpoints. The campaign’s primary objective was driving awareness, which was measured by video completion rate, brand lift, and brand search impact.

Example campaign video

Results: Increased brand awareness and conversions

The 60th anniversary campaign was successful in raising awareness of SLU’s School for Professional Studies. The data supports that the awareness media contributed significantly to both brand health and revenue goals. The results were as follows:

287% return on ad spend for the campaign

5.9 million CTV and cross-device video impressions throughout Missouri and Illinois

89% video completion rate

10.7% lift in brand awareness, 3.5% ad recall lift, and 4.2% lift in consideration

541% increase in brand PPC spend while reducing cost per conversion by 44%

1,050% increase in brand PPC conversions YoY

About Saint Louis University

Institution Type:
Catholic, Jesuit institution

Location:
St. Louis, Missouri

Student Enrollment:
13,500

Services:

• Unique campaign and brand messaging
• Video planning, production, and editing
• Creative direction and execution
• Paid media strategy and implementation
• Performance metrics for all assets

Key Results:

• 10.7% lift in brand awareness
• 1,050% increase in PPC brand conversions
• 287% return on ad spend

Focused admissions outreach and paid media

In 2018, Dominican University engaged Collegis Education for support in growing enrollment. Despite a strong brand, the university’s outreach efforts were hampered by data siloed in disparate tracking systems, gaps in admissions team staffing, and the need for data enablement to support marketing and recruitment. Dominican and Collegis collaborated to execute a holistic enrollment growth strategy – informed by data – that focuses on admissions outreach and engagement for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as paid media management, reporting and forecasting for undergraduate and graduate students.

Situation: Enrollment process mapping

To achieve Dominican University’s goal to create a successful enrollment growth strategy for traditional, graduate and online programs, Collegis connected the university’s systems, such as its CRM and marketing analytics platforms, and collected it in one central platform for activation. By mapping Dominican’s enrollment process, Collegis was able to recommend actions to ensure the student journey was optimized and personalized.

The school’s growth strategy prioritized driving first-year undergraduate enrollments and the development of an online Master’s in Social Work program to drive scalable enrollment and revenue growth. It was clear Dominican would need support to refine the student engagement process, increase conversation rates, and manage the maintenance and deployment of online program courses.

Results: Exceeding ambitious enrollment goals

Across the board, the focused efforts outlined in the partner plan showed positive results for fall 2022.

• 31% increase in first-year undergraduate enrollments
• 51% increase in first-year undergraduate acceptances
• 48% increase in first-year undergraduate applications
• 29% above goal for summer/fall 2022 graduate enrollment

Enrollment for first-year undergraduate and summer/fall graduate programs exceeded goals, year over year.

About Dominican University

Institution Type:
Private Catholic non-profit coed university

Location:
River Forest, Illinois

Total Enrollment:
3,066

Goals

• Meaningful outreach and engagement
• Analytics engineered for actionable insights
• Flexible technology systems for students

Challenges

• Siloed data across systems
• Gaps in staffing for admissions team
• Lack of sufficient data for marketing and recruitment

Solutions

• Data Analytics and Enablement
• Web Performance Optimization
• Marketing and Media Management
• Admissions Support Services and Admissions Training
• Course Development and Academic Solutions

Data streamlines enrollment process

In an increasingly competitive online degree market, Saint Louis University’s (SLU) School for Professional Studies experienced several years of declining enrollment. While the number of online students has dramatically increased over the past decade, so has the number of online programs offered by institutions, with mega-universities capturing significant market share. In order to address enrollment decline and build a foundation for growth, SLU focused on enhancing and differentiating its programmatic suite while collaborating with Collegis Education to build a frictionless student enrollment experience.

Situation: Continuous improvement model

Over three years of collaborative partnership, Collegis Education and Saint Louis University School for Professional Studies have worked side by side in elevating the student inquiry-to-application journey. This allowed SLU to remove barriers in the admissions process and ensure students have a seamless experience from marketing through enrollment.

By first learning about SLU’s historical practices and operations, Collegis built a comprehensive data foundation to help SLU identify and solve enrollment barriers. Through this data-driven approach, Collegis and SLU were able to establish a continuous improvement philosophy with the goal of streamlining the enrollment process and reducing friction on the prospective student.

Solution: A faster, more equitable experience

With an eye on uplifting the student experience, Collegis audited the enrollment process and took action to ensure students weren’t getting lost in red tape or complicated systems and processes. After diving in, Collegis found that five small steps could make a large difference for SLU:

Position smarter handoffs: Collegis implemented an automated scheduling system for interview hand off from Collegis to SLU, making it easier for students to schedule interviews when it was convenient for them, without having to have an initial conversation.

Speed up the process: Collegis suggested collecting transcripts on the students’ behalf to save them time and keep them better engaged in the admission journey.

Focus on equity: With an eye on inclusion and equity, Collegis believed it was an appropriate time to eliminate deposit and application fees.

Improved data transfer: Collegis supported the migration of all SPS programs to Salesforce to create consistency and smooth data transfer between undergraduate and graduate programs that were previously in separate CRM systems.

Streamline the application process: By reducing the time from acceptance to registration to speed up enrollment, Collegis found that administrative hours were reduced and students were moved through the process quicker.

About Saint Louis University

Institution Type:
Catholic, Jesuit institution

Location:
St. Louis, Missouri

Student Enrollment:
13,287

Services:

• Admissions efficiencies
• Student engagement
• Business process optimization

Key Results:

From Fall 2018 to Spring 2021:

• Applicant inquiries increased over 997%
• Applications increased 189%
• Undergraduate enrollments increased 145%
• Graduate enrollments increased 38%

Improving user experience to boost conversion rates

One private university attracted new students by expanding their online offerings. While market research showed there was interest and a growing audience for these online programs, the university wasn’t getting the traffic they needed to these new website pages — and the traffic they did receive wasn’t converting.

Learn how this school optimized their website to improve user experience, increase web sessions and raise the number of web conversions to grow their enrollment.

Situation: Website audit and restructuring

To uncover why this university was experiencing lower-than-expected web traffic and conversions, Collegis investigated their website performance and soon discovered the problem. Over the years, the school’s website had expanded, organized based on internal needs and not on how a student might search for information or navigate the site. This made the site fragmented and full of friction for users — high bounce rates, low time spent on page and poor placement in search results.

As with many schools, our partner didn’t have experts on staff to diagnose the root cause of this issue or effectively fix the problem. In short, the university knew their online prospects weren’t finding the right information to convert, but they didn’t know what to do about it. They needed someone who understood complex web navigation and had the resources to fix it.

To identify where and why prospective students were getting hung up or confused on the website, Collegis performed a full website audit. Our experts tested the user experience to find and remove the barriers that were inhibiting the website — typically a university’s most valuable marketing tool — from performing.

The primary issues were:

• User Confusion with Site Architecture: Programs and modality were organized by the University’s internal processes, not by how a user seeks out the information. This made it difficult and frustrating for a prospect to find what they were looking for.
• Duplicate Pages: Because information was organized under modality silos, some programs had multiple pages of nearly identical information. This duplicate content causes distrust by search engines and lowers the position in a search engine results page (SERP).
• No Program Finder: Program pages are often the most sought-after information on a college’s website. The University didn’t have a single source of all programs — or a way to sort and search them.

Results: Lift in web traffic and conversions

In order to increase web traffic and conversions, Collegis performed and implemented the following:

Local SEO: Simply establishing a consistent name, address and phone number across the website gave search engines confidence that they understand who our partner is, what they do and where they are located.

On-Page Content Optimization: Degree and program pages were redesigned to increase consistency, visibility and conversions. Many had been thin on content, making it difficult for search engines to understand the value of a page and why they should make it visible as a search result.

Improving Calls to Action (CTAs): Placement of CTAs within the application conversion path on the homepage and program pages made it simpler for prospects to apply and request information.

Foundational and Technical SEO: Improvements were made in terms of basic website functionality, such as cleaning navigation, correcting 404 errors and redirects, addressing site speed, improving folder structure and breadcrumb navigation, etc., to drive additional relevancy and authority — and improve visibility within the SERPs.

Institution Type:
Private Religious University

Location:
Midwest

Modalities:
On campus, online hybrid, regionwide
through partnership with community colleges

Services:

• Restructured site architecture
• Streamlined page navigation
• Improved user experience
• Website optimization
• Search engine optimization

Key Results:

• In the first year, the University saw website conversion rates increase 35%, despite the challenges of COVID-19.
• 64% increase in web users moving from homepage to program pages.
• The top three visited sections from the homepage post-launch became the Program, Graduate and Undergraduate sections.
• The site experienced a 13.4% increase in new sessions.
• All programs can now be seen in one place, making it easier to find and compare degree programs.

Finding efficiencies and reinvesting in upgrades

Looking to broaden their reach and serve students outside of their region, Saint Francis University decided to expand their online program offerings. To reach this goal, they needed to scale their operations to deliver a quality, technology-enabled student experience.

Situation: Tech infrastructure assessment

Saint Francis recognized the need to modernize their technology infrastructure and strengthen their capabilities in order to achieve their goals and improve long-term stability. The institution was searching for a partner that could support their entire IT department’s daily operations, while also building a strategic roadmap to enable and transform their digital infrastructure. Collaborating with Collegis Education, Saint Francis found a partner that could implement a comprehensive IT managed services solution and make progress toward their longer-term goals. Through the partnership, the university gained access to a wealth of technology expertise and new capabilities.

The Collegis managed services solution for Saint Francis included stabilizing their technology and infrastructure, standardizing expectations through strong IT governance, and optimizing business processes and infrastructure for increased efficiencies.

Collegis conducted an assessment of key digital infrastructure to find efficiencies and cost savings. The result was a strategic roadmap that included recommendations for technology transition projects, augmentation of staff, and an expansion of student and staff help desk services.

In addition, Saint Francis leadership worked with Collegis to install a virtual CIO to oversee strategy and operations for the department and to transition Saint Francis staff to the Collegis technology team.

Results: Reduced technology debt and improved help desk satisfaction

Collegis created a transition plan to retire technology debt by upgrading major platforms. Significant transition projects to stabilize the university’s infrastructure were completed, including:

• A new card access system
• A more secure, robust Active Directory to replace outdated authentication
• Upgraded campus-wide Wi-Fi network

Collegis helped the entire university adapt to remote work and transition to hybrid classrooms and virtual technology. Additionally, the Saint Francis IT help desk transitioned to the Collegis Personal Support Center (PSC) technology support program. Since the transition, the 6-month average Net Promoter Score is 96.3, as rated by faculty, students and staff.

Just one year into the partnership, Collegis began to optimize and transform Saint Francis’s technology landscape, conducting business process assessments, streamlining student laptop programs, and implementing the Microsoft Office 365 suite to increase security and improve user experience.

Overall, the strategic planning and implementation of a long-term technology roadmap identified efficiencies and a 14-percent cost savings in the university’s IT budget, allowing the funds to be reinvested into digital transformation initiatives.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, Collegis also provided strategic technology leadership and recommendations to deploy CARES Act funds for a smooth transition to remote and hybrid learning delivery and paved the way for capital projects that continue to help Saint Francis University transform.

About Saint Francis University

Institution Type:
Private Catholic liberal arts university

Location:
Loretto, Pennsylvania

Total Enrollment:
2,232

Services:

• Comprehensive IT Managed Services
• Enterprise Applications
• IT Leadership & Governance
• Infrastructure & Operations
• Virtual CIO
• 24/7 Tech Support & Help Desk

Key Takeaways:

• 3 year-one transition projects
• 14% IT budget cost savings
• 96.3 Net Promoter Score

Comprehensive IT management

In 2019, Saint Francis University decided to expand their online program offerings to reach students outside their immediate market. They first needed to transform their operations to deliver a quality, technology-enabled student experience, both on and off campus. Because of the campus’s remote location, they struggled with power outages, Wi-Fi issues, as well as attracting and retaining the right staff to help the university realize their objectives. The institution was searching for a partner that could support the entire IT department’s rapidly expanding list of daily operations and build a long-term strategic roadmap.

Situation: Technology roadmap and staffing

Saint Francis recognized the need to modernize their infrastructure to achieve their goals and provide long-term stability. They began a partnership with Collegis for a comprehensive technology management solution. Collegis designed a strategic, multi-year roadmap for digital transformation that first prioritized developing the infrastructure that would immediately improve the student experience and ultimately allow the university to expand its online programs.

Collegis worked collaboratively with school leadership to install a virtual CIO to oversee strategy and operations for the IT department. The virtual CIO quickly became a key advisor to the president and board, bridging the gap between technology initiatives and how they align with enrollment and revenue goals. Saint Francis staff also transitioned to the Collegis technology team, allowing the university to mitigate their talent acquisition and retention issues.

Results: Cutting-edge student experiences

The Collegis team has identified and completed several major initiatives to stabilize the university’s infrastructure since the start of the partnership:

• Simplified the technology infrastructure, resulting in $200K reallocated to help fund upgrades
• Upgraded the card access system for campus staff and students
• Implemented Active Directory, a secure and robust authentication technology
• Installed an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) backup to keep power running during outages
• Transitioned from the school’s overworked help desk to the Collegis Personal Support Center (PSC)
• Upgraded to a reliable campus-wide Wi-Fi network

The Collegis PSC has accommodated a wide variety of technology support calls while maintaining a high satisfaction rate. Between 2020 and 2022, Collegis has maintained an average Net Promoter Score of 88 – a measure that exceeds most industries’ benchmarks for excellent customer satisfaction. In other words, the implementation of the PSC has enabled a comprehensive, smooth student experience.

A variety of Collegis’s technology changes were immediately apparent to students, including introducing Active Directory for single-sign-on (SSO) authentication into a suite of programs, enjoying reliable Wi-Fi and feeling safer thanks to an updated card access system that helps keep the campus secure. In addition, behind the-scenes upgrades, like a state-of-the-art data center, stabilized the aging technology for more reliability. Overall, Collegis has optimized and transformed Saint Francis’s framework to offer a technology-enabled student experience. With their infrastructure now on the cutting edge, Collegis experts are rolling up their sleeves to develop and grow the university’s online programs across the globe.

About Saint Francis University

Institution Type:
Private Catholic liberal arts university

Location:
Loretto, Pennsylvania

Total Enrollment:
2,232

Services:

• Comprehensive IT Managed Services
• 24/7 Tech Support & Help Desk
• Application Administration & Support
• IT Leadership & Governance
• Infrastructure & Operations
• Virtual CIO

Key Takeaways:

• $200K reallocated toward technology upgrades
• 88 Average Net Promoter Score