Marjorie Olavides: All right. Marina Washburn with CAEP Student Engagement Program. Eliminating Access Barriers with Texting and Mobile Technology.

Marina Washburn: Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Let me get the right screen up. OK. Are you able to see that OK?

Marjorie Olavides: Yes, we are.

Marina Washburn: OK. Good. Hi, everyone. My name is Marina Washburn. And I was the former director of special programs at Allan Hancock college up until last week. And that was basically the CAEP director for Allan Hancock College and that consortium. And what I wanted to-- I'm so happy to be able to present some of the work that I thought we did there, specifically, with this student engagement program.

I was there for four years. So this was a project that started in 2019. And it really took off in 2020 when we started to get the other elements in place. So I'm going to walk you through each of those and what we did and the outcomes have been just fantastic. So I can't wait to share that with you. Let's see.

OK. Good. You're hopefully seeing the next screen. So really, when I started, I wanted to really focus and really guided our program to start looking at our non-credit students a little bit differently because a lot of non-credit programs at least hours. Our marketing and our student engagement and everything else were-- the same processes and techniques being used for credit students is what was being applied to non-credit students.

And so when I started as a CAEP director, I wanted to advocate and continue to advocate for the needs of non-credit students in the community of non-credit students, because we are a little bit different than that high school graduate student and a lot different. And so where we got to and what I'm presenting to you is, basically, the five different ways in which this student engagement program came to be.

And these are the five strategies. We first tackled the marketing so that student can actually find us in their world where they live, where they spend their time. And then we changed how we engaged from all these other strategies to texting, then we changed our registration processes to align with that and then we worked on retention and persistence.

And now we're also focusing on applying these strategies to faculty recruitment among other things. So let me walk you through-- what I'd like to do is walk you through what we did. So let's start with just marketing. I think one of the things that was missing is marketing to our students, our community of students in the non-credit-- the lifecycle of the non-credit student. Where are our students? They're not going to be the high school student necessarily.

So some of my initial meetings with our campus, our college marketing department was to break down who is non-credit-- who is our non-credit student, the demographics of our non-credit student, and where they are. So I wanted to use the data. I pulled this data, I met with them, and I wanted to break down, who our students were and where we could find them, because I felt that we were really missing where they were and who they were in our marketing strategies.

And so I use the word pilot a lot. The last three years, especially, I wanted to pilot a lot of things and using the pilot word and strategies allowed us to try new things. And along with that, to really create change. Even if it's these little incremental changes that, over time, create the larger change. And so we saw that our students are going to be on Facebook and on YouTube and on Pinterest and on Instagram.

And we're looking at the communities by gender and by ethnicities and the demographics that match with our students in our community. And I wanted to advocate for using more of these technologies in our marketing practices. And so we really needed to radically change what we were doing.

So what we were doing before, we were doing commercials on cable TV, we were doing radio commercials. We were doing a lot of print advertising and newspapers and flyers and all of those traditional outlets. And what we ended up doing starting in 2019 is actually do Facebook. Facebook advertising and post and then the biggest impact was actually lead generation. And I'll tell you a little bit about that.

We also started to have banners in the community. We were outside grocery stores and churches and food distribution. We're still doing that. And that is our most effective way of recruiting our students. Is going to where they are. And you'll see that as a common theme throughout is actually meeting our students where they are and not having them guess how to get to us or see if, maybe, they'll find us in the future.

But we going to them and being part of the community where they live, where they reside, where they are at, and actually engaging them in their community. And that's our community. And so we minimize these traditional outlets and started to do and really pivot our marketing into new strategies.

So what we saw, especially with lead generation and our community events, we actually quantify our impact in the community and with lead generation and Facebook, instead of just promoting an ad, instead of just creating another ad that gets promoted, we pivoted to lead generation strategies. And what that did is that-- and we only did this for such a small amount of time. It's a really small cost.

You run a campaign, you do a lead generation, and we were finding hundreds of new students with just a couple of weeks of running these lead generations because we, basically, received a list of students that were interested in our classes from Facebook. And other that those, we were now and continue to see this 38 to 48 conversion rate. And that is amazing conversion rate for lead generation.

So we can actually quantify the impact of changing our strategies and having our students find us in their world. And we then get hundreds of new students every semester coming just from lead generation. Oh, conversion rate means that you get this list of, let's say, 300 students that you ran a possible students or interested individuals. And of those, we did follow ups with them, and of those, 33% to 48% actually registered and became new students in non-credit.

So that's what a conversion rate means. It means that we converted them from leads into students. So I did want to say-- because we pilot, pilot, pilot, we did pilot email. We know we were doing email. But what we found when we piloted email that our students were not there. So what was happening before in our community education, non-credit programs, is that CCCApply was something that was required previously. We had required CCCApply through ESP. This was actually right before my time and we were still doing it a couple of years into my time there.

And what happened was, what we quickly found out is that in order to apply for CCCApply, you actually needed an email. And so campus developed this email account that was accessible by staff in order to help support students register. And we have over 5,000 students with this default email account that was accessible by staff in order to support their CCCApply application.

So needless to say, email was not a reliable data source. And we ended up piloting email, and we found that, in fact, it was not going to be a way to communicate with our students. So we explored texting technology. And initially, the trigger to start exploring other technology was the fact that I learned that we could actually integrate banner data or college data, any sort of data into these other technologies.

And so what I found is by looking at our Facebook, just initially from Facebook, we saw that most students were interacting with Facebook via their phones. We were also noticing, of course, that almost everyone has a cell phone and a smartphone, right? And so students were-- we basically had, at Hancock, a one-way communication texting platform. So it took a little bit of working with public affairs to allow us to pilot a two-way platform for non-credit students.

And so I started then the search for what kind of software programs were out there that would one to integrate with our student data so that it was customizable. And two, that it was a two-way platform. And it took a little bit of time, but public affairs at our campus was really supportive to allow us to pilot.

And so we piloted the texting platform. And here was my wish list. I wanted it to integrate with MS data. I wanted to be able to personalize the text messages to the student. I wanted to be able to segment the data so that I can then do subsets of-- being able to send messages to subset groups of students.

I wanted to capture the language of preference. That was really important that our students felt that we would communicate with them in a language that they felt comfortable in and most comfortable in. And they wanted to be able to opt out. I wanted to develop some automated menus and data-driven messaging. And so what I found out there is something-- is a software program called SignalVine.

Now, this isn't the only one out there, but this is the one that I decided to work with and that I decided to pilot for community education at Hancock. So I want to tell you what we did is, I took a little bit of time. We actually started using texting in 2020-- at the fall of 2020, at the end of 2020.

So it's been actually just two years. And we use texting for everything. So what happened was we were doing a welcome to the student as soon as they registered for classes. They received a welcome message in both languages, and then they could select their language of preference. And from then on, the messages were coming to them in the language of their choice.

We asked them, because this was 2020, right? 2021, middle of pandemic, we were saying, do you need a computer? Do you need a hotspot? And then here is how you get those. Here is your Zoom link. Let's see, we also use it for community events. So food shares and immigration forums and starting a small business workshop. We promote those to our students using text as well.

The outcome of that has been hundreds more students at these events. And so even though they've been held year after year at the college, we started using text and now they had 150 student overflow at workshops, because the event had never been that large. And with texting invitations, now the students knew where to go, what time to go, and how to ask for help getting there.

So we actually had much, much higher participation in events as well. So we also use it for campus tours, graduations, for all those other events that school provides. Welcome events and all of that. And then the other thing that we're doing now with text is that we're also engaging possible new students. So we do text with the general public, we actually-- I'll show you what we do with texting phone number as well as a couple of other tools.

But we, basically, put it out in our community and say, Texas at this number, ask any question that you have and we will help you. So what texting has allowed us to do is that we filled this capacity within our students, we have built a community of belonging, we have slowly built the trust from our students to trust that this is us. This is the community education office.

That we're here to help them, that we know the answers. And if we don't, we're going to get them, and we're going to let them know. And it's this immediate connection that I feel we were really missing in community education. And so the messages are personalized and they're relevant and they're timely. So students are getting the information when they need it.

Texting is very immediate. So what we see is the closer we send it closer to the event, the higher participation. Or when we have a survey that we want some feedback on, the students will respond within the first 24 to 48 hours. We open up classes. And students register within the first day or two or week. And we're at capacity within a couple of weeks of opening classes.

So because of texting, we are able to develop actual wait lists with student demand and develop our scheduling based on the demand that we can document from students from the waitlist. So let me show you. Our engagement went from 0% to over 53% right now. This is a couple of days ago that I ran this slide.

So in less than two years, we have built this community for our students where we have a 53% engagement rate. So that means they are communicating with us back and forth in text. And these could be short text, long texts. I have to tell you, our students love our text. And we have never been more blessed or felt more grateful because our students are so grateful for us doing text.

The communication within our community, it's been-- they've been so grateful to have this as a tool, and they constantly express it in text. So it's a very happy place right now for our college to have this tool in place for our students. Now, we piloted this in 2020. And as of last spring, this last spring, campus was so impressed with what we were doing with it. Allan Hancock is adapting SignalVine for the entire campus use.

So let me tell you about the second piece, actually the third piece here, is mobile registration technology. So let me go-- again, meeting our students where they are. So looking at our data in MIS, in banner, I could see that we had 88% of our students who registered for non-credit classes were not self registering.

And as much as we wanted to believe that, we just needed to show our students how to get into my Hancock and then register, go through the process of registering that a couple of times and they're going to get it. The bigger issue was about the life cycle of a non-credit student. The issue was, how do we acknowledge that our entry level students-- is this-- it's a pyramid. It's a really big piece of the pie and we have students that are also learning to read.

We're also having students who are multilingual. And so the cycle of the non-credit student doesn't support this idea that if we just hold 3, 4, or 5 more workshops in a year we're going to have a larger percentage of students self register because the process in place, CCCApply, my Hancock, logging online with an email in a password, and then following however many steps to get us to select a class and register for it is actually quite complex.

Even for people that come back to school with a college degree. They're very, very difficult, yes. And so what I put in place is, I wanted to run statistics like this that I could then start working with admission and records and say, can we change it? Can we have a separate process that allows us to support our non-credit students in a way that also addresses the needs of the college and the information that we need to gather and support processes and procedures that will allow students more empowerment in selecting their classes and more access.

So they don't have to come into the office to do a paper application and stand in line for hours the first week of classes. Because that's what was happening before. So I was allowed to pilot a mobile multilingual registration form that was simplified. And I'm going to show you how I did this.

I basically wanted to use very simple tools that were accessible to me as a staff member at, Allan Hancock College, and that was actually using Microsoft 365 tools. And what I did was I developed an MS form, a Microsoft form that I could then use the bilingual-- there's actually a language. We're using Spanish and English. Those are the two languages in demand in our area.

So I can translate the form into Spanish, and then it's actually translatable.

Marjorie Olavides: Marina?

Marina Washburn: Yes.

Marjorie Olavides: Sorry. Can I interrupt? I think it was on the last slide, we have a question that just says you mentioned texts in languages, what languages can students use for texts?

Marina Washburn: Oh, yes. So in our area, it's and in English. Those are the two languages like I mentioned. So there is an initial text that they get that is in Spanish and one that's in English. And it instructs them to tell us which is their preference. And then the system automatically logs their answer so that we know what their language and preferences for all future messages with them.

Marjorie Olavides: Thank you.

Marina Washburn: Yeah. So the technology that I put together is this. Mobile technology. And actually, this is a QR code. So if you have your cell phone handy, you can always look at it by just a QR coding that and you'll actually get the actual form. So the user end, it's a simple Microsoft on your phone. It's also available on the computer. But it's a form that then the student fills in, and they submit.

And on their end, it just looks like a submission. They submit it, they get a thank you message, and this link, we also send to them via text message. And as soon as the registration opens, I can send them a message with the link that says, hey, registration is open for fall or for summer or for spring and would you like-- or I could also send messages that are, hey, you haven't registered yet. Are you coming back? Or we still have space and level B and you completed level A.

So because the data set that I'm pulling from banner is a little bit more detailed, I could then send messages to subsets of students in a targeted way to support our registration, to support filling up our classes, to support the students' journey to that next level, to transition them to that next level.

So the other thing we're able to do with this, you can see, we can actually do really quick surveys with our students, because it has, again, simplicity and this level of technology. So this QR code, we put on flyers, we put on our publications, we put on posters at our events that we go in the community and somebody is asking about what the form looks like.

Yes, I will show you that in a minute. So on this end, this is what they see. And then this code we use in the community and then in all of our collateral. So in our publications, it looks like this. And it, basically, is-- this is actually from our catalog. So our collateral is being developed in a way that is also-- today's morning conversation, they we're talking about having the students see themselves when they walk in the room, when they walk into our offices, when they receive our mail.

And we've been doing that transition as well. We've been talking about how do we reflect our community in our collateral materials. And we had all of our collateral redone to be more inclusive of the images that people should see when they open our materials. Same thing with all of our marketing.

And this is a piece that we do that is in our spectrum that actually goes to every household. In our region, it's still a paper in the mail piece, and this is what it looks like in there. And again, it's very easy to apply for registering for those classes. Now, this form-- I know somebody's asking about CCCApply.

So in working with our admission records, we actually looked at non-credit CCCApply, and we decided after discussion about how this has been working and who our community is. And again, talking about the life cycle of the non-credit student. We decided and they support that students that are able to self-register using CCCApply, using non-credit CCCApply because we're talking about non-credit students.

And those that can self register using my Hancock, great, we will continue to support them. And so that is still an option. And this option is for everyone else who is challenged by that other option, who doesn't yet have those digital skills and literacy to maneuver and self-register and all of that.

So what happened with our mobile registration? It really empowered and engaged our students like I mentioned. Our registration activity skyrockets the minute we send that link out. And if it's like term 2 or term 4, that all of those mid semester terms also get filled up right away.

We actually fill up our classes weeks, if not months, before our class start. And again, that's something that was never happening before. Because of that, we started to do wait lists. And our wait lists allowed us to advocate for the kind of classes, the exact kind of class, the hours the class should be, because our students were demanding or the demand from our students was evening classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Whatever those parameters were. We could actually pool our data directly from these wait lists that we were now being able to build. So last spring, this last spring, we saw a waitlist of over 100 students. This last summer, summer 2022, we saw our waitlist grow to 160. And for fall, we had waitlist of over 550 students.

So these were students that were ready to enroll, that they had already submitted an application or a registration form, but we were not able to accommodate that capacity. And so we were limited by our capacity. However, we continue to place those students as spots open up, as we were able to open more sessions.

And also because we're not able to actually seat all of these students, we are opening more sessions for spring in those time slots that we know are necessary in those levels of classes we know are necessary to fulfill the community need. So we no longer have long lines at registration, at the beginning of class.

We don't have a cancellation of classes as much as we used to. I think our limit right now is really understanding where our community need is and the kind of classes that they need. And prioritizing those level of classes, because that's where the need is versus before it was a perception of maybe we need this level and this level at these times, during the day where we're really seeing where the need is based on actual registration forms.

So by the time our print publication gets in the mail and gets received and students start coming in, the classes are already full. So we're still working on recruiting. And I'm going to show you what we're doing in there too. So this is a graph of the information that the registration-- so registration is released 108 days out.

This is that immediate, let's see, blue is fall. This is that immediate student responds to registration. And this is two weeks out where before, maybe the Print publication got in the mail and we started to see students come in. So we saw that both in 2022, 2021, we started to see that trend.

In 2020, we were just building the confidence of what SignalVine is, and we didn't have that online registration form yet. But we started to communicate that registration was open and that they could come in. So we started to see some level of activity. We're still building the confidence of texting.

Oh. Somebody asked about the form, and what it looks like at the end. So along with the MS-- let me see, MS form, I develop then a series of steps or assets associated with that. So that form gets delivered to admissions and records in a PDF form. And so then it is actually processed and uploaded just like a PDF form would be. So student engagement--

Marjorie Olavides: Marina?

Marina Washburn: Yes.

Marjorie Olavides: All right. One more question. Were you in person in fall 2021?

Marina Washburn: Let's see. Yes. I think we were doing both. We were doing-- yes. We were doing both in-person and online. And this fall we're not doing any online. We're just doing in-person.

Marjorie Olavides: Got it. Thank you.

Marina Washburn: Student engagement persistence. So what we're doing now is continuing to leverage this communication tool with our students. And what we're seeing now is that we'll send out-- classes are starting this week, and you are registered for, if they need to, this class, this class, and this class.

So what we started to see is. An actual notable 5% to 8% increase in the first week of attendance when we compare it to even last year and previous falls. And so we know that this gentle nudging of reminders has supported our students with retention. The nudging of, "Hey, next class is starting this next semester, would you like to register," allows them to continue on their path to complete their degree.

Somebody-- sorry. I haven't been paying attention to the chat, but we'll go through those before we leave. OK. So how do we get this done? I have a group of part time three-- actually, right now it's three. It used to be two part time, temporary employees. And my temporary employees work about 15 to 19 hours a week but they don't just do SignalVine, which is our texting platform.

They actually do respond to two SignalVine. They actually attend all of those community events where we're recruiting our students, they also manage the waitlist as they come in so that they can support placements and then pass it on to admission records when that person is registering, they support the registration process because one of the things I noticed at least with us, initially was, my question was, how does the student know that they are registered? Who's communicating that they're in? Who's communicating that their class is starting?

All those little things that I was wondering about, I asked a lot of questions about. And so our student engagement team does that. Our student engagement team confirms with the student that they're registered, they let them know if they're on a waitlist if there's no room available, they let them know when there's a space available and if they'd like to register now.

They also manage things like I really want to continue with Professor so-and-so. And we did a survey of some of our students, and we found that what we were hearing a lot from our students is, do you have the next level with this professor? Because if you did, I'd like to continue with this professor with level B or level C.

And that was really enlightening. So what we're doing this semester is, actually, next semester we're starting to plan for cohorts. Because we're seeing this drop between level B and level C. And we're hoping that this is going to address the drop. Students are comfortable with the professor, they're learning with the professor, and they want to continue with that professor.

So this is one more strategy where we are implementing for transitioning and persistence, targeting persistence goals and see if this creates a change in how students are able to complete those certificates. Because they're in a comfortable setting, they're in a comfortable environment, and they're asking for what they need. And so we do get that level of feedback from our students as well. Much more easier now with this texting platform.

So my team right now is Maricela Damaris and Adriana and Susana. Adriana is our liaison between admission and records, and she supports our student engagement team. OK. So now that we've had so much success with our student and we see that there's definitely a need to also support our faculty recruitment as well as our faculty communication, and so our next step, and what we've started to do is, in conversations with our faculty, we knew we were having these communication issues with our students.

And in talking to our faculty, they said, yeah, in our classroom, you're using WhatsApp or we are using Remind or we're using our own text platform because when we're communicating with our students, that is actually a better way of communicating with them. So we are looking for ways to leverage this texting platform to support our faculty being able to communicate with our student classrooms as well or their classrooms.

We're also lead generation. I wanted to tell you about this, because this has been amazing as well. Our capacity issues have been really stagnant in terms of recruitment of additional faculty, and even though we've had those ads up, even though we're promoting our ads, all of those things, what we changed in the summer is that we did lead generation advertising.

The same way that we're doing it for our students, now we're doing it for our faculty. And what that has led to is we have a truck driving program, for example, in our non-credit department. For the last couple of years, we only had one instructor. One instructor, one part time instructor, because we could not find other instructors.

In summer, we launched a lead generation advertising. We immediately received 40 applications to be a truck driving instructor. And out of those, we're developing a pool of faculty so we actually can grow that program. Because that was so successful, we turned around and did the same thing for our NESL program, which is our biggest program and why we have 550 students on the waitlist.

And immediately within two weeks, we had 40 applications for NESL instructors, part time NESL instructors. And so both of those recruitments had been unsuccessful previously. And with lead generation, we actually have options, and we are interviewing and we are developing pools of faculty members.

And so those two don't even run very long, because they've been so successful in recruiting possible candidates and then interviewing them from there, seeing if they meet minimum qualifications, and so on. So let me go to questions, and let's see. Marjorie, did you want to-- yeah.

Marjorie Olavides: OK. There's a few. I'll start with the last one since you just talked about it. The first one, I believe was on the last slide, what are lead submissions?

Marina Washburn: Yes. OK. So when you are working in Facebook, Facebook, and I actually have seen this also in Instagram, which I think is where we are now as well. This basically looks like an ad, but the way that, if somebody clicks on it, it actually has a Submit button. And in that button, it actually is asking the applicant for their information.

And it just says, their name, their contact information, and that is send to you as the advertiser, we download that in an Excel sheet and then follow up with them. So whether you want their email-- you decide what information you want from them, and that is submitted to you. So that's a lead generation campaign. And you can target those just as much as you do all those other ad advertisements.

Only that for us has been quantifiable, and it's been proven to work. So we've piloted those techniques, they proved positive with our students, and now they're also proving positive working with faculty recruitment.

Marjorie Olavides: Great. And I think you've answered what is lead generation advertising in there also. Was your faculty lead generation using Facebook as well or other ways?

Marina Washburn: Yes. Facebook and Instagram are the same company. So I know that we're doing-- that's also appearing over there. We've also started to do digital campaigns on-- we're really focusing on digital campaigns. So we are continuing to do digital campaigns in Spotify, for example, in Google-- Google Ads, we do run some of those. But YouTube, Facebook, I'm not sure we're on Snapchat yet. I don't think we're doing that yet. But TikTok, I believe.

So we're trying to really be in the places where our community is going to find us. Be in their world. Somebody asked, what is SignalVine? SignalVine is a texting platform. And it's actually-- I don't know if they only work with institutions of higher learning, that's how I found them.

And on our end, it actually just looks like a web portal. You log in, your student information is there, you send out a mass message or individual messages, or you can sort your student data and then send a message to that subset of individuals. But that is how we communicate with our students. On their end, it just looks like a regular text message. No app to download, no account to create, it just looks like a text message.

How much did it cost? The pilot year, I believe, it was $5,000. It was very, very, very inexpensive. It's not like Remind, because Remind requires a student to also have Remind on their phone. At least it did when I was looking into that option. SignalVine is very much just a text platform.

And let's see, the cost for the year after, I believe, the second year, we had it was about 10,000 for the year. It really depends on the users. And campus, I think I mentioned it. This was so successful that campus-- Allan Hancock decided to launch SignalVine for the Credit Department, for basically the entire campus. And with that, we're no longer paying for it directly, but, I believe, it's somewhere in the $30,000, maybe $40,000 for the entire campus per year. But it depends on the number of students you have enrolled.

Marjorie Olavides: OK. Another question. In addition to turning registrations into PDFs, did you find any other Microsoft Power Apps to be useful?

Marina Washburn: Yes. So I used-- Allan Hancock had two users of Power Apps. And I'm number 2. And so I used Power Apps for this entire process. And I also developed an add and drop form very similar to this form, the registration form so students can add and drop. The other thing we can do with-- and it works in the same way.

The other thing that we can do with SignalVine is I did an automated menu. And so the student can type in Help. And when they type in Help, they get an automated menu that gives them options for what kind of support they're looking for, whether it's their student ID number, whether it's office hours, whether they want to register and they need the link or they want to drop a class they get a link.

And so that has also been something that you can build on in SignalVine, which allows us to then manage some of those tasks that don't require a person to actually respond to some text, because some of it is automated.

Marjorie Olavides: I think the questions in the chat looks like you might need to just do a SignalVine presentation.

Marina Washburn: Oh, I'd love to. I have to tell you, it's been a gain changer in terms of, if I didn't emphasize this enough, over 50% of our students are engaged. And when I mean engaged, I mean, they are responding, they're sending us email, they're asking us questions, they express their needs.

And this is something that we were-- we're basically operating blind. And we really didn't know what our student-- we could make a lot of assumptions about our students. And initially when I started at Hancock, I did a couple of surveys of students to just even understand, if any of this publicity we were doing was working for them and try to really understand where the need was, because initially, we didn't have a way of capturing those students that were walking back out the door because the class was full.

And so by developing these technologies, we capture all that data. And there was buy-in from our admissions and records and our registration folks up in front who are willing to say, to remind the student, there isn't space, but would you like to be on a waitlist? And then take their information, and we would manage it from there.

So it became small, manageable changes that created tremendous change for our students. And in time, it's really become a communication tool that's really direct with our students. I mean, there's nothing more direct than text. But reliable, timely, and it really builds that sense of community. Did we get all the questions?

Marjorie Olavides: I think so. But we've got a little bit more time. Can you--

Marina Washburn: Great.

Marjorie Olavides: --I do have another question. Can you, maybe, go over, again, what lead generation is?

Marina Washburn: Sure. OK. So lead generation-- and I should have had, maybe, some clip art for this. In Facebook, I think it's primarily managed in Facebook but in other entities like that. There is a development of an ad campaign button as a business. So as a business, we Hancock College, have a business account that allows us to market and place ads directly in Facebook.

And one of the options-- they have many types of ads and many types of campaigns. One of them is called lead generation. And basically, what that is is that, when the student sees or when the person sees an ad, there's always a button that either says, you could have them call and that's going to call directly, or it's going to ask them to fill out a form, and it's going to ask them for their name and their email and their phone number depending on what you are interested in, receiving from them.

And then that information, when they hit Submit, it actually comes to you as the advertiser. And when that comes to you, my team of student engagement folks they go online-- they go and actually contact them. So whether they provided an email or they provided a cell phone number, they call them. And they follow up with them. And then if they need to send them a text, they'll send them a text, they'll send them the registration link, they'll walk them through the process.

So it's really handholding from a technologically today type of place, so via text, which allowed us to increase our capacity with the support that we have.

Marjorie Olavides: OK. One more question is-- actually two that I see here. Do you have a SignalVine, and that one's being asked by Cathy. Cathy, Marina's email address is on the screen. Maybe it'd be better if you emailed her and asked her for that information. And then the second one, what apps-- oh, it moved. OK. What apps can we use for the multilingual registration form?

Marina Washburn: So MS Teams. I mean, let's see, Microsoft. Microsoft has been a leader in translation, and they actually have so many different languages. So it is available for-- there's actually-- I don't know the exact number, but I just it's multilingual. And there's a lot.

Now, in MS forms, when I select that I want to make the form bilingual or that I want to make it multilingual, I select the language, and then it allows me to go through each of the questions in each of the sections in that language. So it's up to me to confirm that that's how I want it to read. And I use Google Translate to double check my spelling. And so that's been a real tool for me. So both of those are really good tools for translating your forms.

Marjorie Olavides: Awesome. Thank you, Marina. Anyone, if you've got any other questions, go ahead and start typing us into the chat while you're doing that if there are any more questions. I'm going to go ahead and post the evaluation link in the chat. Just remember that posting of this recording is dependent upon review of these evaluations. So please make sure you fill that out. Anything else you wanted to go over Marina, or-- oh, sorry.

Marina Washburn: I know that there was some curiosity about SignalVine. I'm wondering if you'd like me to show you what it looks like.

Marjorie Olavides: Sure. Yeah. I'm also going to go ahead and post your slides again also while you're finding that.

Marina Washburn: OK.

Marjorie Olavides: And someone did say, yes, please.

Marina Washburn: Sure. Let me see if I-- yes, I can. OK. So yeah.

Marjorie Olavides: Lives are uploading into the chat right now, so--

Marina Washburn: So on a user end, what I'm sharing with you right now is our SignalVine Portal. And our contacts-- so I'm just selecting. These are a lot of Hancock's programs, but this is our non-credit program. And so this is our non-credit contacts. And you can then search by all of these fields, which is depending on how you load up your data from Banner-- from Banner or from MIS or from whatever system you are using.

It could either have very many-- there's a lot of ways in which the data is connected directly from your student data. But we also have-- and I'll show you this group of people. Let's see if I have somebody. OK. So this group of people, I just basically told SignalVine, give me folks that are coded as new participants.

And because we make our text number public in our publications, all of these individuals have contacted us to say, "Hi. I'd like more information." And then we eventually, hopefully, convert them into students as well. Because we've given them information, we shared our information, and then they respond with what information they need and the messages that they get.

So this is a student who is a new participant. Again, they're not currently a student, but they're interested in our program. So it might be registering. But like I was saying, we actually promote all kinds of different events and activities that are happening on campus that would benefit our students, including community resources.

So on our end, this is what it looks like. This actually tells us, students that need help, this person selected help. And they wanted to actually unsubscribe, which is an option that is available. This student received a welcome message and then they said they'd like Spanish. And then the system will generate this Spanish message back to them indicating that they want us-- they want messages in Spanish in the future.

The student gets added to a SignalVine and then they are given an option to opt out. And when they opt out, it automatically opts them out. The reason why we wanted to include everyone-- and by the way, they could also un-opt out in the future. The reason we wanted to do that is our students don't know what they don't know, are the resources at our campus?

And so if we had them now get added to SignalVine and only opt in eventually, we might miss a lot of students. And providing the services and the opportunities we can offer, support services we can offer in text. And so campus was willing to allow us to do that, because in CCCApply, there is a box-- there is an option to be opted in or out. But our students are not doing CCCApply.

And this has worked really well. You'll see that overall, we've had 6.4% opt out. And then we've had over 53% engagement from our students. Yeah. Let me know if I can show you anything else. But that is just a quick tour of how SignalVine works on this end. But for the students, it's just a regular text message.

Marjorie Olavides: The SignalVine pull the student info directly from Banner.

Marina Washburn: Yes. So I worked-- so this is the extent of the work I did with IT. I worked with SignalVine, and then once SignalVine-- we went through developing how we were going to use it, what kind of data was going to be integrated into it. I then connected with our IT department and reviewed the specs that SignalVine had sent me. And then I connected SignalVine with our IT department to talk about that file that they need, and that was it.

Once IT developed that, our IT department and it's basically a daily output into SignalVine, that was the extent. There's about twice a year that we need to make sure that the data is still correct. That the output from Banner is still correct. That it's still the right set of students, especially as we add, maybe, new disciplines into the non-credit set of classes. We want to make sure that those are being pulled as well.

But my purpose in developing a SignalVine was to focus on our CAEP students initially. And that still continues to be the primary focus. It's the CAEP-related disciplines that we focus on importing. And so that's a daily import. And other than that, it hasn't been a taxing activity for our IT department. So it was really easy to get their support.

Marjorie Olavides: Right. I'm not seeing any other questions. Oh, there's one. Is there a specific reason you are using Microsoft Forms over Google Forms?

Marina Washburn: Yes. So my background is in nonprofits. My initial career was in nonprofits and in advocacy. And then I came to CAEP and education. And so I say that to say my initial background was in all Google. I was versed in Google everything. And when I came to Hancock and they were using Microsoft, I transitioned to understand how to best leverage these tools.

And what I found when I started to really delve into what can I do with MS Teams and the pandemic opened up a whole bunch of let's start doing more online, and I realized that the Power Apps is a huge gain changer for simplifying processes and really provide the buy-in from folks.

The biggest concern from admission of records initially about wanting to launch this mobile form was, how are we going to get the data. And when I was able to say, don't worry about it, it'll look like a PDF when you get it. Don't worry about the steps to get us there, they said, great. Love it. Let's do it. And so I was able to do more with the tools from Microsoft than I was able to do with Google.