Student onboarding is the journey of acclimating a student to their institution. This process requires a series of steps that starts with first-year students making their deposit (once they are accepted by a university) and ends when the student is successfully integrated into the campus community.
The Keene State College (KSC) Transitions and Community Living team, along with KSC Admissions, assists students with their onboarding tasks and make it easy for staff to identify students who may have trouble with those requirements. At KSC, the onboarding data points include their housing application and assignment, credits registered for an upcoming semester, registration, and attendance of a new student orientation session, claiming of their technology accounts, and compliance with health form submissions.
In June 2021, the Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) Enterprise CRM Services team started a project to bring together different onboarding to present a full picture of the onboard journey for KSC students using Salesforce, a customer relationship management platform. ET&S completed this project in June 2022, which helps deliver onboard data from different courses in one dashboard for review and assists with identifying students who struggle with the onboarding process at KSC. This helps make the students’ journal from admissions to on-campus as seamless as possible.
KSC Direct of Admissions Peg Richmond spoke about the benefits of this project, entitled “Hootie’s How-to’s,” after Keene State’s mascot Hootie.
“If I were to rate all the projects completed in the past year and those that provided us with the most information regarding connecting with and providing service to our students, I would place the onboarding project at the top of the list,” Richmond said. “The transition from accepted student to enrolling student is very overwhelming to (KSC) families. This project has given us the information we need to follow up with students and be sure they are taking all the necessary steps to claim their emails, register for classes, sign up for orientation, housing, and complete health forms. We are so grateful to have this information which has increased our level of support for enrolling students.”
Before this project, Casey Justice, Director of Transitions & Community Living at KSC, previously used Excel spreadsheets from different departments to get a picture of the onboarding process.
“The onboarding project has been a pie-in-the-sky hope since I took over the orientation program,” Justice said. “(When ET&S) was brought in to help us figure out how to make an active dashboard with multiple systems, everything came together. (They) worked with all of our campus partners to get the systems to talk to one another, understand the project goals, and make it happen. This project allowed for multiple offices to share information about what new students have done and provide us quick insight as to which students we need to follow up with.”
