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Communications Governance Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

By Hendrix Bodden posted 8 days ago

  

In a perfect world universities communicate freely with students, they respond and everyone is happy. Unfortunately – you guessed it – schools and their students don’t live in a perfect world. Communications are freely sent – Academics, Administration, Student Affairs, Finance – and sent, and sent, and sent. But students aren’t responding, at least in numbers sufficient to move the needle on student success.

What does this federated, non-governance world look like to the student?

·      Overwhelming - multiple emails and texts about the same subject

·      Confusing – collisions when different messages contain conflicting information

·      Tone deaf – messages are one-size-fits-all with zero student specific recognition

·      Barraged – emails and texts slam inboxes and mobile devices simultaneously

The problem is that Academics needs to get its messages out and is not incented to coordinate with Administration….I know I’m preaching to the choir, my apologies.

The solution is communications governance. But unless school leadership is firmly focused on establishing governance, and departments are willing to support the effort, governance can look like a new shiny toy but with no batteries to make it work.

xSIGNALcampus developed our Student Communications platform to support message orchestration in a highly federated environment AND give each department control over their messaging strategy.

Tall order, right?

Actually, one of our customers showed us how they are driving governance with simple configuration of our the xSIGNALcampus platform.

With the support of senior leadership, they’re working with each department to use our solution to simply categorize messages into Topics such as Holds; Financial Aid; Housing; etc.

On the student side of things, they’re requesting students opt-in to receiving communications and select in which communications channel they prefer to receive specific Topics.

Students get ownership of their comms. Some examples:

·      Non-critical: send me an email

·      Class registration holds: SMS and WhatsApp me

·      FERPA issues: email (legally required) and SMS for time sensitive content.

The university has designated an Always-On channel – in our customer’s case it’s their student mobile app.

The trick is working with each department and getting each department to buy into the strategy and work collaboratively with each other department. And why wouldn’t they? In the current world where a significant percentage of their messages are not read or acted upon, why not de-federate and ensure students get the support they need to succeed.

Could this be termed true data governance? Probably not, but it is functional governance and supports senior leaderships by assisting in governance instantiation.

As a next step, a school can overlay AI to introspect message logistics and content to derive data on channel efficacy, optimize send timing and content. Eliminate the overwhelming barrage of tone deaf conflicting messages.

With simultaneous AI introspection of outbound queued content and SIS/LMS/CRM student data, make messages relevant to the student – don’t send a “You’ve got a Hold on Class Registration” message to a student who carries a past due tuition bill; send a message offering to help the student figure out how to pay their tuition bill.

Very little is easy in this world. But achieving communications governance isn’t hard.

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