The Baylor Parents Network started using the CampusESP parent portal in June of 2018. As with most schools, June is a busy time for us... leading up to an even busier one. Having our parent portal up and running this summer proved to be more than worth it. Here’s why.

The platform runs itself

In the summer, our team travels non-stop, and we don’t have the time to create content or manage the portal. However, hardly even touching our portal from June to September, we imported over 14,000 parents, had more than 18,000 logins from 6,000 users, and saw open rates consistently exceed 45%. With automated newsletters, the system kept parents engaged and sent regular updates on campus news, events and deadlines.

We don’t need to spend much time maintaining the content that goes out to parents. The CampusESP team does all the legwork for us, with curated content and drip marketing campaigns that automate messages to parents. All I have to do is check the portal in the morning and read the content already scheduled to go out, which I’m able to approve or reject.

Now that things have slowed down in our office, we’ve been able to dive deeper into our parent communication strategy. While we’re so thankful for how little time we can put into our portal--and still see incredible results--we’re excited to spend more time curating our content and seeing how it grows!

It’s easy to collect useful data

My favorite part about CampusESP analytics is how narrowly we can examine a certain parent population. The portal allows us to separate our users into very specific demographic groups (student’s class year, location, race/ethnicity, first-gen status) and see what types of content they are opening, reading and engaging with.

The other data I find helpful is having access to email open rates. We measure a lot of our office’s success by open rates, so being able to view open rates according to type of content, time of year and parent demographic has been incredibly useful for us.

But the best part of it all? Our parent portal is so easy to use. I can jump online, grab the information I need, download it to the format of my choosing, and have it ready to present in no time. Proving CampusESP’s effectiveness with parents to our department has been a breeze.

The parents are happy!

The most common feedback we receive from parents is, “This is such a great idea, thank you!” Parents enjoy the platform because it so closely mirrors the portals they used when their students were in high school, mixed with social media. Parents can view personalized content, share it (with their student!), make comments, and customize their experience.

We’ve recently presented our parent portal to prospective parents. The moment we put the link on the screen and say they can sign up, everyone pulls out their phones to take a picture. Parents love to know that they can be connected from the very beginning and that they won’t miss any important information.

Overall, CampusESP is like having a whole team of tech support, content curators, and content creators in our office! There is so much untapped potential in the way we’ve been using the parent portal-- We can’t wait to move forward and make it even better for our parents!