CampusESP and Slate: Better Together at Gettysburg College
Gettysburg College, a private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, wanted to better engage families in the admission process. Without adequate parent communication, they found that parents were logging into their students’ accounts.
So, they planned to build a parent portal in Slate. Then they discovered CampusESP.
Sarah Kotlinski, Director of Enrollment Systems and Analytics at Gettysburg College, realized, “Why am I spending time building a custom portal? CampusESP already delivers exactly what I’m trying to do, wrapped in an interactive platform that engages families on the schedule they want.” She moved forward with CampusESP.
Still, Slate remains a critical part of Gettysburg’s student data and engagement strategy. As a Slate power user and data whiz, Kotlinski has integrated the two systems to create an even better experience for students, families, and staff.
To celebrate their innovative data integration, Gettysburg College has been named our “ESP MVP” for Q1 2025!
Data going into CampusESP: Student checklists, FAFSA status, counselor assignments, and more
To start, Gettysburg implemented CampusESP’s Admissions Dashboard, which displays personalized student checklist data to parents. Through translation tables in Slate, student next steps and help resources are shown to parents into CampusESP, allowing parents to coach their students from the passenger’s seat.
Kotlinski shared, “We’re encouraged to see that all year, we’ve been running ahead on financial aid submissions - and the only thing we changed is displaying the student’s completion status to parents in CampusESP.”
The Admissions Dashboard has also helped Kotlinski’s team resolve issues more quickly. She shared, “Every year students misenter information, and the forms don’t get matched to their record correctly. It’s unavoidable, but by displaying this information more clearly to families, families can help us identify these issues, and we can move students through the funnel faster.”
In addition to Admissions Dashboard data, which includes FAFSA and CSS Profile completion, Gettysburg imports assigned recruiter and visit status as parent profile fields in CampusESP. These fields can be merged into emails and text messages for even more personalized communication, such as nudges to families who have not visited campus, or information about how to contact their assigned admissions recruiter.
Data going into Slate: Parent Promoter Score™, Account Registration, and “Is Gettysburg in your Top 3"?
Making a class is like a puzzle – you have to consider student interest, student action, historic trends, and many other factors. Kotlinski explained, “Parent engagement data is one more puzzle piece to help predict where students will land. Parent Promoter Score has been a wonderful lens that we’ve never had before.”
According to CampusESP research, parents in the top quartile of engagement are 3x more likely to have a student enroll, and if a parent registers their account in CampusESP, their student is 11x more likely to enroll. With that data in mind, Gettysburg built a custom dashboard in Slate that highlights parents’ engagement quartiles and account registration status. This helps recruiters see where to focus their efforts.
In addition, Gettysburg surveys families in CampusESP and asks directly whether Gettysburg is one of their student’s top 3 choices. The parent’s response is also visible on that Slate dashboard. Talk about a strong enrollment signal!
CampusESP helps the Gettysburg team sift through loads of enrollment data and surface which students are on the fence. “When our staff is going out for a visit or when there’s a parent on the phone, we know the best way to approach the conversation,” Kotlinski said.
What’s next for Gettysburg?
The Gettysburg team is encouraged by the early results from their first enrollment cycle using CampusESP:
Financial aid applications were ahead all year, with families coaching their students to complete the most important checklist items
Counselors are empowered with parent data to recruit students whose families have displayed interest
Families are helping students resolve issues earlier, by seeing items marked as incomplete on the checklist that were submitted with incorrect information, leading them to reach out to Gettysburg for resolution
Across multiple areas, Gettysburg is seeing the impact of turning parents into partners. Moving forward, they plan to study the impact of parent engagement on yield, as well as incorporate Parent Promoter Score into other student models and campus research.
Congratulations to Gettysburg College for winning our Q1 2025 ESP MVP Award, and a big THANK YOU to Sarah Kotlinski and her team for trailblazing an integration that empowers students, families, and staff all at once!
Interested in learning more?
PS – We’re making it even easier to integrate CampusESP and Slate! We just released a Slate Suitcase that automatically maps Slate records to the CampusESP source format. Current customers should reach out to support@campusesp.com for help!