CampusESP welcomes Customer 450: University of New Hampshire!

Growing a company is great. Helping more institutions support their students through strategic family engagement is amazing. And so every time we hit another customer milestone — we have to celebrate a little!

Today, we welcome the University of New Hampshire as CampusESP Customer 450! The largest university in the state, renowned for its research programs, UNH wanted to ensure families felt included, educated, and respected as their student’s advisors. With a lot of families to reach and limited bandwidth, they turned to CampusESP. We’re excited to help them bring their engagement expectations to life.

Ensuring enrolled families feel as valued as prospective families

Like most universities, UNH communicates with families during the admissions process. In recent years, they have begun sending unique parent communications during the recruitment cycle. But once enrolled, there was a bit of a whiplash moment.

“We do a lot of work around introducing new students and families to UNH, and we pride ourselves on the amount we do with families to adjust them to the transition of sending a new student to college,” shared Christa Ricker, Director of New Student and Family Programs. “We really do a great job there, but then at new family orientation we tell them they won’t hear from us as much anymore. Part of that is FERPA limitations … but part of it is we haven’t had a good system of maintaining that level of communication.”

Realizing that these families not only wanted to feel included in their student’s journey, but that their involvement could be beneficial for their student’s success, Ricker and others began to reconsider their current families strategy. “We were in search of two things — first a way to scale continued communications, but second a clear system for management of family contact information. A way to simply have everyone’s names in one place!”

Better data management for better engagement

To date, the “database” Ricker and her team have used is a shared spreadsheet, populated with emails students included in their Common Application — potentially years prior — and one-off requests received from interested family members. Filtering through the list to send tailored communications required working with other teams to pull additional data from Salesforce. Plus, due to limitations on the Common App, the university could only ever collect two email addresses to be associated with a student.

“I appreciate that CampusESP allows for moms and dads and step-moms and step-dads and any kind of supporter to begin getting access to information,” shared Ricker. 

Managing accuracy and moving away from Facebook

Like many institutions, the most popular way for current parents to find information about what’s going on at UNH has been the institution’s parents’ Facebook group. Monitored and maintained by representatives of the UNH Parents Council, Ricker says the Facebook group has its benefits — namely being a place of community where new college parents can help each other with the emotional transition and help provide suggestions on common hurdles. 

“Where it falls short is in sharing accurate information about the university,” said Ricker. “Our events, schedules, and policies change year to year, and while parents mean well, they are often answering questions from a different perspective. The information looks different year to year.”

A new way for tailored, scaled communication with CampusESP

As UNH launches CampusESP for Family Communication, Ricker and her team will have a system that is purpose built to meet their goals.

With the ability to import known email contacts or have interested individuals simply sign up for an account online, they’ll begin creating a more robust database of family contacts that tracks interests and student lifecycle information, allowing them to send tailored communication to the right families at the right time.

With automated digests and a content team at CampusESP HQ helping to build 90% of their content, they’ll have consistent and relevant emails going out to families on the topics they care about most.

And with ownership and comment auditing, they’ll be able to easily ensure the information going out is accurate.

“I’m excited that CampusESP gives us a new baseline, a level of communication that can only be built upon,” said Ricker. “I really appreciate that I’ll now know families are getting both general information about life at college as well as UNH-specific information, and everything I do is additive and unique to what’s happening at UNH at that time.”

Ricker already has plans for that new-found time, planning to augment the portal with posts about the work of the Parent Council, first-person insights from campus leadership, and updates on the university’s research accolades. 

“I think ultimately, a year from now, my hope is a family member would be able to share information back to me that they read in an email or in the portal. I love the fact that our families will know they are being communicated with because they are valued members of our community, and that the resources they receive will help them support their student to be successful and happy at UNH.”