Tarleton State University believed in the power of family engagement early. Here’s where they are now.

Kei Bermea and Lathes Towns from Tarleton State University holding up their ESP MVP award!

CampusESP has come a long way since it was founded: 40 employees, 300+ customers, over 7 million parent users.

One thing that’s been a constant throughout CampusESP’s growth? Having Tarleton State University as a customer. Since their first year of having CampusESP, Tarleton has come a long way as well. Case in point: they increased their family user base by 10x and FERPA connections in their portal by over 8x. As they’ve expanded, they’ve introduced more creative content to support their families, which has played a part in decreasing their phone calls from families by 95%! We want to honor their achievements by naming them our CampusESP MVP award winner for Q4 2022. 

So let’s take it back to customer #1 and look at how they’ve expanded their reach and created engaging content to reach goals over the years. 

Tarleton predicted the influence that families would bring

Kei Bermea and Lathes Towns pose with Leslie Gale and Tess Jenkins from the CampusESP team (center) during a campus visit. (We adore Lathes’ purple hard hat!)

Tarleton State University joined the CampusESP family in 2015. At the time, there wasn’t much research on the importance of family engagement. Most colleges and universities did not focus on family engagement nearly as much as they do today. Tarleton, however, understood and adopted the value of family engagement early on.

“I knew that parents wanted to be involved, but not intrusive – that was my favorite go-to word back then to help the university understand how important parents were and how much we needed to start valuing them,” said Lathes Towns, Director of Student Involvement and Family Relations at Tarleton. 

From the beginning, Tarleton’s main goals were to increase communication with families and decrease the number of phone calls from parents. As an all-in-one platform for family communication, CampusESP seemed like a good fit. But being the first institution to invest in a new technology always involves some risk. It was the deep level of support promised by CampusESP’s Customer Success team that made Tarleton more confident with the decision. 

“A big selling point was that CampusESP would provide as much of the content and support services as possible,” said Becky Gray, former CIO at Tarleton. “And hopefully at some point Tarleton would have the resources and bandwidth to contribute additional content as well.”

Tarleton commits to creating valuable content that informs families and builds trust

A few years later, Tarleton grew their department and brought on Kei Bermea, who is currently their Assistant Director of Student Involvement and Family Relations. Bermea hit the ground running by incorporating new ideas in the portal to keep families informed and help them feel more involved with the university. One unique initiative, coined “Texan Talks,” offers virtual events that let families connect with campus leadership and ask questions. Tarleton has created over 15 announcements about Texan Talks, which translates to over 160,000 emails delivered to families.

When the COVID pandemic hit, CampusESP became the go-to place for families to stay updated on all things related to how Tarleton was navigating the pandemic. When things were unpredictable, families continued to build trust with the institution. Tarleton’s campaign focused on providing COVID updates received 38,000 total impressions from families!

“In the beginning, when fear and anxiety was really high, our parents had the groundwork to express themselves and really feel like somebody was listening to them,” said Bermea. “They could see a face with the name.”

Tarleton modernizes their FERPA processes with CampusESP

Before getting CampusESP, one of Tarleton’s challenges was that they didn’t have an electronic FERPA process. Everything was handled through paper forms. Tarleton also noticed that parents were violating FERPA by using student credentials to login to access information. Tarleton turned to CampusESP for FERPA Management, which is built directly in their family portal.

“FERPA Management was really vital for us as a university because we didn't have one set place for parents to access information,” said Towns. “We were receiving so many phone calls from parents and had to look in multiple places to get the information we needed before we could even talk to them.” 

Tarleton has seen a positive impact on retention when families receive updates on their student’s progress. CampusESP conducted a study with Tarleton and found that student retention rates are 9% higher among students with more engaged parents. The number of Tarleton families who are receiving academic and financial updates continues to rise each year – as of this year, over 4,500 students have connected to a family member, which represents 8x growth in FERPA connections since their first year with CampusESP. 

And the phone calls from families? They went down – drastically.

“We used to receive 5 to 10 calls a day from Tarleton parents. They were concerned and wanted more resources to help support their students,” said Towns. “With CampusESP, our phone calls began to decrease daily. Our parent call volume has gone down around 95%, and now we’re only getting a few phone calls from parents per week.”

Driving parents to the source (NOT Facebook)

Looking forward, Tarleton has plans to sunset their Facebook page for families. By steering families towards The Tarleton Parent and Family Experience to receive up-to-date information, they can maintain control of their narrative and equip parents with accurate answers to their questions, all in one place. Tarleton promotes CampusESP at Orientation each year to help drive more families to the portal for information. After their first year of using CampusESP, they had around 1,500 parent users. Today, they have over 15,600 parent users, which comes out to over 10x growth in their family user base!

“We're phasing out Facebook for our parents and driving parents to the portal instead because that's a place where we have more control,” said Towns.

It’s a good move for Tarleton, considering it can be difficult to monitor parent comments on Facebook and prevent families from taking in false information. That’s one of the several reasons why Facebook won’t help you reach your parent engagement goals. 

We’re so impressed with how Tarleton scaled up their family communication strategy with CampusESP and proud to have been there to help! Congratulations to Tarleton for securing our Q4 ESP MVP – well deserved!