EDUCATIONAL SESSION TRACKS

Portal Power: Daily Tour and Ambassador Management through Slate

Portals and Reports

Lisa McGrady, Assistant Director & Samantha Buxbaum, Admission Counselor/ Program

Coordinator -University Ambassadors, Florida

State

University

Trying to provide an intimate tour experience for guests at a large institution can be challenging Over the years we had perfected our system of spreadsheets, dry erase boards, and sticker charts to smoothly run tours for satisfied guests. However, as our institution transitioned into using Slate to manage applications, we found ourselves, and our data, left out of the big picture for Admissions and Recruitment. Join us as we take you through our journey of collaboration and creativity with our Slate Core Team to create our Facilitation Portal Used to assign tour guides, match guests with similar interests, document notes, and generate reports, our new portal is a more efficient and sophisticated version of our historic process Still a work in progress, we will share our trials, successes, and ideas for future improvement

Using Slate Portals to Communicate to Visitors

Rebecca Johnson, Director of Visitor Center, University of South Carolina

The University of South Carolina hosts over 35,000 visitors annually. With 17 tour times a week, over a dozen academic information session and the option for one-on-one appointments, we found it difficult to fit all the necessary details for the visit into an email. After some head-scratching and lots of trial and error, we discovered the beauty of utilizing Slate portals to streamline communication We have optimized portals to help our guests navigate the registration process, locate parking and get to their event location with less hair pulling We found so much success in the weekday visit process that we expanded to our large event days--Open House and Admitted Student Weekend; and applied the portal to our group visit process to collect participant information. Join us as we share some tips and tricks we learned along this journey.