Name: From Hot Mess to Success: The Great Campus Tech Makeover
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T20:30:19.936Z
Duration: 50 min 40 s
Description: From Hot Mess to Success: The Great Campus Tech Makeover

Transcript for "From Hot Mess to Success: The Great Campus Tech Makeover": Alright. I gave everybody a little extra time, so we're just gonna get rolling here. I'm really, really appreciative of everybody joining us today, especially my panelists who I will introduce here in a second. But I'm just thrilled to be here with three very outstanding CIOs who have transformed their digital campus experiences with Pathify. And what makes this conversation especially valuable is that these leaders that you're gonna hear from today face many challenges that you all are dealing with right now. Outdated portals, tight budgets, lean IT teams, and the pressure to really deliver modern experiences that actually engage your campus communities. So today, we're gonna hear their honest stories about why they made the switch to Pathify, how implementation went, and where they're headed next. If you have questions, please feel free to post them inside of the q and a, and we'll we'll get to those as we go along in the session. So first things first, let me introduce our panelists. So we have three CIOs from three different schools joining us today. The first is Alicia from La Salle University. She is the v p the sorry. The assistant VP of IT and the CIO. We have Sejal, who is the CIO at Illinois Institute of Technology, and Talia, who is the CIO and data officer at Graceland University. And they're all gonna share some very different stories, and some different information about, how they got to Pathify. But first, I kinda wanna jump in for those of you that really don't know the Pathify story and gonna give you an overview of who we are and kinda what we do, and then we'll jump into the panel discussion. So Pathify was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2012. Our our two cofounders were really frustrated at their particular institution because they had so many places they had to go to find information. It becomes very annoying, too many clicks, all the things that I'm sure that many of you hear on a daily basis. But Australia only has around 35 colleges and universities in the entirety of the country, which is insane because it's a massive place. But where do you go that has the most higher ed ed the higher ed institutions? That would be The United States where we have thousands and thousands. So in 2017, we incorporated in The US and relocated the bulk of our workforce to The United States. Today, we're working with over 270 institutions. For perspective, some of you may have heard this story before, but I've been at Pathify for almost six years. When I started, we had 12 customers. So pretty rapid growth, for a variety of reasons, but one of the biggest ones is our customers. We also have over a 150 integrations and widgets that we have built in our core platform. And at this point, over 200,000,000 unique users, which is a crazy amount of unique users. So one of the things that I mentioned that the frustration of our cofounders was there's all this information, resources, people, documents living in various different locations. And that continues to expand. At at every institution, the digital footprint is just expanding on a daily basis. So you're asking students to navigate that ever expanding deep digital ecosystem and not understanding that students don't want to click more than one or two times, and even that they complain about. So you they have all the you have all these systems from a technology standpoint. You have all this information. You have forms that they need to fill out and documents that you need them to review and all this other content and events and calendars and communications and so much more that you're asking these students and faculty and staff, frankly, too to, go through and find. And it's really causing a problem, and it's becoming very frustrated because there's just too many things that they have to log in to find, and they don't know where to find anything. So what we're doing at Pathify is we developed a campus experience platform that's taking all of those systems on the left hand side menu. We're living in the middle, and we're integrating with things like your chatbots. If you don't have a chatbot, we do, so we can talk about that if you'd like. Any notifications, any information from your systems that are in widgets, any communications, any documents, any tasks or checklist that you have. We're bringing that all into the middle and connecting it all so people have one one place to log in to, a one stop shop that they don't have to think about anything because no one wants to think any bar. Everybody knows that. We are fully paired between web and mobile. So what that means is it's one product, one platform. You get apps in both stores as well as the web environment. So you're meeting people where they wanna be met, whether they wanna use their tablet, their phone, or a computer. The content is gonna be exactly the same regardless of what device that they're on, and we're providing that central and personalized type of hub that we are only doing in higher education. We don't have any other industries that we work in, so we're very focused on the needs of higher education and centralizing all of those things, systems, resources, people, into that one platform that's gonna be highly personalized as the person that's logged in, a very, very robust search interface. And we're trying to modernize that college experience that people are expecting. People expect a very specific type of digital experience, and we're trying to provide that, through the use of this one stop shop. So in our world, integrations are key. You are using ten, twenty, 60, a 100 different pieces of technology and expecting people to know where to go, and they just don't. So our platform is designed where you can integrate with virtually any system that you want as long as you can get the information out. The way that we do that is through our middleware layer. It's called Flow. We built it at Pathify. It is proprietary to Pathify. It's very powerful. It allows us to integrate with all of your systems very seamlessly and in a, in a way that people, can recognize the information and not have to go out to all these different systems to see it. So now I am actually gonna turn it over to the panel, and we're gonna get started with that. So I wanna start with the beginning for these for for our panelists. What was the breaking point that made you realize your current portal solution wasn't working anymore? And by the way, at Pathify, we do not refer to ourselves as a portal. We talk about ourselves as a platform, a campus experience platform. Because as many of you might be familiar with the word portal, it kinda connotates this whole link farm experience where you just have a bunch of links on a page, and people still have to click on those links and maybe five more clicks to get the information that they need, and we're just not doing that. We're actually bringing information in from your systems and displaying it right on the dashboard. So was there a specific incident, student feedback, or just accumulation of frustrations for our panelists? Kinda describe the situation. And, Talia, I'll kinda start with you. Certainly. So I'd been at my institution for more than twenty years, and I was getting ready to transition into the CIO role. And I knew immediately that this was a project that needed to be on our radar. So as an employee, as a parent of a student, all those things, I dealt with our student portal or platform, and kind of what you mentioned, it was a link farm. It had a lot of information. It was quickly outdated. They were clicking on things to go other places, and so we knew really early that this was a project that was gonna be on our radar. And you guys were also going through a process of evaluating your current ERP and making a change. So was that part of the decision making process or the breaking point, I guess, you could say? Absolutely. So another large project on my radar when I came in as CIO was an ERP transition, which is a significant change for any CIO. And so throughout that strategic planning process, part of it was how do we maintain some consistency for our students even though we're changing platforms in the background? So having Pathify allows us to keep them interacting with the same same place, even though we're switching out systems behind the scenes. Awesome. Alicia, same thing for you. Kinda talk about what was the breaking point at La Salle University. Sure. So for us, and I've been at La Salle University for over twenty years, and I've been through several transitions of of products, that were our portals over the years. And the product that we had been on for a few years at that point was getting close to the end of the contract. It was very much a traditional link farm. People were not staying in it. They were just logging in to get to the link that they needed. There was nothing personalized for them, and it was getting outdated. The content was getting stale. Information was scattered all over the place, and there were some performance problems with with the product that we were on. So we were we were at the point that we really wanted to move to something else. Awesome. And, Sejal, same same for you. What was the breaking point at Illinois Institute of Technology? Yeah. So I've been at Illinois Institute of Technology just like my fellow CIOs for over twenty years as well. And when this project came about, you know, again, it's a I think it's an accumulation of frustration over time that really drove this. Link farm. We also had a mobile app. We had a email platform, student the separate system for the student groups and activities. So as you quickly see, there's so many different systems, and and our students were just getting confused like you mentioned. You know, the systems were just not accessible how they wanted it to be accessible. And then for me, the biggest pain point was that IT was the middle one. In order to update these link form portals, IT had to get involved. So we were a roadblock in my opinion. And and, honestly, we shouldn't be spending our time updating content. So the breaking point really came when we realized that the portal was sunsetting. We had a mobile app that was coming up for renewal, and so we really stopped and started to think about what how we wanted to simplify that experience, how we wanted to have more of a digital front door for our students and our employees to be fully connected and find what they really wanted easily. So it was really about simplification, and the biggest one is, like, getting IT out of the mix. I'm sure a lot of people on this call or this webinar resonate with that. Okay. So, Alicia, going back to you, you had a kind of a unique challenge. Your old contract was expiring, and you really only had a few months to implement something new. There are a lot of IT leaders that probably were were would worry about that kind of timeline pressure. Can you walk us through how you guys approach that decision under those constraints, please? Sure. So we had been unhappy for some time, and we knew that we were going to be looking and had started looking at other options. And simultaneously, we started doing some house cleaning because IT was very much in the mix. We are we're the owner of the portal and all the things in the portal. You know, any any department that wanted to update content in it had to go through IT to get there. So we already had a good sense of kind of the skeletons in the closet, if you will, as far as our content and our links and our tools and all of that. We we had a good sense of what needed to be done. So making that project plan internally just about our content and what we wanted to to do next and how we were gonna approach cleaning it up and identifying the contacts in the other departments across campus that we would need to work with was happening while we were also looking at products. So that really set us up so that once we had identified Pathify as the place we wanted to be, we were ready to hit the ground running right away. And because we really just had a traditional Linkfarm portal, moving at least the core functionality of what we needed to another platform was our phase one and very doable in our short timeline. And, Mhmm. you know, even after that, we had plans for the months, you know, following the initial launch to to increase the tool set that we had available for our campus and kind of take baby steps on some of those those features. And what would have happened if you try to do this with this is gonna be a dreaded word, but the lengthy process of going RFP. Bad word. I know. Bad word. What would what would happen if you if you woulda had to go through that, do you think? If I would have had to do that, it it would have delayed our process at least a year just because of the amount of paperwork and and and work with with procurement and and other partners on campus to really get that moving. Now we did very much include our partners on campus in our decision making, but a traditional RFP would have delayed the project significantly. So what I'm hearing you saying is just don't go to RFP. Okay. It's being it's also being recorded. So thank you so much. Okay. Let's talk about implementation. Okay? So this is for Sejal. Sejal is someone who has worked with a lot of vendors, and I I I mean, most people have worked with a lot of vendors. But what specifically made Pathify implementation process different for you? I would say, like, for me and my team, you know, Pathify is very well structured and realistic with the timelines. They have clear expectations outlined, clear timelines outlined, and Pathify really delivers on what they say they deliver. So there's a project manager that comes with a very structured approach. So it keeps us grounded. Right? And the support. So before Glow Life, we're testing all across the way. We found a problem with our mobile app, and Pathify was on it. And then every team member was on it for a successful launch. So that really differentiated it. And, also, we don't really need a full time developer team. That was the biggest selling point. The IT involvement here is minimal. I mean, just like Alicia mentioned, you know, we're taking baby steps as well. We've moved the cool functionality so we could launch rapidly. And what works really well with Pathify is, like, it's a platform that is meant for higher ed, lean teams, operating with multiple different priorities. You can actually really just launch this fairly quickly. And I wanna share this personal story. It's like me and my developer, we actually went on a ten hour marathon on a Sunday just to develop the prototype of the interface, and it was that easy. So, I mean, that's how we felt like Pathify just delivered them what they had told us. Simple, easy to deploy, and it didn't take years. Nobody's asking anybody to work on a Sunday. Just for the record, like, we Not is not a. part of the. contract. We're not we're not gonna ask anybody to do that. But, I think it's a really fair point that, you know, this is yes. It's IT involvement, but it's not IT, project in the sense. that you don't have to have full time developers, like you said. But there is the flexibility to be able to use our middleware to do some development if that's something that you do wanna do. So there's kinda two sides of the coin there of flexibility, but also having a lot of out of the box things that don't require developer, input if you if that's the route you wanna go. Awesome. Okay. What so, Sejal, but what advice would you give to an institution that would be starting implementation, say, like, next month? I would say treat this as a campus experience, not an IT project. So campus experience, a communication experience, not just an IT portal replacement project. Get your stakeholders engaged fairly quickly early on, student affairs, you know, enrollment, academic affairs, your partners across campus on the academic side. Just get them all involved fairly early on in the process so you can actually build for the experience you're trying to deliver to your user community, and then don't try to boil the ocean. Right? Pick a couple of high value cases, launch strong, build the confidence within that portal, and then keep on expanding. Pathify works really well when you continuously iterate with it. So, you know, my advice is don't try to pull everything off all at once. You're just gonna slow yourselves down, and that methodology has worked really well for us. I think it's a really good point because I think what happens at a lot of institutions when you implement a new piece of software is either you go full bore or you say, I'm just gonna get, you know, the the bare minimum, lined up, but then nobody ever works on it again. And I think one of the big drivers of Pathify, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong here, but one of the big things that, we do really well is we kinda talk you through how to kinda go through a phased approach in in a lot of ways. Because if you try to implement everything at once, you're just gonna you're gonna be upset, and everybody else is gonna be upset too. But, Talia, I wanted to hear what what your thoughts were on, you know, the same question about getting, any advice of an institution that maybe is gonna launch, you know, or start implementing next month. Yeah. I think the key as well is content. A big part of this kind of platform is making sure that you're giving accurate and current information to your audience. So making sure you have those subject matter experts lined up in the various areas who are gonna be including content is key, because as the others have mentioned, this is not just an IT project. This is campus wide, institution wide. Students from every program are gonna be involved here, and so we gotta make sure we have content available for all of them. We had a few instances where we weren't getting responses from people, so we started on the content journey, and then all of a sudden they were very interested because they realized we were not gonna put a lot of bells and whistles in there. We were putting the bare minimum. So they jumped in as soon as they saw the opportunity to really expand and and market to the audience that they wanted to. So get as many involved as possible early on. And I love that that they they started freaking out because you weren't doing it the way they wanted you to do it even though they had an opportunity to do it. And what's nice about our system is it's very permission based. So you can permission out all of that content to various people across campus, including students. So, Talia, I wanted to also kinda come back to something that you talked about in the very beginning where you guys were are are are are in the process of making a major migration, ERP migration from Gen Zabar to Oracle, which is happening a lot. A lot of institutions, people are making those types of changes. So it's not uncommon, but it's also significant undertaking. So how does Pathify help with that transition? And why did you just why did you decide to bring in a new front end platform at the same time you're changing your back end systems and, you know, just adding more work to your plate? Talk talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah. Again, from that strategic planning effort, it was really how do we bring consistency and continuity to our audiences while we're doing so much work behind the scenes. The end result is we want them to have a better experience. Obviously, a mobile component to that, which we did not have before was an exceptional ad. So from a strategic planning point, it was really let's maintain some consistency and continuity as we change systems behind the scene, kind of reduce or eliminate disruptions for our end users. And some key aspects I mean, that that is a key aspect of Pathify is that you're really system agnostic. We we can use all all these various systems across the board for other aspects of our tech stack, and it really doesn't matter. Pathify can use that information and display it to the right audience at the right time. So those were key for us in terms of maintaining that continuity, and we continue that today. We're now going through we're still in the ERP transition, but we're also in the middle of an LMS transition, And so it's gonna be very easy to just swap out that widget with the new one. So minimal interruption to the student's experience. They'll go to the same place. They'll be able to find their assignments just the same. I would guess that you do not recommend making a full ERP change and a full elements change at once. So that's just that has nothing to do with this, but maybe good advice for other people on. the call. If you'd like to if you'd like to frustrate some of your faculty, it's a good plan. If you don't, it's probably not a good plan. Love that. Alicia, you described your launch as kinda going off without a hitch very smoothly. And, frankly, in higher ed, especially, that's not something that you often hear, as as far as implementations go. What made this one different? And be honest, what were the hard parts? Sure. So obviously, one piece of the puzzle of of being hard was the timeline. We only had a few months to launch in you know, before our our old contract expired, and we would be shut out of our old system. So we had a a drop dead deadline. Like, that was it. You have to be on on the new product. Small team, you know, at at many institutions, just like La Salle University, our IT teams are very lean, and we are juggling multiple projects and multiple systems at any given time. And there are always emergencies and things that pop up that you're not expecting. I will say that Pathify was a fantastic partner to work with. They really all of the the staff that worked on our project were extremely responsive, helped us navigate challenges that we ran into, what they were right there, and the communication was very timely. And that really ensured that our project launched on time. Internal coordination, you know, especially outside of IT with the rest of campus, can be a challenge. I mean, when we were going live, it was right in between graduation and the start of our summer term. So, you know, everybody is exhausted. They're at all of these events trying to graduate out our students, bring in the incoming class, get summer started. So tricky time of year. But you made it happen. So made it happen. really setting priorities is really key there too. You know? What are the things that have to be in place to launch? And there were some things that we pushed down a little bit into the summer as this isn't available yet, but it's coming soon. Yep. Yep. Good good stuff. And one other thing, I think you had mentioned that you had received some positive student feedback. I know those words. usually don't go together. Yes. But for the. first time ever, I think also, on a technology loss launch, what did the students say? Can you give us, like, some, like I mean, we won't we won't coach you on it, but can you give us some insight into what those students said? Sure. I mean, students can be very vocal when they don't like something. Otherwise, they they tend to not speak up, and you hear nothing. So to get positive feedback was a significant change for us. And we received messages right through we had a link in in our portal for them to provide feedback, and we received messages saying thank you. You know, I I like the the new look and feel. I finally found x, and it was something that we already had in our old portal. They just didn't know how to find it. They also provided actual feedback. Can you add this feature? Or, you know, I found it hard to find this. Could you move it somewhere else? You know, things like that that were actually constructive, and we were able to have an open dialogue with our students and make improvements based on their suggestions. And how did you guys capture that student feedback? Like, So how how how'd you go about doing that so that you know, inside of Pathify, was there like, how did you guys design that? we added a link into our main navigation menu on the left that would open up a support ticket in our portal, in our IT ticketing system, categorized as portal feedback so that the team working on the project would receive those comments directly. Cool. Talia or Sejal, did you guys use forms or anything to, and I'm not prompting you guys. I'm just curious, to get, you know, feedback, not just from students, but faculty and staff too because this is being used by every everybody. How did you guys capture some feedback also? I'll let Talia, go. Oh, Okay. I'll. go. Okay. So, yes, we did. We actually created a widget, and we had a little link there that would branch out to a forum for feedback just like Alicia had mentioned. And our story is very similar to what Alicia just did. You know, we did receive positive feedback from the entire community saying that the portal was much more modern, simple. We did receive that feedback loop of improvements, and so we did make those slight little changes like students wanted and faculty and staff wanted. So that was very valuable, and some of this was really geared by the Pathify team. It's like, let's put this budget in place. And, you know, again, very simple, very easy, but it allows us to just continuously improve after launch. But I was just, like, very happy to hear Alicia story because it I it resonated so well with us that it was just very similar. Awesome. Yeah. I think? I think it's interesting that there are three of us here and we all have a different approach to this. But we did use a form. We put a form out so that when we launched the product, the form was one of the first things you see when you get into the portal. So we had lots of people start up providing feedback, and we expected it to be, I can't find this, help me with this, because it's new. Everybody's not sure how to use it quite yet. So we expected a lot of questions, and what we got back was similar to what Alicia received. A lot of thank yous for doing this. This is so much better. The look and feel is great. And we started getting recommendations, like in the capsule, I'd really like to see this very common used link or item so that we can get to it quickly. And so we started receiving some really good feedback from our audiences. Awesome. And in different ways, you all kinda use Pathify in different ways to kinda get that feedback. How about analytics? Were you guys kinda looking in the analytics section in the back end of Pathify to kinda glean some more feedback even though people weren't providing it. Have you guys used that in in any this is for everybody. Yeah. So we've used the analytics one to see who's logged in. At the very early launch, we wanted to find out kind of how is the campus community reacting. Are they getting into the portal? How are they accessing the system? And and just kind of ongoing, we've continued to go in to look at the search features and identify what are the keywords people are looking for so that we can ensure they're finding what they need. And we're updating those if if we find items that that we think we need to provide some additional assistance. Cool. Sejal, I think you. were gonna say to Talia, we were using it at the initial launch, it was more for did everyone log in? We knew our numbers. You know, we were looking at the student population. We were looking at faculty and staff population. We were then sending reminders. Hey. This is the new portal just for the adoption. Also, the mobile app. So we did sunset our mobile app, and what we saw is, like, folks were downloaded. The web priority was very important for us. And then on the tool section, which tools were really getting hit more? The analytics really do provide you you know, Canvas is the most top hit tool that students use followed by the ERP. So you really can understand how the platform is being utilized, and you can actually take that as feedback and mechanisms to start improving. Awesome. And Alicia, any anything else you wanna add there? I mean, I would I would say the analytics are life changing for us because we had no visibility in our previous product. So. this was just amazing. You know, we could see what pages, tools, everything that they were using, but also how they got there. Were they on the app? Were they in a mobile browser? You know? Were they on iOS, Android? Like, having all of that data in one dashboard y kind of tool has been fantastic. Awesome. And and so it's a little bit different feedback gathering, but you still can, glean a lot of information feedback wise on peep how people are using the platform. So awesome. Okay. So this is for everybody because this is probably the most important topic that everybody wants to talk about is cost savings and consolidation. So let's talk about that because that's what matters to everybody. So what systems or tools have you been able to consolidate or eliminate since implementing Pathfi? Alicia, I'll just come to you first. Sure. So for us, you know, when we first launched, we were focused on the core functionality that we needed to replace. And then since then, we've added on. So we added on the tasks module, and we recently decided to also add on communities. And by doing that, we are consolidating and eliminating some other systems and contracts that the campus had used. We're also in the process of eliminating some homegrown things. You know, we've got a lot of, you know, technical debt that's built up over the years, and being able to get rid of some of those things and consolidate not only saves money, but also staff time and frees them up for, you know, other priorities that need to happen. So that has been a continuing theme, and I expect it will continue over time as we add more and more to this platform. And you mentioned the communities module. For those that aren't really familiar with what that is, that's the engagement piece, clubs and orgs, groups of things. And you said you are replacing a third party, like, Mhmm. vendor product. to have placing a student engagement platform that our student development and campus life team has used for some time. So it it's going to be launched for all of our incoming freshman activities in the summer. Cool. Cool. Sejal, same question for you about cost consolidation and system consolidation. Yeah. So for us, it was, you know, the portal went away, the link firm. Our mobile app, we sunsetted, and we also were able to sunset a cloud our cloud marketing platform tool. And so throughout this consolidation process, we did realize an 8% budget, you know, cost saving, which was reshifted back into the operations because we are lean and we have lean budgets. So that's huge for us. Right? But but what it really meant is simplification as well. So you have few vendors, fewer contracts, and staff time like Alicia mentioned. You know, we we're just operating on so many lean resources that it makes it much more simple to work with one vendor platform versus multiples, and the experience is just that much better. Yeah. Yeah. And I I don't think that there's too many institutions out there that would be like, oh, we have so many staff and so much money that, you know, we don't need to be thinking about that. If there are schools out there, please reach out to me. Let me know because I'd be curious. Talia, same question for you at Graceland. Yeah. Similar similar story as Alicia. We went through some vendor review and evaluation. There were some contracts we were able to negotiate terms. We were able to eliminate some and replace all of those with Pathify. So there were some savings there. I never wanna pass on cost to students, but in this case, you've heard me reference a new ERP, a new LMS, and a new student platform. So we did reevaluate our student tech fee, and a very minimal increase to that was super impactful as well. And, actually, it's a really good point, Talia. I, as an example, was recently on a campus in Iowa, actually, where I did a student demo. And one of the questions that the administrators asked was, if we increase your tech fee by $30.50, $100, would you guys be okay with that to support something like this? And every student was like, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it is an avenue that you could consider because the students recognize that there's a need for something better than what they're being provided, and they're willing to pay for it. So if that's something that's interesting to you guys, you know, it's it is an option out there. So awesome. Okay. Anybody wanna add anything else about cost consolidation or savings or anything like that that you didn't get a chance to add? I think we covered everything. Are are any of you guys using our chatbot functionality at this point? Not right now. No. Okay. Because we had a question about someone was asking how how they're seeing students use the AI agent, but you guys aren't using it. So, unfortunately, we cannot answer that question. So I'll Yeah. I'll throw in there, though, in in talking with some of our students, they were not interested in a chatbot. The search feature in Pathify works extremely well, and we're able to add keywords specific to our institution. So things that wouldn't normally come in a standard search, we're able to to incorporate those through the keyword feature. And so our students really elected, we don't we don't think we need the chatbot. Doesn't. mean it won't provide value to someone. Yeah. It depends on the institution. But I just wanted to be clear that it's not an experience that you all have. One other question that came through that I wanted to pose for the group before we continue on is have any of you guys used we have a platform where you can make product requests and enhancements and things of that nature. Are there any unique features or functions that any of your universities have requested to be created by Pathify, and how much flexibility is there? So, you know, I'm curious from the panel how you guys might answer that. Unless you can go first since you're at you're at the top of my screen. Sorry. I mean, I would say that anything that we've submitted, it hasn't been so unique to just La Salle University that it wouldn't apply to others. And I would say pretty much everything that we've asked for, Pathify has come back and said, oh, that's already on our road map. Here's when you can expect to find this feature. So the experience has been very positive. How easy was it to submit those feature requests or enhancements? Oh, extremely easy. I think we continuously use it just to say hello. But, it's love that very easy. you. It's very open. You know, some vendors, it's there's no place to provide that kind of feedback, and Pathify wants to hear it. So we make sure that that they hear all of our comments. Well and before I ask Sejal and Talia to talk about their experience with that, it's really important for us in order for us to push forward and create new functionality and new features for our customers to be involved in that process. Now I'm not gonna tell you that we are gonna do everything that everybody asks for. We would never get anything done. But like Alicia said, there are there is a lot of functionality that would be valuable to every institution or so many institutions that, you know, there are things that we're considering, and our product our head of product is very, very involved in our system where you're submitting those requests. So he's paying attention. And much of the functionality that we have inside of Pathify actually was born out of customer ideas. So we do take that very seriously, and we do try to get as much of that inside of Pathify. It's obvious that we can't do everything. Right? But there is the opportunity for you to build out some stuff yourself going through a training of our middleware layer. So it it doesn't necessarily have to be all on us developing everything out. There are some areas where you have the flexibility to do that as well if you choose. Talia, same question for you. So I can't think of the specifics, but I definitely have a team member who submitted several ideas. And I know she's received feedback from Pathify, they've had conversations about those requests. But I also know that she has a regular cadence of meetings with a Pathify representative, and they talk about the quarterly updates or or things that are going to be released on their road map. And so she's able to keep our team informed of things that are coming and and pre planning kind of for how we wanna utilize those features. Awesome. Awesome. How about you, Sejal? Same experience, I think. Everyone's pretty much covered it. So we have team members who constantly use that feature to make suggestions and provide that feedback, but the recipe cards have been very valuable within the system itself. So there's others who have developed things that you can actually leverage. But we also have a regular cadence with our Pathify representation team, and that's been very helpful too. Very flexible. They're willing to listen, and that's the beauty of this partnership is that Pathify is really willing to listen to the customers. And like you mentioned, Heather, not everything can be sold, but as they come in and they group together, Pathify has really taken that and said, okay. Let's launch these features moving down the pipeline. So we always see that come through the quarterly newsletters as well, and it's like, uh-huh. We can use this, and it's really exciting. Yeah. And I think I mentioned very early on kinda when I went through the initial slides that we can't we can't move forward without our customers' input. We are not the kind of company that's developing products just assuming we know what everybody needs. We need customers, to really give their input, and our customers are not afraid to do so. So let's talk about results, cause that's also a really big key. And and Alicia had mentioned that their previous system did not provide any analytics, which is crazy, but happens. So what specific metrics or feedback points have you show have have shown you that Pathify is working, and what surprised you? You guys talked a little bit about this previously, but I'd like to expand upon it. So, Alicia, I'm gonna start with you. Sure. I mean, visibility into basics, like who saw the announcement that you posted and who didn't is is great. I mean, just to to know, you know, that that it was seen and people are receiving that information, and they're logging in, and they're checking. Mhmm. Before we would post things, you know, in IT, like a system needed to be down for some reason, and we wouldn't know. Did people even see that message? Now we know that they're seeing the message. I would say that the task completion tracking has been amazing. Being able to assign tasks to specific populations and track their progress towards achieving that task has been fantastic. So one of the things that we did for in the fall, our first, you know, mean semester on on Pathify, is we have a technology checklist for our incoming students. And one of the things was to download the mobile app and being able to see, yes, they actually checked off that they did it and then also see on our mobile apps analytics that they actually did download the app, which more than doubled the adoption on our campus of that of that mobile app. There was a recent example where we needed a population of students in one of our residence halls to make some updates on their devices because there was a change in Wi Fi. Very targeted. And we could see they got our message. They checked off that they did it, and our tickets coming into the help desk were significantly reduced because of that. Awesome. How about you, Sejal? Same thing. Like, we didn't have visibility before or with the mobile app was a bit limited. So the visibility has been really key. We can now see sessions. We can see who's logged in, how many times they're logging in. That's extremely valuable. We know that there's engagement. We can actually send down targeted messages to various individualized groups versus the entirety of the seven different colleges that we operate in. So the users have been really, you know, thankful for that because you get, you know, information overload, and sometimes it's just not relevant to the campus that you wanna talk to. So that's being key. Like, Alicia mentioned, you know, task completions. We have a lot of training that we have to go through. You know, there's the title nine training, especially on the staff side. Then we have the campus safety training. We've got our own cybersecurity training. Just giving those tasks, even just with timesheet reminders to staff members. Right? It's these notifications that go out. The announcements have been critical because, you know, we all get a ton of email, and email has just been, like, this big black box now. I mean, I'm sitting on 1,200. To me, those little notifications are so valuable because that message just hits us instantaneously. And, you know, our students and staff and faculty can now find what they need to so we don't get as many tickets coming in. Like, where's Canvas? Where do I get, you know, my course, and where do I get my schedule? Even with transcripts, like, the the search features are so key. You can just hit transcript, and it just pops up the page. And and it's it's searching for both your website as well as your internal tools. Right? So that whole one stop shop, the single pane has been extremely valuable for us. Awesome. How about you, Talia? Yeah, certainly adding the mobile capability was huge for us. And others have mentioned how much pressure is on IT to help maintain a system. And with Pathify, we've certainly been able to reduce our inclusion and kind of everything that needs to be done, because users within the department. So in our old system, if they wanted to create a page or a survey or a form, they often had to contact IT and submit a ticket and go through that process of getting support. Where today, they can do that on their own in the Pathfinder platform. So that's helped reduce the reliance on our staff. Awesome. Okay. So let's look ahead a little bit. If you could give one piece of advice to an IT leader who's evaluating campus experience platforms right now, what would it be? And Talia, I'll just start with you. I think the integration, agnostic, being able to set up integrations with all the other systems that an institution needs is key. So I think that's important. We've kind of talked about the fact that you need users from kind of every area, every aspect of the institution involved. I think those are important. Certainly thinking about the entire investment long term versus just one contract price, multi year, those kind of things. I think those are all helpful. Awesome. How about you, Sejal? Yeah. I'm gonna piggyback off of what Talia said. You know, look at this as a strategic experience layer, just not a portal. Also, look at your total cost of ownership, speed to implementation, your your team's capacity. Those are all key. And then, you know, this really give us that decentralized content. So content is always update and current. So take a look at everything from a holistic perspective as you start looking at these experiences that you're willing to deploy at your institution. English, what do you think? I would say, you know, think about what your campus really needs, what that experience you know, what is the best fit for your environment. There are products out there that have features that you're just not gonna use. So what what are the things that are the most important to your campus and will make a difference? And, also, phone a friend. So definitely, you know, call your peers at other institutions and ask them about their experience and what product they're on and get some, you know, real feedback. Yes. That's really great. And any of these ladies, I'm sure, would be very happy to talk to you about their experiences, good, bad, and ugly. That's the nice thing about Pathify. And I think it was that mentioned, we have a really nice community. People are willing to share with each other, whether they're a new customer, an old customer, a prospective customer. We have a very good community of people that wanna help. And I think higher ed is like that in general, but I I haven't I haven't found another place where I feel like it's so collaborative. And, hopefully, you all agree with that. Okay. So we have about twelve minutes, and I I addressed the comments that were already in the q and a. Does anybody else have any other questions that they want to ask of me, of our panelists, anything at all? And while you guys are thinking about that, I did just wanna share a couple of things that are coming up with Pathify. So we actually have a thirty minute high level demo tomorrow. I know it's a quick turnaround. A very, very high level, we don't dive deep into a lot of the areas, but we do these monthly. It just happens to be tomorrow. If you're interested in that, the link is gonna be posted. And then we are doing a demo on our engagement platform, which is communities. It it can be used as a stand alone. It also is built into our entire platform. That demo is going to be on the twenty fourth, which I think is next Tuesday, and we're gonna post the link to that too if you're interested. You're always welcome to reach out to myself or anybody else at Pathify if you have more questions related to this or anything else. Both of those links should be posted in the chat for you to be able to see. But I am not seeing any more questions in the chat that I have not already answered. I really wanna thank my panelists, Alicia, Sejal, and Talia for joining us today. Very much appreciate everybody's time that's on this call. Like I said, please don't be strangers. Reach out with questions. You know, we we want we want you to have better user experiences on your campus, whether you're a current Pathify customer or hopefully a future Pathify customer. You know, we we would really like to work with you and try to help save some time and money at your institution. But if you have any questions specific to integrations or budgets or if you're curious about change management or student adoption strategies, now is the time to throw it in the chat. But if you have no other questions, I really appreciate it. And I hope everybody has a great rest of your week. So thank you. We'll hang on here for a couple minutes just to see if anybody has any other questions, but really appreciate everybody's time. Thank you so much. And thank you to my panelists. And I also wanna just point out the panelists are always willing to come out and see you at your institution, or you can come see them at their institutions. They all have really beautiful campuses in various parts of the country. I'm sure they'd be happy to host you on campus. So thank you guys very much. Like I said, reach out if you have any questions, and take care. Appreciate your time.