Increasing College Access and Success through Text Messaging

Posted by National College Access Network on November 9, 2015

Last summer, NCAN collaborated with Signal Vine for the first time to provide a “summer melt” text-based outreach campaign that NCAN members can use with their students transitioning from high school to college.

Sixteen member organizations and schools are participating in the Summer Melt pilot program,with a total of 2768 students served at its conclusion. The program shows impressive results, with student engagement rates of 76 percent and an average response rate of 60 percent per message. Sixty-five percent of students showed high engagement rates, meaning they respond to a majority of the messages from their advisors. The pilot program ended with its final message to students on September 9, 2015.
The summer intervention draws from the lessons of applied behavioral economics research by Drs. Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page, which showed an 11 percent increase in matriculation when sending personalized text message “nudges” to students during the summer between high school and college.

Because of the pilot’s success, and expressed interest from NCAN members, NCAN and Signal Vine are expanding their partnership and services for members so that organizations can use text messaging engagement with all types of students, all year long. The next phase of this process is the Financial Aid Campaign to improve students’ awareness of available financial aid programs and assistance in completion of these programs.

Again, NCAN will provide a standard set of messages created with NCAN members for this 16-week financial aid campaign to help students understand and complete the financial aid process, including the FSA ID, FAFSA and award letters. Each participating organization will be able to customize these messages to include program-specific content or important dates and deadlines. The platform allows the organization to send messages to either groups of students or individually using the “message branching” logic mentioned above, and can interact with students based on the way they respond to previous text messages. A dashboard allows advisors to see aggregate metrics and results across their students.

This benefit is specifically geared towards meeting the needs of:

• smaller NCAN members for whom entering into their own contract with Signal Vine might not have been cost-effective, and
• any NCAN member who wants a short-term opportunity to determine whether texting is an effective strategy for their students.

NCAN will be hosting a webinar on Tuesday November 17, 2016 at 2pm EST during which members will be able to see a demonstration of this texting platform. Click here to register for that webinar.

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5988533332026086146