New College Access texting service aims to decrease Summer Melt

Posted by National College Access Network on March 30, 2015

New Member Benefit: Freezing Summer Melt

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the phenomenon of Summer Melt – the unfortunate situation in which a student is accepted to a postsecondary institution but fails to enroll or attend. NCAN is now offering a tool to help member programs overcome Summer Melt and increase the likelihood that their students will enroll in college – texting. Through a partnership with Signal Vine, NCAN is now able to offer members an opportunity to “test drive” this proven strategy that can support their students’ transition from high school to college. The cost of participation is $5/student. 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.

Signal Vine is a two-way text messaging platform that enables college-access professionals to send personalized, timely, and meaningful messages to their students to drive specific behaviors, activities, and outcomes. NCAN has developed a set of essential Summer Melt texts that are included as part of this project, but each participating program can customize and/or send additional texts at no additional charge. The platform allows the organization to send messages to either groups of students or individuals, based on their response to previous text messages using “message branching” logic. Click here to learn more.

http://www.collegeaccess.org/SignalVineSummerMelt