There are no good decisions without good data. Just as a ship without a compass is doomed to run off-course, so will a business without proper metrics. Every change of the wind is an insight about the path ahead.
Nowadays, having a roadmap to success is as important to continuing education and workforce development divisions as a real map is to a ship. The tide is turning in higher education; online enrollments have been steadily growing for over a decade and there’s increasing recognition from working adults that they need to continue learning across their lifetimes.
Non-traditional divisions have experience serving these learners, and are therefore steering many of their institutions through a transitional period that’s left plenty of schools dire for enrollments and revenue. Even the more fortunate are questioning where the next dollar will come from, and where the current dollar needs to be spent to ensure not just survival, but growth.
If CE divisions hope to drive this transformation, they need accessible, relevant data on which to base their decisions. The most meaningful reporting and performance metrics need to be at a leader’s fingertips.
You can’t change a ship’s parts without understanding the whole. Significant, lasting change is only possible with a bird’s-eye view of the division.
We are Flying Blind
Every decision requires data, and poor data makes for poor decisions. There’s a time and place to “fire from the hip”, and configuring your school’s high-stakes investments isn’t one of them.
Too often, non-credit education leaders don’t have the data to make informed choices, leading to misused resources, lost time, wasted energy and an unbalanced balance sheet. Enrollments and revenue suffer, with offerings that aren’t aligned with learner interests and expectations.
Other times a division will have the necessary data, but it’s inaccessible to the people who need it most. Crucial information is either hidden in filing cabinets or scattered throughout different applications. In either case, finding information becomes challenging and meandering.
Even so, data may be both present and accessible, yet completely unreadable to key individuals; they’re simply numbers on a page and incomprehensible to division leaders who need a cheat sheet. It’s no surprise that leaders defer to “the numbers people” in these circumstances, as data is being collected and presented in ways only a data scientist could tolerate.
Good Data Drives Good Decisions
Poor or inaccessible data is essentially useless and can contribute to poor outcomes for the institution and the learners it serves.
When critical information is collected, assembled and presented in ways that offer a holistic view of performance, leaders can think and act with a deep understanding of where their division stands—with outcomes that reflect that understanding.
This is where Destiny One comes in. Destiny One’s student lifecycle management software is designed specifically for divisions serving non-traditional students. It manages all aspects of the learner lifecycle, allowing leaders to unite, understand, and control all aspects of your business at once. It integrates with main-campus systems, engages students with an Amazon-like experience, optimizes staff efficiency, and provides business intelligence empowering data-driven decisions.
Critically, it delivers real-time data in easy-to-understand formats. And, with a partnership in place with Tableau, it can even deliver powerful data visualizations to take the guesswork out of understanding divisional performance.
Table of Contents
- High-Level Metrics for High-Level Decisions
- Transparency on Divisional Performance
- Good Data Grows Enrollments, Efficiency and Revenue
- Data and Workflows that Drive Marketing
High-Level Metrics for High-Level Decisions
There was a time when being cavalier was acceptable. Schools didn’t have to worry so much about when and where their students would come—they just did. Simple geography was often a deciding factor for a prospective student, and divisions could bank on most learners within a 10-mile radius enrolling for one purpose or another.
With the turn towards digital learning, however, physical proximity isn’t a part of the equation. Almost every form of education is within clicking or scrolling distance, meaning each of your school’s offerings competes with at least one online counterpart.
This creates a demanding environment for continuing education, where online learning is emerging as a new norm for higher education. If schools are to compete with the MOOCs, bootcamps and other channels that are only clicks away, every part of the division needs to be visible to decision-makers. Key metrics need to be at administrators’ fingertips.
Limited Data Means Lower Outcomes
Director of Continuing Studies at Western University (WCS), Carolyn Young said reporting on even basic performance metrics once required enormous effort. Young pointed to decentralized information as key to the struggle.
“It would usually take us three to five days to report on our three program areas, and it was because each program resided in a different place,” Young said. “We were really struggling with how we collected data. What I found really embarrassing was that, when we were asked at a national level to report to our association on enrollment was and revenue, I didn't know.”
Young explained that this information was hard to come by, no matter who was asked: “I didn't have answers at my fingertips, and when I asked other people about it, they didn't know either.”
Other leaders at the institution needed those figures to guide their decisions as well, she said.
We use Destiny’s year-over-year comparisons for particular programs. Our directors love that one. They use that report all the time.
“There was a pressure on me to get information together, and I didn't have any place to find those reports and get those numbers.”
At Temple University, David Benson, Associate Director of Continuing Education Systems recalled finding the school’s operational and outcomes data as being a near-Herculean task.
“Our method of collecting that and presenting that data would be to email all the different director heads that ran the different CE units across the university,” Benson said. “There might be 30 people to email for once piece of information.”
He said they would then compile their data from various call centers and send it along, where it would need to be composited together. “It was like a job in and of itself, and the accuracy and veracity of that data was questionable at best.”
Benson said even rudimentary system information was out of reach for his division.
“We had five different systems that were stood up around the university. Some were homegrown, and there were a couple other vendors in place,” Benson said. “And so just the idea of when to do a maintenance window was something that I would have never even come up with.”
This made for day-to-day inefficiencies that hampered the division’s growth.
Destiny One at Temple University
Centralizing non-credit and ontinuing education programs to increase efficiency and improve student experience.
Make Decisions Based on Performance
Western Continuing Studies enlisted Destiny One—student lifecycle management software
tailored for CE divisions—to make the most of their metrics. Young pointed to the
system’s enrollment comparison feature as pivotal for projections.
“I love the enrollment comparison report. Right now, we're using enrollment data from between October 2019 to April 2020 to see what we can expect in terms of enrollment and revenue based on what we did a year ago,” Young said.
Using reporting dashboards and modules that centralize and simplify data management, the division can make decisions based on data.
“It helps us make projections for where we think we're going to end up for the year,” she said.
Quick access to critical information also ensures the institution is responsive to student demand, making for timely offerings that drive revenue. Young said the enrollment features show her division which offerings are generating the most heat, and at what times.
Using reporting dashboards and modules that centralize and simplify data management, the division can make decisions based on data.
“We can even see by those numbers where their preferences are going,” she said. “We know it’s our two-day workshops they like, not our 13-week courses.” Young said this tells the school which programs to prioritize moving forward.
Temple University use Destiny One’s reporting capabilities to highlight important metrics for performance, which Benson said enables more informed choices by leadership.
“We use Destiny’s year-over-year comparisons for particular programs,” Benson said. “Our directors love that one. They use that report all the time.”
Benson also found value in the ability to sort revenue within customized parameters, such as “Revenue by Purchase Type”.
“In that dashboard, you can see a bar chart of different things that people might purchase, be that special requests, certificate bundles, courses, sections or program offerings in a bar chart.” He said this not only aids data management, but shows leaders where to concentrate resources.
Those far-reaching metrics extend to the back-end itself, according to Benson. When he wants to determine the best time for upgrades, site usage indicators tell him when support will be least disruptive.
“Now when I want to know what's our lowest usage time, I can just run the log-in report and when the least people possible are using our public shopping site,” Benson said. “Then I just coordinate our upgrades. That's just something that I don't have to think about very much, and before I would've just been guessing.”
Transparency on Divisional Performance
There’s a longstanding perception that continuing education’s work isn’t noticed or appreciated. However true or false, there’s no debating the importance of CE to colleges and universities nowadays: Our work is no longer an “add-on” to the higher education model, but a main feature.
Leaders inside and outside of the institution depend on CE divisions to deliver accurate, relevant reporting if they’re to make the high-level decisions they’re responsible for.
We Need to Talk to Our Leaders
Carolyn Young at Western Continuing Studies said it’s in the division’s best interest to keep senior leadership in the know, as their actions steer the future of the institution.
“You have to have good data and confidence in your data to share it with your senior leaders, because they’re on the line,” Young said.
She said good data also helps drive credibility at the national and state or provincial levels.
“We have a very active national association that collaborates with our federal government on university continuing education.”
Young said this attention translates to funding and resources that can be funneled back to the division’s initiatives. “This is a group that’s taken a huge interest in continuing education. In the last two to three years, it's become one of their key priorities.”
She emphasized the need for hard metrics: “Sometimes the numbers are more important to them than anything I can say anecdotally,” Young said. “I know that that's key to them.”
David Benson at Temple University said those institutional-level numbers are critical during budget discussions with leadership. He said if leadership can’t foresee good outcomes—like those made clear by reputable metrics—they’re reluctant to invest further resources in the division.
“Whenever we're going to receive funding for a grant project, be that $5,000 or half a million dollars, the funder wants to see outcome data,” Benson said. “They want to see it now, and they want it to be accurate and verified.”
Strong Data Makes Leadership Receptive to Change
Student Centricity and the Modern University Rooting the Student Experience in Data
Western Continuing Studies has fostered a highly productive relationship with senior institutional leaders and government stakeholders. Young attributes much of this to the division’s use of Destiny One, which enabled her to answer questions about performance and expectations at a moment’s notice.
“At one meeting, we were asked by the representative from Universities Canada how many enrollments does a specific group of universities have under continuing education,” Young recalled. “It was such an important question because it would be tied to federal funding.”
Young said the reporting infrastructure Destiny facilitates is essential to the annual reporting that CE leaders are required to do. “We're approaching our budget planning for the coming year, and the fact that I can now easily draw on the reports from what we've accomplished so far this year and what we did in the previous year is so meaningful to these leaders,” she said.
I love that with Destiny’s reporting tools, when you’re asked for something and you need it in 20 minutes, it’s right there.
Having clear measurements of the division’s performance has been essential to some significant decisions as well.
“Back in the spring, we were coming to a really important decision around our downtown campus location, and whether we were going to stay in that space,” Young said. “And through the report on Destiny’s ‘daily section’ summary, I was able to verify that our enrollment in the downtown campus was actually declining from the previous years by 10% in the evenings.”
Having clear measurements of the division’s performance has been essential to some significant decisions as well.
She said this was instrumental in assigning time and resources effectively: “If we were actually seeing growth in that location, we wouldn't leave. So that helped us make a big decision about where to place our next location.”
Young credits swift access to viable metrics to the division’s success in that regard.
“Senior leaders expected me to have the data, and I had data that they could trust—not something I was making up,” she said. “I love that with Destiny’s reporting tools, when you’re asked for something and you need it in 20 minutes, it’s right there.”
At Temple, Benson credited much of his division’s relationship with other faculties to dashboards and reporting functionalities that simplify communication between departments.
“I've got different units doing their sales in different areas, so I need to be able to splice out and roll up that data into institutional reports,” Benson explained. “That's where the Destiny One dashboards have incredibly helpful tool for me personally. I'll go to the enrollments dashboard, the finance dashboards, and I can see quarter over quarter, or month over month, what our performance has been. Then I can splice it out for Fox School of Business.”
Benson said his division’s well-tracked metrics have facilitated productive discussions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We can see which units are faring the same now as they were in 2019, and which units have seen a decrease in revenue,” Benson said. “Then we can have an institutional discussion internally about who's transitioning well and who's having trouble.”
While data security can be a concern among divisions, Benson pointed out customizable “permissions” functions as keeping a tight lid on select information.
“You can give permission so that people can just see the data that's appropriate to their area, and they can get only the data they need,” Benson said.
Good Data Grows Enrollments, Efficiency and Revenue
Higher education demands adequate funding and resources. The goal of a better-educated, more fulfilled public doesn't come cheap. Money, time and energy grease the wheels of any division, and the inability to make value judgements based on reliable performance indicators squashes any hope for expansion.
Good Data Secures Your Bottom Line
Carolyn Young at Western Continuing Studies uses the enrollment information offered by Destiny One to make the most of existing programming. She said knowing when and how offerings are performing allows division leaders to modify those offerings, maximizing enrollment and revenue.
“One of our program managers oversees professional development programs. We use the reports from Destiny One to look at not only the enrollment, but to understand how to combine two or three courses to create an accelerated certificate,” Young said.
She said this streamlining has yielded monumental gains in both revenue and efficiency.
“It’s been a huge success story for us. We now see it’s actually the short nature of them that is very appealing to people,” Young explained. “The reporting tools have helped us with data-driven decisions, and it’s been extremely positive and powerful for us.”
The COVID-19 pandemic could have created significant challenges for WCS, but with robust data metrics at the ready, Young said her division was positioned for success. She underscored Destiny One’s “enrollment by delivery type” indicator for showing which types of offerings students want.
“Whether it's education delivered through immersion, in-person or online, those numbers have become so necessary to our decision-making and our reporting to senior leaders,” Young said. “The average enrollment in our online classes has grown by 40%, so we've moved everything online. We're getting more students in individual classes than we did when we were doing in-person and online programming.”
On the operational side, Benson emphasized “traceability” helping administrators see where divisional resources are being spent.
“We have a wealth of data that we never had before. When any staff member does anything in Destiny One, there is just heaps operational audit data that's generated in the system,” Benson said. From a compliance and auditability standpoint, Benson said he can see what information is being accessed, shared or changed at any given moment. “To know that if something does go wrong, I can back my way out of it through following the breadcrumb trail is huge. Those are resources that we don't have to build internally. They’re just something that’s baked into the product.” Benson said these features lend to greater responsibility among staff.
Data and Workflows that Drive Marketing
E-commerce leaders like Amazon and Google place enormous weight on knowing their market. Aside from providing seamless customer experiences, they know how and when to interact with existing and prospective customers: Be it through targeted content based on known preferences, timely email marketing, etc.
Your learners are consumers. And like consumers, they need to be engaged with on their own terms if they’re to enroll with a specific institution. Knowing where to place your division’s marketing dollar is often the difference between an enrollment and a lost prospect.
Turn Data into Actionable Marketing
At WCS, Young said advanced metrics have helped the school understand where to place marketing efforts.
“One report that’s used frequently by our communications manager is tells us how a student found out about this program,” Young said. She said that using Destiny One, when a student fills out their profile or registers for a course, they’re prompted to check off whether they heard it through word of mouth, through the website, through social media or other channels. “We use that extensively to understand where we need to put more of our marketing resources.”
Benson at Temple said reports pulled on their marketing segmentation changed their perspective on who they’re targeting with specific initiatives.
“We were doing a ‘kitchen-sink’ style of marketing, where we’d send one email blast to everybody who's registered in the last three years,” Benson said.
He said they’d lumped what they thought were homogenous learner demographics together: Learners seeking professional development, and learners taking classes for personal enrichment. Based on that intelligence, Benson said they made separate marketing campaigns to great effect.
“We thought those populations actually overlapped. But Destiny showed us is that in more than 85% of cases, those are two distinct separate populations. “We created separate campaigns for the professional development track and for the personal enrichment track. It’s a more cost-effective way of reaching those populations.”
At Western, Young noticed an incredible uptick in responsiveness to marketing, as well as improvements to staff efficiency through streamlined marketing workflows.
“Prior to Destiny One, if someone was interested in a course that wasn't available to them, we didn't have a mechanism for being able to let them know that this course is now open for registration,” Young said.
By leveraging a feature in Destiny One that automates the outreach process to encourage students interested in a course to register when it opens, WCS saw benefits both in time-saved and in revenue generated. Young said marketing personnel can now focus on more value-adding work, and let Destiny’s automations do the rest.
Destiny One at Western Continuing Studies
Learn how Destiny One by Modern Campus helped increase operational efficiency and improve the student experience at Western Continuing Studies
At Western, Young noticed an incredible uptick in responsiveness to marketing, as well as improvements to staff efficiency through streamlined marketing workflows.
“That’s saved us thousands of hours, because we only have one person in marketing and communications,” Young said. “For her to have to do that kind of task would have been mind-numbing and very draining.”
Young credited WCS’ back-end with “cross-pollination” in their marketing efforts.
“If we see a student completed our French immersion program as an undergraduate, we ask them if they’d be interested in any of the seven post-degree diploma programs that we offer,” she said.
From there, Young said automations continue to drive enrollments with other offerings aligned with student interests.
“Our marketing and program support managers have come together with a marketing campaign where we reach out to all of the post-degree graduates from the last five years, and give them an opportunity to enroll in our project management certificate,” she said. “We use the data from Destiny’s reports to connect with our students better.”
Strong Data Enables Divisional Growth in Continuing Education
Strong, relevant data is at the heart of every good decision. Many non-degree continuing education and workforce development divisions are unable to access important metrics and information, which can lead to uninformed decisions that may hinder efforts to expand the institution.
Accessible, easy-to-read data enables informed, institution-growing decisions. Destiny One illuminates your division’s performance with a wealth of dashboards and modules that offer a bird’s eye view of operations.
Young underlined the large scope of reports her division pulls from as core to staff’s understanding of their work.
“With 150 reports available, there's nobody that's going to feel like they were left out in trying to understand anything about their work,” she said. “Destiny One covers all the bases.”
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