You can easily imagine how useful and helpful portals can be for your customers. Alumni directors can benefit from portals to monitor connections and engagement among former students. Internal audiences such as athletic coaches or department chairs can be granted access to a portal to manage recruitment efforts for their subsets of prospects. Portals serve both internal and external users. Portals allow users (institutions and their customers) to monitor and manage data and progress toward process completion points. A portal is a powerful tool to link and populate a web page with data drawn from Slate (or other CRM or data source) to personalize the user experience at any particular moment in time or process. But you also missed the advent of a great new tool: the Slate portal.Īssuming this is news, portals are akin to what you used to think of when you described a microsite or personalized webpage. If you’ve had the good fortune of living under a rock for the past two years, lucky you! You’ve missed a ton of grief and anxiety. This discussion thread is yet another reiteration of what we’ve witnessed at RHB over the past few years: for schools using Slate, portals are one of the most promising and essential ways to distinguish your institution with your most important audience. The overall message these students expressed? They’re looking for clean design, clear next steps, intuitive navigation, and enough personality to not feel generic. (By the way, if you aren’t monitoring r/ApplyingToCollege, you’re missing out on a key opportunity to learn exactly what your target audience thinks and wants.) While the discussion thread provided very detailed feedback for some specific schools, most of the opinions expressed would be valuable to any of us hoping to improve the ways we communicate with our applicants and admitted students. A few weeks ago, a user posted to the r/ApplyingToCollege subreddit asking fellow Redditors which schools’ application portals stood out, and the responses were exactly what you’d expect from Reddit: a blend of useful insights and brutal honesty, all seasoned with a heavy dose of attitude.

Slate quiz