Curious about tackling your institution’s tech sprawl? In the session, Scott McGowan, Pathify’s Manager of Account Management spoke with Irv Bruckstein, Chief Information Officer at Washington College, Rob Henderson, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at the University of the Pacific and Ryan Adkins, Cloud Application Administrator  Developer at Alabama A&M University to discuss the importance of modernizing and streamlining experiences — enabling institutions to maximize efficiency and reduce spend. With so many platforms vying for student attention, campuses turn to Pathify to consolidate tools and surface important information.

Less Chaos, More Connection

Each panelist faced their own version of digital clutter. At University of the Pacific, Henderson explained, “We had over twenty-five different bulk email systems, spamming the students incessantly with unique messages — some relevant to their needs and goals, others not.” Three years after making the switch to Pathify, the university slimmed down to 5 systems — a huge efficiency win for students and staff. For Alabama A&M, “We’ve got every single eyeball on campus,” Adkins said. Pathify functions as the single sign-on portal and primary engagement tool for the university. At Washington College, Pathify gave students “an easy point of ingress to everything they access digitally on campus. We’ve seen a lot more engagement,” Bruckstein said.

Reducing Costs While Improving Experience

In addition to boosting engagement, streamlining efforts also delivered significant cost savings. Pathify enhanced Washington College’s content management. “We manage and edit the content ourselves, which resulted in a dramatic reduction in our invoices from our website provider,” Bruckstein stated. University of the Pacific saw dramatic financial savings from day one after implementing Pathify. “Overall, we’ve saved about $40,000 a year in the migration to Pathify. The search tool simplified students’, staff and faculty’s ability to find critical information fast — and creating a customized dashboard helped as well. Several areas saved both hard and soft dollars,” Henderson emphasized. Taking full advantage of the platform, Adkins and Alabama A&M consolidated five different platforms — mobile app, groups, student organizations and more. “Now we’re starting to look at Delegate Hub and maybe Alumni Portal down the line,” Adkins said.

Measuring the Impact

The numbers backed everything up. At the University of the Pacific, student read rates on critical messages jumped to 50-60% — a big leap compared to the typical 30% rate seen across higher ed. At Alabama A&M, Adkins noticed a clear shift in user experience after replacing their old app, which mostly mirrored their website. “It’s 100% better than our old app,” he said. Washington College experienced the same impact. “We’ve seen a tremendous increase in engagement, which didn’t exist before implementing Pathify,” Bruckstein said. For all three institutions, the shift to Pathify delivered better results with fewer tools and less spend.

Advice to Optimize Technology Investments

The session closed with a question, “What advice would you give to fellow Pathify users and peers across higher ed?” Here’s what the panelists said:

  • Talk with your account manager: “My Account Manager is always showing me cool new things and what other universities are doing. I take it as inspiration for how to use Pathify in the future.” -Ryan Adkins, Alabama A&M University
  • Get students involved early and often: “Understanding the student tech stack and getting students involved directly in the process allowed us to make dashboards and set up integrations built to truly impact the student experience.” -Rob Henderson, University of the Pacific
  • Collaborate with key partners: “This isn’t an IT project. It’s a university project — improve the business of the university. Involving strategic communications and student life [teams] saved hundreds of hours and validates the investment over many years.” -Rob Henderson, University of the Pacific
  • Dedicate staff for Pathify support: “We offer help in creating pages and content to everyone interested, and it’s accelerated our adoption rate. It’s been a big help to our community.” -Irv Bruckstein, Washington College

Want to catch the full conversation? Watch the recording with Washington College, University of the Pacific and Alabama A&M University here!