Pathify Customer Story
Improving Employee Collaboration
Ask most higher ed employees where they received the most benefit the past two years and they’re likely to respond resoundingly with their appreciation for remote or hybrid work opportunities. Instead of spending hours in an office when there are competing priorities (including their own educational pursuits), employees receive the option of working from home, creating more flexibility than any other time in higher education. Despite the convenience remote work offers, it still has its drawbacks.
With fewer in-person interactions, water cooler talk becomes scarce. Yet it remains a crucial part of building camaraderie and community among employees. This need spurred Indian Hills Community College to pursue an intranet solution serving as a virtual water cooler while centralizing documents across various departments.
About Indian Hills Community College
Located in Ottumwa, Iowa, Indian Hills Community College (IHCC) aims to provide students what they need to succeed in a four-year program or a life-fulfilling career. It’s ranked among one of the top 500 community colleges in the country and prides itself on putting students on a fast track to in-demand and high-paying jobs.
In addition to over 70 academic programs, Indian Hills draws an expansive online student population with over 250 courses available to attend asynchronously.
The institution includes three campuses and several premier junior college athletic programs with a number of alumni who moved on to the NBA, NFL and MLB.
In Search of Better Collaboration
Prior to engaging with Pathify, IHCC faced similar challenges to many other institutions with large workforces. Much of the communication involved massive group emails with a disjointed file sharing process. In addition, many of those files lived on the website as a PDF, hurting the institution’s site speed.
Dr. Bianca Myers, Executive Dean of Advancement at Indian Hills, discovered this drop in performance, in addition to a drop in organic search traffic. As a result, the site had less visibility for prospective students seeking out community colleges in Iowa.
“We knew hosting so many PDFs on our site hurt us,” Myers said. “We had had some outside companies analyze our dip in traffic and they kept telling us we need to get the PDFs off our site.”
Aside from hurting the overall web performance, storing the documents on the website made them difficult to find. Employees struggled to find what they needed quickly and often created redundant documents due to a lack of overall knowledge sharing between departments.
The website also lacked any sense of security with only one password shared widely between departments. Given the nature of some of the documents uploaded on the website, Myers knew IHCC compromised its security without a better tool for managing documents.
“We had a pretend locked down portal because it was easy to access, and knowing most coders, anybody could figure it out based on breadcrumbs throughout our website,” Myers said. “It became a bit of a concern.”
In 2019, IHCC hired Cory Lamb for its Chief Technology Officer position and with it, a renewed approach to employee collaboration and improved security policies. One of Lamb’s first initiatives: find a portal with dual functionality for both employees and students. Despite a directive for removing PDFs from the website and improving collaboration, IHCC also wanted their technology investment to improve communication with students.
DR. BIANCA MYERS
We had a pretend locked down portal because it was easy to access, and knowing most coders, anybody could figure it out based on breadcrumbs throughout our website.
It became a bit of a concern.
EXECUTIVE DEAN OF ADVANCEMENT
Creating a Social Experience
IHCC engaged Pathify in Fall 2020 after surveying a number of CIOs in a listserv. The recommendation ultimately leading Indian Hills to Pathify came from the CIO of Northern Iowa Community College. Although IHCC never specifically sought a social media-like experience, the ability to create a virtual community between employees across campus — in addition to students — intrigued Myers during the search process.
“Pathify had a social media feel that people are used to,” Myers said. “It gives you everything you need to know by scrolling through the feed like many of the other apps we’ve become accustomed to.”
The search functionality also appealed to IHCC for a variety of reasons. Given the institution’s history with emailing PDFs back-and-forth, Myers instantly saw the potential benefit of storing every document in an easily searchable, single, secure location.
When Myers compared Pathify to other solutions available on the market, none had the search functionality she sought.
“You can search for almost anything if you have an idea what the post is about,” Myers said of the search functionality included in the Engagement Hub. “I never use Tools or Pages for navigation because I search for everything and that’s probably the best thing about Pathify. You don’t have to know the document’s name.”
During Pathify’s initial rollout, employees initially hesitated to adopt the Engagement Hub. After all, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, IHCC adopted several point solutions, in addition to Zoom, to quickly create a remote campus. Myers admitted technology burnout factored in her team needing a strategy to slowly implement Pathify and maximize buy-in.
Indian Hills started using the Engagement Hub with its employees in Summer of 2021. This allowed Myers and her team the opportunity to troubleshoot any processes and ensure it worked smoothly by the time faculty came back to campus. By the time Fall Semester began, Myers’s team aligned on messaging around the importance of the Engagement Hub and why employees must centralize all communication and document management moving forward.
“Our staff responded better than I anticipated because people didn’t have an option to say they can’t find what they’re looking for,” Myers said. “They had a search bar that works and takes you to everything and that really sold people on it.”
Out of 694 employees, 80% of IHCC staff adopted Pathify for communication, and appreciated a sudden drop in emails. Rather than waking up to an inundated inbox, employees had the ability to easily digest information when they want it and easily find important documents.
As an added benefit, the water cooler talk Indian Hills employees sought are now a reality. Pathify provides a point of connection to build camaraderie and restore the water cooler talk existing prior to 2020.
As a vocal advocate of Pathify, Myers willingly shows off the Engagement Hub to other institutions with an explanation of how IHCC uses it on campus.
Pathify had a social media feel that people are used to. It gives you everything you need to know by scrolling through the feed like many of the other apps we’ve become accustomed to.
DR. BIANCA MYERS
EXECUTIVE DEAN OF ADVANCEMENT
Lessons Learned for the Future
Due to Indian Hills’s confidence in the Engagement Hub for its employees, the institution hopes to ramp up adoption among students.
The students who adopted Pathify so far found it easy to navigate because they locate content they didn’t know existed. They also like the social aspect of Groups and Events where it’s easy to connect with other students while feeling like part of the greater community.
Over the next year, Myers hopes to see greater adoption from IHCC’s athletic teams. As a top junior college athletic program, Indian Hills wants its students to feel connected to campus, and believes Pathify will help facilitate it.
Coming up on two years post-implementation, Myers believes much of the wait between implementation and IHCC’s go-live came from initial hesitancy. As a result, she advises institutions looking to make a similar decision should instead move quickly and iterate as they move along.
When it comes to making an investment in technology, sometimes quick decision making leads to a better result.
“I think we were slow and nervous to roll it out and we probably waited longer because we wanted to get it right,” Myers said. “You’re not ever going to get it right, so don’t overthink it. Do what you think is going to work.”
DR. BIANCA MYERS
I think we were slow and nervous to roll it out and we probably waited longer because we wanted to get it right. You’re not ever going to get it right, so don’t overthink it. Do what you think is going to work.
EXECUTIVE DEAN OF ADVANCEMENT
