Florian Recaps Slate Summit

Over the summer, the Graduate Professional Education (GPE) Slate team, consisting of, Dina Florian, Jarrod Pace, and Amy Holliday the Graduate Professional Education (GPE) Slate team, represented Baylor at the Slate Summit in Chicago to gain added insights into Slate, a student enrollment system, which has been one of the largest system implementations GPE has taken on. This project has allowed the University to bring enrollment for online programs in house. The learnings and engagement with fellow enrollment professionals from various universities across United States proved very beneficial.

While we had a team on site sitting in on sessions and gathering takeaways, below is a recap of our associate director of enrollment, Dina Florian’s, takeaways, as she is leading the Slate implementation:

The delegation from our Slate Team arrived at the conference keenly attentive to discussions surrounding the identification and mitigation of spam within our systems. As we launched new program RFI’s, we had been hampered by the influx of spam and bot farm leads, significantly impacting our enrollment teams from a time and productivity standpoint. Their interactions with seasoned slate enrollment professionals led the team to discover some tactics that have benefited Baylor’s Professional Education programs. 

Conversations with enrollment professionals from other universities and Slate representatives revealed two major trends in combatting spam RFI submissions. The first was the utilization of more questions within the form; the second was the implementation of a dynamic RFI, which took you through several pages of questions before you were able to click submit. These additional steps are intended to slow down click-farms and thus deter them from filling out forms in mass. 

Baylor opted to implement a math-based challenge question. Knowing that RFI best practice is to keep RFI forms short, this added question forced click-farms to take an extra step; and largely negating bot farms as they were unable to successfully answer the challenge question. 

During the event, Florian and the team were encouraged to learn about new Slate features currently in development that have the potential to significantly improve functionality and our enrollment team’s interactions with Slate. Dina noted, “these new features will positively impact our internal process and functionality, which will make it easier to manipulate and organize data. We are eagerly waiting for them to be roll out.” The team also learned from other universities in attendance training methods and tools. As we move forward with our implementation, these insights will be useful in supporting our program focused enrollment teams. 

Additionally, Florian highlighted how enjoyable it was to connect with peers from Baylor, outside of the office and normal meetings. This event presented a valuable chance for enrollment teams from diverse sectors of the university to gather and exchange ideas informally, which is a contrast to the structured discussions typical of regular meetings.