Most schools are understandably eager to stand up their communications early on.

Here are the Slate tools that make communications possible, and how you can implement them in your database.

Order of operations

Schools frequently ask us: “Can we do communications/events/interviews first?”

The short answer is: yes, but it’s hard to manage records in two systems at once. Meaning that, depending what you want to do first, there are certain objects that must be configured and functional in Slate so that two systems aren’t taking in live data at the same time.

This usually hinges on your inquiry form (configured in the previous Roadmap step), and the objects specified by the following priorities:

Communications first

To communicate with prospects or new inquiries immediately, complete your communication plan and build out any other necessary functionality in Slate before publishing your inquiry form or redirecting ongoing feeds like search lists to create new records in Slate.

Your communication plan will include both Deliver-based and form-based messages.

➡️ Jump to communications

Events first

To invite prospects or new inquiries to an event as quickly as possible, establish events in Slate before publishing your inquiry form or redirecting ongoing feeds like search lists to create new records in Slate.

➡️ Jump to events

Interviews and appointments first

To invite prospects or new inquiries to an interview, establish interviews in Slate before publishing your inquiry form or redirecting ongoing feeds like search lists to create new records in Slate.

➡️ Jump to interviews and appointments

Deliver foundations

With the Slate Deliver module, you can:

• Create email, SMS, print, and voice communications

• Personalize messages with merge fields and Content Blocks

• Use liquid markup to display content conditionally in messages

• Create drip marketing campaigns using populations, and much more

Creating a communication plan

When you first create a communication plan in Slate, focus on your essential communications.

▶️ Action item

• Familiarize yourself briefly with Deliver capabilities.

• Knowing what’s possible in Slate, whiteboard a communication plan.

✨  Tip

If you’re trying to get Slate up and running as fast as possible, don't try to recreate the exact marketing plan you've spent years developing in your previous system. Slate is going to change how you conduct business, so your marketing plan is likely to evolve as well.

Configuring system emails

An easy entry point for Deliver is system emails. Find them in Deliver > Folders > Templates.

These are standard, transactional email communications triggered by specific user actions.

Before any of these default communications go out, customize their content with your institutional details.

▶️ Action item

Configure existing system emails, and optionally add your own.

Configuring email templates

In Deliver > Folders > Templates, you’ll find an example email template: Call to Action Button Template.

This is a sample template that you can customize with your own branding.

▶️ Action item

Customize the existing email template, or create your own templates from scratch.

📖 Further Reading: Learn how to use responsive design to make your email templates mobile-friendly.

Drip marketing campaigns

Using your communication plan as a guide, it’s time to build out drip marketing campaigns in Deliver.

If you haven’t already, now is a great time to create dynamic content, including content blocks and Liquid market elements. These will save your marketing team the time and effort of recreating the same message content over and over.

▶️ Action items

• Create a drip marketing campaign.

• Create additional mailings as needed using dynamic content blocks and Liquid markup.

Inbox

With an outbound email communication strategy in place, we can get started with incoming communications.

Inbox is a tool that lets you directly manage email accounts hosted by external clients, incoming text messages, and phone communications, all from within Slate. Inbox also lets you automate your two-way communications with AI chatbots.

▶️ Action item

• Configure Inbox for email communications.

If you go on to configure SMS and phone communications in Slate, you can return here to set up their Inbox equivalents.

More Deliver features

You’ve established the foundations of your communication campaign: automated, two-way email. But that’s only a fraction of what Slate is capable of.

With voice, print, video, and text capabilities, you have the potential to bring your entire communications strategy under one roof.

Slate Print

Slate Print uses the powerful automation capacity of Slate and applies it to your real-world mailing campaigns.

Thanks to our partnership with industry-leading print marketing firm MitteraEDU, we’re able to bring you the cost and labor savings of an established print operation along along with the reporting power that you get from handling communications in Slate.

📖 Further Reading: Bring down overhead for real-world marketing with Slate Print.

Slate Voice

Slate hosts a fully-integrated telecommunications platform called Slate Voice. Slate Voice doesn’t require any integrations with third-party platforms or custom interactions.

📖 Further Reading: Get started with Slate Voice.

Slate Video

Slate Video lets you send pre-recorded video directly from the person record.

📖 Further Reading: Learn how you can engage applicants with Slate Video.

Slate Credits

Using some Slate features require the purchase of Slate Credits. These credits cover the nominal communication fees charged by third parties, such as telephony, printing, postage, and text messaging.

📖 Further Reading: Slate Credits

Events

Events let you schedule both in person and online events, invite attendees, and send automated event-related emails.

Your database comes with pre-configured event templates, which can be used to create individual events of the same type. These templates also come with event template communications, which, once configured and activated, are sent to registrants automatically.

Configuring event templates

Your database has three event templates, each of which must be configured.

Find your event templates in Events > Folders > Templates.

▶️ Action item

First, brush up on the setting configurations available to you with event templates.

Next, the following settings event templates:

• Location: In an event template, select Edit > Location to update the location information.

  • If the events created from this template are virtual, select one of the two options for Online Event.

  • See Online Events and Webinars for more about virtual events.
    

• Description: Select the Description tab and enter a public-facing description for the event template.

  • Individual events created from this template will have their own descriptions, so this description should reflect the class of event, rather than any event in particular.

  • 
    

• Registration Settings: Select the Registration Settings tab to configure registration limits.

  • These limits can be overridden on the individual event level.

  • See Managing Waitlist and Capacity for setting descriptions.

  • 
    

• Rescheduling (if applicable): Select the Rescheduling tab if registrants for this type of event are allowed to reschedule.

  • See Self-Service Rescheduling for setting details.

  

Lastly, create additional event templates as needed.

Configuring event template communications

You can create automated communications associated with an event template that send automatically to registrants.

Your database’s event templates come pre-configured with common communications.

Each template comes with the following communications. They must be customized before being activated. You can also delete them in favor of your own.

• Confirmation page email: “Thank you for registering!”

• Confirmation email (24 hours): “{{Form-Title}} Registration Confirmation”

• Reminder email (48 hours): “48-Hour Reminder: {{Event-Name}}"

• SMS reminder (1 hour): (No message content by default)

• No Show email (24 hours): “Sorry we missed you!”

• Thank you for attending email (24 hours): “Thank you for attending!”

▶️ Action item: Configure the template mailings’ fields & settings

To access the pre-configured event template messages, select Event Communications > Edit Mailing > Edit Message.

If you plan to use these communications, for each of them, you must update:

• The Sender field

• The Reply To field, which is empty by default

• The message subject and content, which are placeholders

• The message’s Active status, which defaults to Inactive

  

With these configured, you can create additional communications as needed.

📖 Further Reading: Event communications

✨ Use your deliver templates for a standardized aesthetic.

Interviews and Appointments

Manage one-on-one interviews in Slate using Scheduler.

With Availability, you can use a portal to offer time slots for specific appointments based on a schedule you define.

📖 Further Reading: Scheduler

(2-year model only) Configuring Scheduler template

If your database was provisioned from the 2-year model, you have a pre-configured Academic Advising Sessions Scheduler template.

To access this Scheduler template, select Events → Scheduler → Folders → Templates. Select Academic Advising Sessions

▶️ Action item

On the Academic Advising Session Scheduler template overview page, select Edit.

Configure the following settings:

• Location: Select the Location tab. Update the location information.

  • If the sessions created from this template are virtual, select one of the two options for Online Session. See Online Events and Webinars for more about virtual sessions.  

  • See Configuring the Location tab for more information.
    

• Description: Select the Description tab and enter a public-facing description for the session template.

  • Individual sessions created from this template will have their own descriptions, so this description should reflect the class of event, rather than any event in particular.
    

• Registration Settings: Select the Registration Settings tab to configure related registration check-in settings.

  • See Configuring the Registration Settings tab for more information.
    

• Rescheduling (if applicable): Select the Rescheduling tab if registrants for this type of session are allowed to reschedule.

  • See Configuring the Rescheduling tab for setting details.
    

▶️ Action item: Have users add their external calendars in Availability

Staff who conduct interviews can link Slate to their external calendar bidirectionally. When all of your interviewing staff do this, their combined availability can be used to generate a dynamic schedule in a portal.

Students can then register for appointments in this portal. When they register, your interviewing staff’s external calendar will reflect this new event, and vice versa: when a staff member is busy, that time is no longer available for students to register in Slate (unless it’s covered by another staff’s availability).

Because they’re authenticating with external calendars using their own credentials, these staff will have to perform this step themselves.

See Adding Scheduler Availability for more information.

Next up: Historical data migration

With foundational data structures established and communications built out, we find this to be a good time to bring over data from your previous system.

➡️ Next: Step 3: Historical Data Migration