Montgomery County Community College (MCCC), a technologically advanced community college recognized for its provision of high-quality, affordable and accessible education, sought to optimize its technology stack to transform and enhance student communication and engagement.

Challenge

MCCC wanted to optimize its technology stack to transform and enhance student communication and engagement. The college is deeply committed to student success and wellbeing, believing that student engagement is one of the most important predictors of student success. It wanted a solution that would reshape the MCCC student engagement experience within the existing technology stack and with clearly defined automation, personalization and data-management capabilities.

MCCC was working with an existing solution built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 that allowed for the college to message students, run reports to identify certain demographics, and compose and send messages manually. The college didn’t have the time or resources to analyze the effectiveness of its messages and whether or not there was active student engagement. The goal was to elevate and automate this process to create student journeys that would not only ignite engagement but allow for staff and students to build richer relationships.

Approach

Mary Beaver, Director of Enterprise Software Solutions at MCCC, explained: “Our students are not just engaged with the school; they have life requirements that impact their time, and this made it important that our communications were effective and personalized. We also wanted a centralized space where messages are scheduled within an accessible calendar, so they are uniform and consistent.”

For MCCC, engagement sits at the core of the solution as students who show increased engagement are more motivated to learn, have more resilience, tend to achieve higher grades, and are more likely to develop better relationships with professors and administrators. They are also more inclined to manage their learning pathways and classes. Therefore, the solution had to connect with students on multiple levels while reducing manual workloads for MCCC staff and provide data and analytics that could improve future communications.

Working with Coffee + Dunn, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys was integrated within the existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment to provide personalized and orchestrated communications, centralized visibility into campaigns, goal-based reporting, and deeper insights into student engagement levels. Dynamics 365 automates recurring communications with existing students and correlates engagement with overall registration and enrollment, while leveraging Microsoft Azure to provide richer visibility and critical data integration.

Outcome

MCCC is now able to combine all the student data, information, communications and scheduling in a centralized space that provides a 360-degree view of the students and their individual journeys.