678: LIVE from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Anthology Together 2023⁠ #AT23 - with Dave Becker, CEO & Founder of...

Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to add up on the Edit Experience podcast where we make education your business. We've made education your business, and we will continue to make education your business. But we've done that here this week and Anthology Together 2023 in Nashville at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Hotel. And it has been absolutely epic. We have met with people in institutions, in ed tech companies, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft. It has been absolutely off the chain. You couldn't even get into this studio. There was lines. There's still a line out the door. It's just absolutely incredible. You can't see what's going on because, of course, the filming only has us framed. So it's hard to describe the may I'm happening around us right now. What are we again? We. We are here live at the A.T. studio.

Nice.

Which I gotta tell you, Anthology hooked this up. I mean, this studio is legit. I don't have a legit sound effect, but if I had one and it said legit, I would be playing it right now because that's how good the studio setup is. Right? 100. It is incredible.

Off the hook. There you go.

Off the hook.

How about a sound effect for that.

1999 called and once off a hook basket.

All right, we're gonna get. This is gonna be a good one.

My guest today, he's Dave Becker, and he is the CEO of Campus esp. Dave, what's happening?

Hey, how are you guys doing? I'm doing great.

How are you? We're honored to have you tell us a little bit about Campus esp.

Yes, Campus esp. Well, we are a startup based out of Philadelphia, and we help colleges and universities engage with parents and families to support student yield and student retention. And like, you know, parents and families are just really, really engaged in post secondary education. And a lot of schools don't know how to deal with that energy. And we focus it back on the students and helping the students. All right, amazing.

How does this work exactly? So when you say engage parents, parents and families and students, what does that look through email campaigns or through. Through what? Messaging? Through.

It's like a. An all in one experience. It is.

We like the word experience as we do.

Exactly. And it is like a portal meets email, newsletter meets text messaging. It's really. Wow, that one caught me off guard. It is. You know, thing is, parents are going to be super engaged no matter what. And so if you don't give them some information about how their students doing and how they're progressing and Some information about the school. They probably go to the dark side, which is over involvement. Execute order 66. That was a complete softball.

I knew he was going to put that one.

Well done, Dave. Well done. Thank you for the setup. So anyway, we help schools deal with that energy and focus it on things like enrollment. That really makes a big difference in, you know, their, their outcomes.

So wait, wait, wait. What does ESP stand for?

ESP stands for campus experience for students and parents.

I'm on your site, which by the way, it is a beautiful site.

Oh, beautiful website. I think Melissa over there would love to. Well done. Melissa.

Melissa, are you the, are you the. The queen of the website was having the designer or your maintainer of the site.

Well done. She's the vice president of marketing. She'll let you know that.

Melissa, the vice president of marketing. Well done. On the website it says, and this is so true, families are the top influencers of today's college students. Campus ESP keeps them informed. Do you think we forget that in higher ed? Is that why campus ESP exists? Do we, do we focus so much on the student who, you know, traditional student who might be 17 or 18, and it's like, well, wait a minute, the mom and the dad or some adult is going to be helping them make this decision? We got to keep them in the loop here.

Yeah. You know, parents are told in high school that the more involvement, the better. The more that they're involved, the more that they're engaged, the better their students gonna do. And then all of a sudden the student goes to college, they're paying. They're usually part of the financial experience of the student and they're paying all this money and they're told, hey, you need to back off now. Now's the time to let your student succeed on their own. And of course everybody wants the student to succeed on their own. But like this is a huge investment. Like the average cost of education just goes up and up every single year. And you know, that is a lot of debt put on not only on like a, like an 18 year old student, but on the family as well. So a lot of times we also say like student success is family success. And that's the way a lot of families look at it.

I like that a lot.

That's cool.

We, you have a lot of solutions. You have campus ESP for student enrollment, for family communication, FERPA management. I'd like to know about that one a little bit. For parent giving for two year colleges. So start with FERPA management. That's a really interesting solution. What does that mean exactly? I mean, besides the fact ferpa, you don't have to go into detail. I think we all know what that part means. But campus ESP for FERPA management.

So a big part of the, of the, of the parent experience is getting information about their students. And a lot of that information is generally FERPA protected, meaning the student has to give direct access to the parent. And the reality is students don't really care. They just give their parents their IDs and passwords. In fact, 61% of parents have their students college ID password. You have some early, early research that we did there.

Do I look like I know what a JPEG is?

So that one threw me off too. That was a good one. So what we do is we just put up that whole experience online so that parents can make the FERPA waiver request to their student. The students can decide what to grant access to. And then once they do, then parents see just the information that students want them to see. And then when there's something that's updated on the student record, let's say financial aid or unmet financial aid requirements or a new bill or a hold that goes to the parent. And what we find is that when you send those alerts to parents, it actually helps with student retention. Bullseye. And so we see that, like, generally the schools can experience for, for students that have a parent in campus, ESP, the retention can be up to 15% higher, which is insane. Yes. You don't have a. Come on.

You blew my mind. And I couldn't even, I couldn't even hit a button.

Just blew off. You can't even reach the keyboard.

Let me tell you why. Let me tell you why the world of higher ed is so disruptive right now. We're seeing colleges close. Enrollment is a main issue. We think about enrollment. I think when we think about enrollment, I think when we think about enrollment, that doesn't make any sense.

We can edit that out.

That's the other thing, though. I don't edit out my mistakes. You know, Anyway, we, we, we think, okay, that's new. We need new students. But you, if your retention goes up, you need less new students. Like, this is a way to solve the enrollment problem. If my retention can go up by 15%. I mean, this is huge, man. Massive, right?

And here's the thing. Parents want to hear from the schools. Believe it or not, when you look at prospective parents and prospective students and parents of current students, it's 88% want communication from the school, at least weekly, tell them like it is.

Whoa.

Which is crazy. So. So this is a generational thing that has occurred here. It's magnified by the cost of education. So parents are just more involved. And then after Covid, they're, They're just more tied in because students need more of their support. They. They have, like, delayed onset of adulthood in many, in many ways because they just didn't get the experiences that, that, you know, Covid limited them from. So, I mean, parents are going to be engaged. And those schools that fight against parent involvement. It doesn't make any sense. Outrageous.

I don't know.

Why would they. That's crazy. Parents want to help the students.

The buyer. They're the buyer.

Right.

They don't want to go against the buyer. I mean, that's not going to help you. If you're talking about regular sales, which higher education, you're selling something, you have buying influences. You have to understand all the buying influences. They have buying power. If you don't understand the influences and you have the buying power, you're not going to have a sale. That means less enrollment. When I look at campus, esp for student enrollment, I'm. I want to know about this. Tell me about it. Because I want my challenges to be solved.

Well, there's. There's a couple ways that we use the student enrollment module, which is focused on parents of preference, prospective students. Number one, if a parent is engaging you, if a parent of a prospective student is engaging you through your portal, you know that they're probably doing that because their student is really interested in your school. So you can use that to understand the likelihood to enroll for the student. In other words, if the parent just deletes your emails, more than likely their students not that interested in the school.

Yikes.

So that's one area. And the second area is using, we call it like nudging the nudgers. The parents are the ultimate nudgers. So if you're trying to increase your deposits or increase your applications or get the student to visit campus, you know, the student's not gonna visit campus on their own. Their parent is hugely influential.

Somebody's gonna take them too.

Somebody's gonna take them. And generally, if you've ever been on a college tour, you know, the person asking the questions, it's the parent. So we're trying to get the information, nudge the parents down the enrollment funnel. And it has absolute direct impact on enrollment yield. Yet generally, what we see is yield can go up, up to 5% higher. When you're communicating with the parents, you still have to do it with the students. It's not, say you're, you know, moving past the students, but you're influencing the students by messaging the parents.

Dave, I. I'm just looking through your website and I see this bit right here. I'm gonna read it out loud.

Go for it.

Like most great ideas, the start of Campus ESP happened over a beer.

Cheers.

Nice. Tell us how this idea comes to be. Besides this part, you don't need to go into great detail.

I'm remembering last night for some reason. Yeah. So I've been in education technology for 25 years, and I've been working with colleges in all sorts of different ways. And the idea for Campus ESP was really focused around engaging students directly. And a school very early on that we went to in rural Texas basically said, you know, students aren't even logging into these systems anymore. It's their parents who are logging in as their students. And I'm from Philadelphia. I'm skeptical about everything. I didn't believe it. We choose truth over facts. For the next two years, we basically just researched the idea. So we did that. The initial idea for Campus CSP probably came about in 2013, but for the next two years, we did research. We worked with about 14 different schools surveyed, 8,000 parents. A lot of students just understand it because I'm Gen X. And we didn't. We didn't talk to our parents at all. So this was eye opening for me. And then, you know, very early on, instead of engaging students, we said, let's influence the students through their parents. And as far as I know, I don't think anybody else does what Campus ESP does. And we're, you know, very innovative from an enrollment perspective and I believe helpful from a social impact perspective because parents need help supporting their students.

And we know that this is a big problem. The traditional age, what we consider the traditional age, college student, 18 years old. This is the population that is expected to decline with the big enrollment cliff or the great enrollment cliff or the semi great enrollment cliff. However you decide to, you know, imagine what it is. And I'm on your research, right? I'm looking at the bit of the research and some of the results. I read these here. 37% of families interacted with their student daily. 61% of families had their students college ID and password. I mean, 41% of families expected communication from their students college at least weekly. And today that number is 85%. The consumer expectations are changing. And I wonder if that has to do with debt too. Like debt, debt management, financial, you know, the confusion around college. And it's like, okay, wait a minute. We need to make sure that we're protecting our kids from this misinformation that can come from higher ed sometimes. What do you think?

It's, it's a huge, it's a huge issue, the cost of education. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is you're asking a student in 18 and by the way, I have twins who are 17 years old. You're asking them to make a decision that could saddle them with debt for the rest of their lives. And schools don't want their parents to be involved. I mean, that's crazy. Come on. There's no way I want my, my kid to not. There's no way they understand the financial implications of the decision that they're making. So.

Well, let's start the insanity.

So let's start the, the insanity and, and help the students. And you know, it's interesting because we first started Campus csp I think a lot of schools viewed parents as problems. Oh yeah. And since I'd say the last couple years everybody's kind of shifted years. And they really see parents as we always say parents as partners. Yeah. But they see parents as an opportunity. Especially with so much just. Schools have so much more limited access to information about. Yeah. Through test optional and things like that. So parents are a way to understand more about the student, reach them more clearly and make an impact on their enrollment.

How does Campus ESP integrate with the other technologies with anthology or CRMs, you know, so if I'm on the website, I'm thinking about Campus esp. I call you up, which I know you, I heard you only take phone calls between midnight and 6am so anybody.

Which time zone are you talking about?

We interested? How, how do I understand this technology working my other, my stack.

Right, right. We are technology agnostic. I guess I'd say the portal only takes three weeks to set up. I think that's one of the things we're most proud about. You get so into the features and the functions, but if you can't bring it live, it's not going to help you. So this is only like a three week implementation. And one of the ways that we make help Campus ESP integrate into your stack is by tying it to CRM information. So we'll pull over on a nightly basis information about the student send specifically the student, the parent and the enrollment stage of the student. So that we can have enrollment specific messaging sent to the parent that aligns to what the student's receiving.

And so am I working within campus ESP to create the messaging?

Yes, I'd say generally you work within campus esp. It's everything in one place. What's unique about is it's not just a platform for messaging. It includes content management and it's a content library for sending the right messages at the right times. And Campus ESP manages 90% of that content. So like when the FAFSA comes out, something that all students need to know about and so you can get that information out to their parents, we send it out to all of our customer portals automatically. So they can just approve the note going out to parents and it's out there.

That's amazing. So what's, what's the goal here at the conference? What's next for campus esp? Where are you going? What's the growth path?

Well, this is our first conference or first time at the anthology conference. So this is an amazing experience. It is electric here, which is great. Amazing. So you know, we're having a lot of conversations with schools. We're talking with some more international schools which has been exciting for us. We're just know, expanding our footprint. Right now we're at over 330 schools and double from a year ago. And you know, we love working with anthology customers and, and really with the anthology team. It's a great, it's a great ecosystem of partners and of, of customers. I like your style, dude.

If you look at the list of customers on your website, because I saw them scrolling. We've interviewed presidents for many of these organizations here. You've got HBCUs, you've got looks like Catholic institutions. You've got big online institutions, you have state, big flagship state institutions. You're really everywhere. How are you feeling about that growth, about your partners? You think you can go to all 3, 800 institutions across the US and is that the.

That's the dream.

That's the dream.

Melissa, what do you think?

Over to the VP of Marketing Melissa, for making that a reality and then international.

Right? Yeah.

Do you work with any Internet international schools?

Yeah, we work with one school in China. Nice. And most of our efforts have, you know, we're, we're a small startup company. We are bootstrapped. We don't have massive amounts of funding or anything like that. We've grown through revenue and from building a product around customer requirements, which I think is kind of unique in edtech. And we now support five of the top 10 largest universities in the United States. There are a lot of HBCUs and HSIs. What people don't realize is family engagement for African American families and Hispanic Latinx families is higher. Yes, is among the highest. So when you're looking at improving retention in those areas, often an area where schools are looking to improve, families are absolutely the secret weapon. If you can engage with them, you can really make a difference in your student success.

Another secret weapon is my guest today is the CEO of Campus esp. Did you enjoy your experience here on the podcast today? Thanks for telling us about your organization. We're going to we're going to push it far and wide. Let institutions know, because we need to engage parents. We need to make sure that we are communicating with parents, and we need to solve our enrollment challenges. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just.