Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: How many spam calls do you get every day? How many spam text messages do you get every day? I feel like that number has increased over the last couple years. There's a lot of noise out there and so trying to meet students where they already are most engaged and that is within their social media feeds. It's just a new, innovative way to communicate.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Welcome to the EdTech Connect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and so let's dive in.
Welcome to another show today. Today we have a true champion for student success and a marketing mastermind in the world of educational technology. Today I have Haley Johnson, the regional vice president of education at Solutions at Modomatic. At Modomatic, Haley leads the charge in partnering with institutions to boost enrollment and retention and keep students engaged throughout their academic journey. They've even cracked the code on how to motivate students using the latest in motivation, science and a unique approach that leverages the power of social media. And they're all about results, operating on a pay for performance model where institutions only pay when they see positive outcomes. But Haley's expertise extends beyond her current role. She also brings a wealth of experience from her time at a college scheduler where she helped over two and a half million students navigate the complexities of college planning, scheduling and registration. Her work there was all about empowering students to take control of their academic paths and achieve greater success. So welcome to the show, Haley.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Sure. We have some overlap. Like I see Haley at conferences. We're kind of in the same region and so I thought she'd be a great guest and tell us first. I guess start off, just break the ice and just tell me something people don't know about you. Is it some hobbies or what do you like to do outside of your work?
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Yeah, outside of work I enjoy spending time with my family and friends and a lot of my mom friends that I've become close with. We have a lot of kids around in our group. I like to stay active and with CrossFit and local running events as well. I have two young boys, 6 and 8, so they keep Me pretty busy. We enjoy attending their soccer games, flag football, baseball. And then outside of that, I like to stay creative. And so I love to paint and draw, especially with my boys, and just be crafty.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Well, I have an 8 year old too, and sounds very similar to some things I'm doing, but some older ones. So yeah, I think we might even cross paths here pretty soon. But I want to start off and talk a little bit about your where, how you got to where you are. You have a pretty unique mix of experience and skills. And specifically, you know, we had some overlap in the NorCal area with how College Scheduler came about. I'm familiar with that product and then, you know, with Civitas and tell me a little bit how that affected your kind of your trajectory and what maybe what key features of college scheduled schedule contributed to that adoption or just, you know, what was the positive impact in that. That experience early on with that company?
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Yeah, so I graduated from Chico State with a marketing degree. And honestly, at an early age I was really intrigued by advertisements. Like what are they trying to like communicate to me? And so it was just really interesting. And I loved my marketing classes at Chico State. Shout out to Matt Muter if you have him. Marketing degree. And then when I started at College Scheduler, I slowly realized that student adoption of the software College Scheduler was really important. And I reconnected with a college friend who actually created College Scheduler, Robert Strasarino. And he first sold it to Chico State and then to SAC State and a couple other universities across the country. But when we lost one of the large universities, it was because of student adoption was really low. And so I was trying to understand, like, why is the student adoption low? Because this is such a great product. And so I realized that they didn't have a marketing plan.
And so I would from then on create like really specific marketing plans for our partners as they would come on and use College Scheduler. And I would also share news articles that other, you know, partners would create and share in their newsletters as an example to try to just create awareness and create that high student usage which ultimately led to a high student success rate. So that like marketing degree really helped in that aspect. And then before College Scheduler, I also sold radio commercials. So I've just like been all over the place.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: We have very similar backgrounds. Hailey. I don't know if we discovered that my major was marketing. And my dream job back in the day was to go work at an agency in New York or something like that. I'll Date myself. There was nothing else out there except work. Go work at an agency. That never happened. But I also worked at a radio station selling radio ads too. But. So tell me the next step. So you worked at College Scheduler. When did Civitas come in? What was. What was the next step in your journey?
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so, I mean, College Scheduler was absolutely an amazing journey. I was there for a long time, late 2009, and then we got acquired by Civitas in 2016. And then I stayed for another four years because college Scheduler was my baby. I was employee number two. And I loved. I loved what I was doing. And so Civitas acquired College Scheduler and then they wanted to make College Scheduler part of their overall solution. And so I stayed there for a few years.
And then slowly but surely, as things happen, another opportunity came about.
And that. And that's Modomatic.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So before we move to that, just price to start with this earlier is can you. You could probably tell the audience better than I can what exact College Scheduler was and like how that started. Just the quick story.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. So College Scheduler is a student schedule planner for use by students. It was the first one really ever created that had been brought to market. And so Robert was a student at Chico State the same year I was. And he. He knew that there was some way to find the perfect schedule. And so he began creating College Scheduler. And he wanted to put in breaks. He only wanted to take classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And he knew that there was like a way to look at all the possible pre made schedules. And so he created the software that would analyze that by ingesting the student course schedule. And he created College Scheduler. And it was. It was an absolute amazing product. And the company grew from like five colleges and universities to like over 300.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: Was he a student at Sacramento State or was he at Chico State? I can't remember.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: He was at Chico State and they were the first school that adopted it. And then SAC State was number two.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Right. I was. I don't want to tell a story because I mess up exactly where he was, but. So from there you had all that experience. When I met you, you were already at Motomatic, I think, and I met you at a conference. And so tell us a little bit about. Tell me what Modomatic does.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: Yeah. So Modomatic is the leader in enrollment platforms and student retention. We have a proprietary platform and we use social media as the vehicle in order to reach students and just drive meaningful Action. What makes Modomatic unique is our pay for performance model and then also the way in which we are able to reach students with our proprietary platform and serve them ads that are specific to their steps that they need to take in order to go get through the funnel and register for classes.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: So when you say specific, are you, so is it personalized? Are you, is it based on what is that? How do you know what they need at any given time?
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah, good question. So we do need a list size because the social media networks have restrictions and so we work with populations of stop outs. We work with populations of applied never registered students, even current unregistered students. And so we have lists, we receive lists of students from this institution and that are, that have not taken action that the institution like is trying to get back. And so we try to use social media ads that are tailored to the required steps that they need to take. For example, if they need to reapply, then they would see ads for reapply. If they need to see ads for, you know, me with an advisor or counselor, they would see those ads. If they're, you know, able to register and they just haven't registered yet, we would show them ads for. Register for classes.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: So I'm not able to keep up with social media anymore. Partially. We'll call it a generational thing. But I, I love your take on how do you leverage the various social media platforms and tailor that approach effectively per platform?
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's super complicated and that's what our operations team does.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: Don't tell us a secret sauce, but some of it.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: But yeah, no, but I do know that you need to have like many different versions of an ad in order to serve on like Snapchat and then Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, all of them require like different, different versions. And so our proprietary platform actually manages all of that. And because our ads are backed by behavioral science as well, each ad has a specific strategy and objective behind it. We're truly trying to elicit an emotion from the student and just get them to think differently and just like click on the ad of course, and then drive them back to the institution's website.
[00:11:21] Speaker B: So I work with a lot of institutions and solution providers and often I see a problem of solution providers can't quite narrow down their ICP enough. They want to target all of higher ed. Do you have a certain demographic or type of school that you're working with more often than others or where does it work the best? Any insight on that?
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I've seen a Lot of success working with community colleges specifically, specifically in California, but we're really starting to build momentum up the west coast in Oregon and Washington as well. But going after lists of stop outs at an institution that's, you know, anywhere from 5 to 10,000 plus students, because usually there's a lot a large list of stopouts going back even three or four years that the institution just doesn't have the capacity to do meaningful outreach to. Of course, you know, they're working. The ones from the last year, you know, they're calling, emailing, possibly texting, but those from like even a few years ago, that's where we can really reach them and drive meaningful impact.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: What's a, what's a good size list? I know it probably varies depending on school, but are we talking about 10,000 students or more than that?
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Or what's anywhere from 5 to 8,000 is a good size list? Yeah, we average 3 to 5% conversion of those lists, sometimes more. It really depends.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: What would you consider like the smallest you could really test this with? If you're trying to dip your toe in and see like, is this going to work, what would you say?
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Yeah, we usually say, you know, around 2000. Ideally the list needs to be 2000 of a group of students that need to take the same action. But our engagement managers are amazing and they can get creative and we can do some overlap there, but we do have to stick to the social media network restrictions.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: Can you tell us any of the platforms you are more excited or work closer with or that have more challenges? Any details on the specific social media properties out there that we can learn about?
[00:13:37] Speaker A: Yeah, Facebook and Instagram are now under the umbrella of Meta. That is where we see the most engagement. So it's Instagram, Facebook, MetAdvantage plus, which also includes the Facebook marketplace where people sell things, there are ads in there and then we're seeing a lot of success on Snapchat as well. Me, I don't have Snapchat. I thought Snapchat was dead, but it's definitely not because some of the, even the California community colleges, their top performing social media network was Snapchat. And so, you know, if they're not active on Snapchat, that's a really good insight for them. So their market, if their marketing has the capacity to do some Snapchat, you.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Know, engagement, you've talked about and highlighted in different places the challenge of traditional communication by phone, email, text. What do you think contributes to that decline in effectiveness and how do you, I mean, you're Right in the middle of it. What have you seen?
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, how many call. How many spam calls do you get every day? How many spam text messages do you get every day? I feel like that number has increased over the last couple years. There's a lot of noise out there. And so trying to meet students where they already are most engaged and that is within their social media feeds. It's just a new innovative way to communicate.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: It's where they are, right?
[00:15:09] Speaker A: It's where they are. It's another layer of communication and we're doing it in a very unique way using, you know, images of the campus or students, but being very non intrusive.
It's not like in your face.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: That's trick, right? It has to be. Yeah, very well done.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: So if it comes down to the messaging itself, you gotta be really good at that. How. And you know, are you using AI to build this messaging? And how does that, how are you doing that?
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Actually, we are not using AI to create this content. I'm sure down the road, you know, we may. But what I love most about what we do is that our content team are humans. Our content. And the most effective ads that we've created have been tested and proven across over 250 institutions.
And so that's what I feel. We also bring to the table is our library of over 200,000 ads that have been tested. So if, you know, a new school in Arizona wants to work with us, we know which ads have been proven because we've worked with Paradise Valley Community College and Mojave Community College. So different, you know, regions. Maybe the students engage differently with the social media ads. And that's, you know, the data back, you know, activity that we have.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: One of the benefits of Motomatic, I really believe is your pricing model. You've told me this a couple times and you said it already, that it's based on performance. So is this correct? And tell me, I mean, I guess expand on it if you can, that you don't pay unless they convert, unless they take action through these messages?
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Yes, that is correct. And that's actually one of the reasons I joined Modomatic. I mean, there's been a lot of, a lot of change in higher ed over the last five to 10 years. When I came to Modomatic and learned that, you know, it was pay for performance, understanding that, you know, budgets have been cut, if we're able to show an institution an ROI that they can really see from a list that they're not working or that they haven't been working.
It's just additional revenue. Like that's what our partners say is that we are a revenue generating partnership. And after an engagement, we put together a nice presentation and show the roi so the CFO or leadership, you know, can see how the impact modomatic can make.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Could you share an example of a campaign that demonstrates the impact? Like, what does the action. What is that action?
What does that funnel look like?
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely, definitely varies. I mean, the latest one, we worked with Clayton State University in Georgia, and they had a list of stop outs that they did not have the capacity to reach out to. They had never gone after these stop outs before. And it was a list of around, I think 3,000 from the last couple terms. Some of them had to reapply or some of them didn't. And so all they had to do was just register for classes. And so we went after that list and we were able to get almost 200 students to register for fall 24.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: That's more than I was even expecting you to talk about. I was thinking, okay, we did this campaign. So many people clicked on this link. I mean, I think that's a first step. But that's incredible. Like, the ultimate goal is to get the application right, right?
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. And this was. I mean, we want to understand the finish line. If the finish line is pay for tuition, if the finish line is census even. I mean, that's what really gets VPs excited is like being able to show that they're not paying for students who don't make it to census. And so we are happy to make that the finish line.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: I'm really impressed with the focus that you have. Every time I've talked to you, it's the same. Like we're. It's always. I forget what you call them. No stops. Stop students or students that have stop outs. Stop outs. This tech. And you could do so much like for life advancement and donor relations. And like, you know, are you is exploring any peripheral markets within higher ed or out that this could really benefit?
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Yeah, good question. I mean, honestly, our partners will bring up new use cases all the time. Admit to deposit. Just that one action. Submit housing deposit.
Register for student orientation. Just that one action. They're getting stuck. Like they just. Students are not moving.
Definitely. We've worked with alumni, I think at Lane Community College because a lot of community colleges these days are offering bachelor's degrees now, just a handful of them. So just getting the word out to those alumni or students who have, you know, completed but yeah, yeah, really exciting.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: So, looking ahead, what. What emerging trends in higher ed do you. Do you see are you most excited about? What's your take on the future?
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, there's the enrollment cliff they say is coming. There's been a lot of movement, a lot of, you know, presidents, VPs, administrators, moving from one institution to the other. I feel like the old way of doing things is going to, you know, slowly decrease and new, innovative ways to, you know, do things and is going to arise.
And I'm excited about that. I mean, that's what modomatic is part of, where a new, innovative way to reach students in another form of communication.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Is your company fully remote? You guys have a home base somewhere or what's. What's the structure look like?
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah, we are. We are remote. Isn't that crazy these days compared to, like, years and years ago?
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, it's. It's pretty amazing. Like, it's nice too. I think you and I went through a career where we're kind of traditional now. We can transition in this remote world. Like, I see my kids coming out and considering going right full remote from the start, and I feel kind of bad, like, you should get some affix experience, you know?
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: But. Well, it was really great talking to you, Haley. You can get connected to Motomatic. We'll put a link in the show notes and if you have any. Do you have any last words for our audience? Like, let's say they're just trying to get started. Where's a good place to start if you need to, like, really bump up your targeted marketing?
[00:21:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I just think outside the box, truly. I mean, there's only a couple people in each department and I know that you're all wearing multiple hats, and if there's a pay for performance opportunity, then don't be afraid to look into it.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Low risk. Love it.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: All right, have a good one, Hailey. Bye. Bye.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: We wrap up this episode. Remember, EdTech. EdTech is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time. Thanks for tuning in.
