Beyond the Campus Gates: Bringing Alumni, Parents, and

Prospects into the Campus Portal

William P. WilsonMark R. AlbertJohn C. Duffy

Gettysburg College

Copyright Gettysburg College 2003. This work is the intellectual property of the authors. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the authors. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the authors.

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What is CNAV?• Design began in 1995, rolled out in 1996• Our Campus portal, with access to

appropriate data from College databases• Developed by Gettysburg College, then by

a spin-off company; now supported locally• Have default views for students,

employees, faculty, alumni, parents, and accepted students

• Over 1000 unique users on a daily basis• 68% used AC CNAV for information

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Our Goals for Today

• Give you a sense of what we provide our off-campus users– Accepted Students– Alumni– Parents

• Questions/time on-line

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Accepted Student CNAV

• Work with Admissions to define date(s) to roll students into Accepted Student status

• Read information from designated PeopleSoft tables

• Establish userids and passwords• Admissions provides information to

the students about how to gain access

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Comments from Students

• Did CNAV impact your decision to attend?– The school made me feel welcome which

helped me choose Gettysburg. Accepted Student site was one of the things that made me feel welcome

– Was able to contact people, and see what the College was about

– It showed how up-to-date the College was– I was able to get a lot of information from the

site that I may not have been able to access through mailings

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AlumniData We Have

College Relations Data•Name (when in College and now)•Address (mailing, phone, email)•Employment•Class Year•Major/Minor•Social Organizations•Giving History

College Relations/Alumni Relations•Alumni Club

Registrar’s Office•Transcript

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Alumni data is pulled and stored in the same location as student and employee data – provides opportunities to query and compare data across the campus community.

All data is searchableOpen up data to other alumni to search for classmatesCreate like groups – major, year, social organizationsAlumni Club based on geographical location Email address for life – email forwarding system from @gettysburg.edu address to another address – creates an affiliation with the college

Alumni

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Alumni

Alumni Pages

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Alumni Mentoring Program

Project requested by the Gettysburg College Center for Career Development to match particular alumni with students based on a student’s career interest.

Interested in this because:•Opportunity to involve Alumni

Little current alumni involvement (<6%)•Would involve multiple divisions of the college

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Alumni Mentoring Program

Key elements for this program:

•Data must first come from system ERP CNAV could not be system of record for the biographical information

•Identify the necessary data either pull the data from the ERP or develop the database components for the data that is not available from the ERP

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Alumni Mentoring Program

Build pages that provide the interface between the

users and the data:Biographical data formsContact informationSearch toolsContact tool for students to make first

contactwith alumni through the CNAV system. This

allowsfor better tracking of the contacts made.

Build pages that provide administrative tools for the Center for Career Development:

Activities OptionsQuestions to gather more bio dataAnalyze usage data

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Alumni

Alumni MentoringParticipant Pages

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Alumni

Student Search Page

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Alumni

Center for Career DevelopmentAdministration Pages

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Alumni Mentoring Program

Long-term goal of the Center for Career Development is to open this program up to include alumni, parents of students and interested companies and individuals to provide career mentoring and internship and employment opportunities for students and alumni.

Knowing the long-term goals helped us develop the system in a scalable nature. Development was done with the bulk of maintenance left to the maintainers of the ERP data and the Center for Career Development.

Parent CNAV

What Do Parents Really Want?

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Parent CNAVAccount

• Account Request submitted by Parent• Validate Requestor as Current Parent• Send to Student for Verification and

Approval• Parent receives (arbitrary) username and

initial password• Student Controls Access to Personal

Information and Transcript

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Parent CNAV

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Parent CNAV Transcript

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Goals

• Engage Parents in their child’s educational experience

• Provide an opportunity for the Parents to engage in the life of the College (courses, events, services….)

• Offer the possibility for participation, perhaps in ways unforeseen right now

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Bumps

• Awkwardnesses– Identification of Parents (minimal problem)– Student approval/rejection of account– Account names (eg., jcd12345)– Relatively small percentage of parents use

CNAV– Is the “special” data available (transcript,

course schedule, etc.) worth the trouble?

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Parent CNAV Plans

• Student Emergency Contact Record and Updater

• Parent Data Updater (to pass along to PeopleSoft; for example: address, job info)

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Some Links

• http://www.gettysburg.edu/it/cnav• http://www.gettysburg.edu/it/webt

ech/talks/nercomp2003