📊 Reporting in Slate

Overview

Many institutions launch Slate full of enthusiasm over the expanded access to data it offers. Typically, leadership turns to admissions, marketing or IT teams for data reporting and while those teams may have access to the Slate data, they may not have extensive training in data analytics. Requests for data frequently lack specificity regarding the desired information or the questions they are hoping to answer. If you're looking for a place to start, here is some information to help establish expectations and lay the groundwork for reporting on Slate data at your institution.

What Slate Does Well

Slate does a great job providing detailed data about your current cycle. It can help you gauge where prospects, inquiries and applicants are in your funnel and help you determine priorities to address gaps or accommodate unanticipated growth. In a response to a question on reporting in the Slate Facebook Group, Carol Cervera¹ commented that reporting in Slate is best thought of as a car dashboard, giving you info on how your trip is going, whether you need to add air to a tire, modify your speed, etc. I don't think any of us want to drive a car without having the ability to see if the Check Engine light is on or if we need to get fuel. This kind of data is essential. Likewise, data on current inquiries, prospects and applicants is essential to your admissions office.

When Slate Needs a Partner

To keep our car trip metaphor going, just like your basic car dashboard might not be able to help you plan your trip or do a deep dive on your historical driving habits, Slate may not be the best tool for your institution's broad reporting needs. When leadership is looking for data to predict enrollment trends or determine marketing effectiveness, it may be best to pull data out of Slate and work with tools built solely to meet reporting needs such as PowerBI or Tableau and to collaborate with staff on your campus trained in data analytics. This will free up resources in your Slate instance (much like moving your winter coats to storage frees up room in your closet for shorts and bathing suits in the summer) and allows your admissions, marketing, and IT teams to focus on their areas of expertise.

Slate Reports - Where to Start

1. Daily Report - Slate provides simple ways to build a report where each staff member can log in and see a personalized list of actions they need to take that day. Maybe it's a list of applications that need to be read, inquiries that need to be called or gifts that need to be processed. Leadership most likely won't see the growth they want to see unless this nitty gritty work is getting done, so we recommend starting with this report. There's a great example from Technolutions in Clean Slate that you can iterate on to meet your needs.
2. Funnel Report - This is the report leadership wants to look at. They want to know how things are going for the active cycle. Every institution has some variation on this report, but there is no industry standard because we all define things differently. Our recommendation would be to keep this report straightforward by only including the current year or comparing the current year data with point-in-time data from the previous year. While you may have data from additional cycles beyond that in Slate, the integrity of that data can start to degrade as you update business processes and the processing power it requires to include it in your Slate reporting may negate the usefulness. For broader funnel reports comparing several years, we recommend moving the data out to other reporting tools. 
   
3. Event Report - Even if you only host one event per cycle, you want to keep track of the people who attended the event and the actions they took after attending. At a previous institution we used this kind of reporting to discover that applicants who attended a specific yield event were yielding at a lower rate that those that didn't. Attending the event made people not want to attend our school! It was a clear sign we needed to retool that event entirely and the next year we saw outcomes that exceeded our expectations.
4. Marketing Report - You're spending the time and the money sharing your institution's messaging, but what kinds of results are being delivered? In general, schools are doing so much marketing that you want to keep this report as narrow in scope as possible or it will simply be too much data for Slate to run in a timely manner. However, if you want to know how a specific ad campaign is performing this year or if a specific set of emails is driving people to apply, a Slate report could be a good fit for that data.

Imagine having a ready-made suitcase of reports you could easily copy to your instance—how convenient would that be? While some reports are available in Clean Slate from Technolutions, most reports aren’t straightforward to transfer. They often require significant updates to align with your specific instance. That’s why we believe you’ll benefit more from learning through examples and building a solid understanding of report foundations. This approach ensures your reports are not only functional but also tailored to your unique needs.

Resources

1. Report Builder Overview (Knowledge Base)
2. Slate Innovation Summit 2022 - Presentation Slides (🔐 requires login)
   1. Using Queries and Reports to Strategically Support Your Institution by Joshua Frankenfield, Megan Luft and Emily Myers.
3. Slate Innovation Summit 2019 - Presentation Slides (🔐 requires login)
   1. Next Level Reporting Using Configurable Joins by Matthew Burris, Sara Euvino and Liz Pfhaler
   2. Reporting 101 by Cally Haggerty and Christina Hunter
   3. Leveraging Reports in Slate by April Crabtree and Kristina Kelpe
4. Tracking Marketing Campaigns in Slate: A Panel Discussion, OHO Marketing (video)

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Footnotes:

^{1 Cervera, Carol. Comment on Joanne Toone's "Internally we are already wondering if Slate is robust enough of our enrollment reporting..." post in the Super Slate Technolutions Friends group. Facebook, 14 December 2023, https://www.facebook.com/groups/superslatefriends/posts/890318488988767/}