Four years ago, Lone Star College-Montgomery realized its usual strategies for enrollment, retention and completion were not enough to meet its goals for improvement. College leadership encouraged exploration of the use of data science as a tool for accelerating improvement. The result was the formation of a Data Team that began leveraging internal expertise in data science, developed its members in predictive analytics tools and techniques, and eventually coalesced into a cross-disciplinary, cross-functional group that tackled specific issues with increasing agility. The first two years saw the development of hundreds of interventions and culminated in the establishment of the Data Center and the Digital Marketing Intelligence Center (DMIC).
One of the best assets for the Data Team is not only having college leadership on board, but also the entire marketing team alongside. The marketing team was immediately involved, launching and maintaining up to 60 campaigns running simultaneously on any given day to boost student enrollment and success, and soon built a center dedicated to showcasing and analyzing its campaigns.
The DMIC, housed in the Office of Public Relations and Marketing Communications and the Data Center located in Student Services at Lone Star College-Montgomery, are a creative suite enabling faculty, staff and students to monitor millions of online conversations about organizations, brands, products and services, in addition to the college’s social media channels and digital marketing campaigns. The Data Center enables faculty and staff to learn how access, segment and analyze data to launch nudge campaigns. The centers have four to six large display screens showcasing current data and conversations across the web, like a small network operations center. A graphic display summarizing social media content conveys sentiment, share of voice, trend information, geolocation data and more. In addition to marketing and data science support, the centers offer an educational and research opportunities to student, staff and faculty.

Submission ID:

13838

Presenter(s):

Michael Chavez Lone Star College-Montgomery

Brian Mullen Western Caroline University