News

Mogli Text Messages Help Build Connections with Students

As a company, Mogli began from the idea that a simple text message could change the world. In fact, Mogli is short for, “Mobile Global Impact”. The work being done by uAspire provides an outstanding example of this idea in practice. 

uAspire serves students from underrepresented communities, working to improve their economic mobility by supporting them in the pursuit of accessing and completing postsecondary education. Students working with uAspire are three-times more likely to complete their program of study and graduate with a degree compared to the national average of students from low-income high schools.

Supporting Students

The process to support students begins with counseling and advising services in high school that continues through their college career.  Access to text message communication from advisors to students with Mogli and Salesforce helps uAspire’s team of guidance professionals directly support more than 10,000 students.

While uAspire’s team has been leveraging the power of texting to connect with students since 2010, the combination of Mogli and Salesforce provides powerful tools that allow automations to handle important reminders, and also delivers key insights to managers through dashboards and reports. The ability to deliver actionable information that can identify both areas of success that can be replicated as well as warning signs for students who may need additional support is an important component to uAspire’s operational success.

Since a significant portion of the students uAspire provides assistance to are the first in their families to pursue a post-secondary education, ongoing advising services are a key component of completing a post-secondary degree. A big part of these ongoing services is ensuring that students stay on top of their financial obligations for tuition. Mogli helps Aspire’s advisors manage relationships and support as students navigate through their post secondary education journey.

As a native Salesforce solution, Mogli’s ease of use and accessibility allows uAspire staff and advisors to leverage the power of text messaging and Salesforce in different ways throughout a student's journey. 

Providing Support Throughout the Journey

When students are in high-school, uAspire counselors spend more direct time engaging with individual students to provide guidance and support. The ability to have one-to-one conversations with students through Mogli can be an important supplement to the critical in-person interactions that occur. It also provides an additional channel for students who may have less time available to participate in face-to-face meetings.

These conversations are logged and can easily be reviewed within the Mogli conversation view which, for uAspire, lives on the student contact record. Here counselors, managers, and other appropriate support staff can keep track of progress and key engagement activities.

These tools help uAspire advisors keep students on track, while providing important data that identifies those who may be at risk  and reduces the chances of anyone falling through the cracks.

uAspire continues to provide support once students graduate high school and move on to pursue higher education, though in a slightly different way. Relative to their high school counterparts, advisors supporting postsecondary students carry a larger caseload in terms of total number of students supported.

“Mogli gives us a direct connection to our students through text messages,” noted Alex Houston, Director of Impact Operations for uAspire. “The fact that it sits directly in Salesforce and is easy to use for our advisors allows us to be confident that we are reaching all of our students.”

For these advisors, Mogli’s bulk messaging supported by Salesforce automation and reporting is a critical tool that helps the uAspire team ensure students have all the resources and help they need to continue progressing toward their degree.

The majority of the messages sent are reminders of deadlines related to financial aid forms and in most cases, a simple reply comes back from the student acknowledging that the proper form has been submitted. Thanks to the high level of engagement created by using text messaging as the medium and the reporting tools in Salesforce, counselors can quickly identify students who may be at risk and devote more one-on-one time and resources to those cases.

Their team's foundational work is why students supported by uAspire are 80% more likely to complete their college degree. Empowering advisors to do more of what matters is one more way that Mogli, through clients like uAspire, is using the power of text messaging to change the world.

To learn more about UAspire's work or to support their mission, please visit www.uaspire.org. To learn more about Mogli and its text messaging solutions, please click here.

View original article