University at Buffalo Sees 75% Conversion Rate To Application With Unibuddy

Challenge

As the largest and most comprehensive institution in the State University of New York (SUNY) system, the University at Buffalo is constantly innovating. With 30,000 students to serve across their undergraduate, graduate and professional schools, their enrollment teams focus on delivering a world-class applicant experience, as scalably as possible.

In the aftermath of Covid-19, and leading up to the fall of 2022, several Buffalo graduate schools began to feel their individual enrollment strategies needed improvement. In particular, they wanted a more scalable way to leverage the power of their current students. As Ryan Taughrin, Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management at the Graduate School of Education, put it, “We were all executing on the smaller tactics – an ambassador program, connecting peers over email when they reached out. But we needed something that nurtured the high volume of traffic we were bringing to our website, a technology that integrated with our CRM Slate, and was affordable due to funding challenges.” Jennifer Rosenberg, Associate Dean of Admissions at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, had tried many different ways to engage students – Zoom events, Skype chats, even a free instant messaging solution. But they weren’t seeing the engagement they wanted.

Solution

Several University at Buffalo graduate schools first had exposure to Unibuddy after seeing a demo at the annual NAGAP conference. The immediate draw was the ability for prospective students to seamlessly connect with current students over a chat tool embedded directly on a university website. “We knew peer connection was a critical and growing need, regardless of the school or department,” Taughrin said.

So, seven Buffalo graduate and professional schools banded together to purchase Unibuddy. “We had the support of the office of the vice provost of enrollment management as well, who saw how Unibuddy could help us rise above the noise,” noted Erin O’Brien, Chief Marketing and Enrollment Officer for Buffalo’s School of Management.

Each grad school implemented its own instance of Unibuddy, which created consistency in the Buffalo prospect’s experience yet still allowed for individual department customization. “We were able to get set up in a day. It basically involved dropping code onto our website,” O’Brien said. “Unibuddy provided a really easy onboarding process,” Taughrin added. “We were provided with the personalized support to ramp up fast. Our IT team was supportive; it took one 1-hour meeting to implement. And our ambassadors downloaded the app, and got to work on their profiles. They were happy they could answer questions at their convenience on their phones. No more office hours, they loved it!”

One aspect their School of Management saw value in was Unibuddy’s integration with their CRM Slate. By combining Unibuddy’s engagement data with their system of record, the enrollment team was able to cater to students’ individual needs as well as create more compelling content and messaging based on what they were seeing was top of mind in peer-to-peer conversations. 

Results

Not yet a full cycle into their implementation, the University at Buffalo is already seeing positive results. The Graduate School of Education saw a 75% conversion rate to application for those students who engaged in Unibuddy conversations. Compared to 50% of students applying after they attend an information session, “in our pilot year, this was a significant increase,” Taughrin commented.

For the School of Management, “Unibuddy also helped us identify stealth applicants.” In hard numbers, 40% of Unibuddy users went on to apply to the School of Management, and 18% of Unibuddy users deposited for a 2023 term.

In alignment with diversity goals, the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences saw 350 students from 26 different countries engage and over 3,000 messages exchanged between October 2022 and May 2023. 78 applications were created from this student group, and 30 were admitted. The Pharmacy recruitment team was happy with the high number of accounts created, and 22% converting to application, in just their first year of implementation. 

Qualitatively, Rosenberg noted that students’ conversations gave her team the insights they were missing. “Unibuddy enhanced our ability to yield students by creating transparency into their needs, which lets us nurture and convert them more easily and in a personalized way.” In fact, the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences has now begun to use Unibuddy to convert admitted students and propel them toward enrollment. O’Brien also noted that for the School of Management, “When I measure engagement in Slate, prospective students spend more time interacting with our Unibuddy ambassadors than any other channel or activity we offer. That’s the nurture experience we were looking for.”

Ultimately, Buffalo’s enrollment teams wanted to improve the student experience and ensure they could get students’ burning questions answered. Taughrin noted: “Undergrad is not the same as grad school. It was important that we help students disentangle myths, feel confident at each stage of the application journey, and be an informed consumer. We want to make the grad school journey more student friendly, and Unibuddy helped us do that.”