Retention Overview

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Introduction

TargetX Retention and the Student Success Center help institutions manage and monitor student information, enabling campus professionals to proactively be engaged throughout the student lifecycle. You can visually identify each student's status from a single solution and gain insight into the following:

academic standing
engagement history
involvement in co-curricular activities
financial standing and more

SSC landing example

TargetX Retention and the Student Success Center leverage information from your institution's information systems in one central location. During implementation, TargetX works with your team to import key information from your Student Information System (SIS), Learning Management System (LMS), and other point solutions being used across campus to support student success.

The TargetX Student Success Center is the central location for reviewing, logging, and engaging with students. Other web forms, workflows, and communications can be further tailored to your institution's business processes and needs. You are empowered to proactively connect students to the support services and resources that are readily available to help. Over time, your institution can identify trends and adjust or add programs and services that are the most impactful to retention, persistence, and, ultimately, student success.

The Retention Suite includes the following set of tools:

Faculty Early Alerts: allows faculty to generate alerts/kudos focused on academic performance to ensure student success. Faculty Early Alerts refer to a student's success in a particular course.
Email: allows you to send broadcast emails to groups of contacts who meet common criteria.
Events: allows you to schedule and assign resources to retention events for your institution. Events interfaces with your Salesforce instance, allowing seamless integration between Events and your student/contact records.
Online Appointment Scheduling: allows students to access appointments from anywhere, whether they need to meet in person or virtually.
Surveys: allows you to regularly receive feedback from students to continually provide support and refine processes.
Action Plans: enables you to monitor interactions, tasks, and communications, ensuring clarity on completed actions and upcoming tasks.
Success Teams: facilitates seamless access for Advisors, Success Teams, and other staff members to handle assigned caseloads efficiently, managing alerts, holds, action plans, and referrals for additional assistance.
Reporting and Analytics: allows you to leverage prebuilt and custom reports to access your data.
Student Scoring: allows you to define different scores for various cohorts to help identify risk in any defined population.
Alerts and Interventions: allows you to build automated flows for quicker responses and free advisors from administrative tasks to focus on timely interactions with students.
TX Print: allows you to print letters, envelopes, and address labels.
TX SMS: allows you to use text messaging for seamless communication.

Key Retention Terminology

Term	Description
Academic Snapshots	Academic Snapshots provide a look into how the student is progressing at a given point in time. Several components comprise this snapshot: Academic Profiles, Course, and Attendance information. For example, if the Academic Profile indicates an Attendance Alert, you can then view the student course and attendance information for details.
Action Plans	The TargetX Action Plan is a series of next steps (i.e., tasks/to-do items) that the student is asked to complete. The Action Plan includes assigning university resources and specific communications and touchpoints through a series of rules called Rule Actions. Action Plans can be assigned to a specific student or set of students. For example, you can create a Rule Action that will assign an Action Plan if a student gets put on probation. The list of Action Items could include items like 'Make an appointment with Tutor' or 'Advisor meeting.'
Advising Notes/Referrals	Advising Notes and Referrals are activities that Advisors create on student records. Referrals allow Advisors to guide a student to additional support services when needed. For example, you can create a Referral to Academic Advising for a student with failing grades. Meeting notes give Advisors a central location to keep track of student interactions. For example, you can add notes about an advising meeting where you offered the student extra credit assignments.
Alerts	Alerts can be configured on a student record layout to bring important indicators of success or risk to the forefront for counselors and advisors. Alerts play a significant role in driving timely communications, business processes, and student initiatives. Visualizations of alerts serve as visual cues on student records. For detailed guidance, refer to Working with Retention Alerts. Alerts and visualizations are built through formula fields, so they can reference different fields and values, indicating whether the student is in green or red flag territory. Consider what types of markers would be valuable for your advisors to see and what would be possible with the data you have. For example, you can create an alert that displays a Red icon when a student has a GPA below a certain threshold.
Appointment Scheduler	TargetX Appointment Scheduler is a feature in the TargetX Events module that allows a student to schedule an appointment with an advisor, staff, faculty, or service center. To uniquely validate, identify, and relate a student to an appointment, the TargetX Appointment Scheduler requires the authentication of a student into a TargetX Community. Appointments can only be seen through the Appointment Scheduler Community for Students. With the proper permissions, internal users can also view Appointments and Interviews on the Appointment Calendar. This enables students to log in, select a Success Team member, choose a reason for the appointment and how they would like to meet, and then choose an available day and time.
Holds	Holds track academic, financial, judicial, or other issues a student may have that could impact their academic goals. For example, you can create a Financial Hold for students who haven't paid their bills.
Kudos/Accolade	Kudos, also called Accolades, provide a mechanism for an Advisor to praise a student who has achieved a goal or otherwise excelled. For example, the student increased their GPA this semester and attended tutoring.
Reporting and Dashboards	The Retention Dashboard page provides an at-a-glance view of analytics and a Task list for the current user. The Dashboard will display three Reports to the user, configured in the Student Success Center Preferences. For example, you can include a graph that displays a Student count by Student Type, another with counts by Major, and a third that depicts Student Level.
Student Success Center (SSC)	The Student Success Center is a central location that Advisors use to review and monitor critical information about their students and evaluate student persistence and progression through the student lifecycle. When you log in, the Dashboard displays an overview of Tasks, My Students, and My Appointments, and you can quickly identify 'at risk' students. The criteria for identifying 'at risk' students, such as grades, attendance, and alerts, are based on your institution's guidelines.
Success Teams	An important aspect of supporting students lies in identifying a student Success Team. Success Teams are intended to be a problem-solving and coordinated group of people that assist the student in maximizing their potential. Students have the ability to promptly arrange appointments with their Success Team, and you can access the list of Success Team members for quick contact when a student requires extra assistance.
Surveys	Surveys are a proactive tool for educational institutions to assess various aspects, such as class participation, campus activities, faculty interactions, and overall satisfaction. They aid in pinpointing areas and enhance the learning environment's overall quality. You can then collect the results directly in TargetX Retention and share the results with others in your organization.

Enabling Student Engagement

The Engagement and Intervention workflows use the data collected about a student to enable follow-up activities. For example, low-risk students may have automatic reminders sent to purchase books on the first day of class. Faculty may enter survey responses based on changes in student behavior that trigger an email or phone call from an administrative advisor or call center. The intervention workflows establish email or text campaigns for individuals or groups based on specific indicators.

Surveys/Polls

Surveys make student success a two-way street by soliciting feedback from your current students. You can push out surveys and collect the results in Salesforce. For additional information, see Surveys Overview.

Appointment Scheduler

The Appointment Scheduler allows students to schedule appointments or staff to schedule time with students. Staff can also define a Profile, add their availability, and track meeting outcomes. For additional information, see Appointment Scheduler Overview.