UIT refreshes Financial Wellness Center scheduling portal

University students fret over money just like the rest of us. A 2024 study by Ellucian, a higher education technology company, found that about 60% of college students considered dropping out due to financial stress.

To alleviate fiscal fears and help college students navigate what may be their first money management experience, the U’s Financial Wellness Center (FWC) facilitates one-hour sessions with peer mentors and accredited financial counselors, online and in person.

In January 2024, the Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) Team in UIT’s University Support Services was enlisted to streamline the online service management portal used to book the financial consultations. A refreshed appointment scheduling system integrated with Salesforce, Zapier, and Acuity went live on September 2, 2024.

“Everyone on the [CRM] team was amazing to work with,” said FWC Director Gabrielle McAllaster, Ph.D. “They were very thoughtful and really took the time to understand our center and the work that we do. They learned our processes and made sure our voices were heard throughout the implementation.”

Before Salesforce Developer Doug Lloyd was called in to help, McAllaster said FWC staff emailed Zoom meeting links to students, followed up via email, and did “a lot of admin work in general.” CRM Team Manager Brandon Gresham said his group’s aim was to “get them out of their spreadsheets, get them out of their emails, get them out of their sticky notes, and get them out of their one-off, disconnected tools, and bring all of their scheduling components into Salesforce.”

Gresham said the tool configuration itself isn’t nearly as important — or as challenging — as understanding how an organization operates, which “includes distinguishing between how work is handled currently versus how they prefer to work in the future, as well as calling out pain points so that we can try to figure out how to build a solution that gets them closer to their desired future state.”

Gresham said it’s essential to identify a client’s data needs and use that justification to ask data stewards for permission to access relevant data — “those two things can take an inordinate amount of effort but are critical to delivering a solution that actually improves their process.”

Lloyd, who led the FWC scheduling portal project, previously served the CRM Team as a part-time student employee before being hired full time as a Salesforce administrator, then promoted to its first and only Salesforce developer. He said that while not much looks different from the student user’s perspective, the portal provides backend users with much more granular information than what students enter in their intake form in Acuity.

“The whole team can see the schedule, look back on internal and external notes from prior appointments, and reassign appointments really easily,” Lloyd said.

The refreshed portal also centralizes where FWC staff can run reports and study patterns based on follow-up surveys created in Qualtrics. Staff members can, for example, follow trends related to how many students they serve and anonymous student satisfaction survey results, like the finding that 95% of students and community members strongly agreed or agreed that FWC financial counselors were attentive, knowledgeable, and approachable.

“All of the new functionality really helps with our capacity to serve students through proactive and personalized pathways,” McAllaster said. “We have a better understanding of the students who seek our help, allowing us to quickly access their past interactions and the issues or insights they wanted to address. This makes counseling sessions much more productive, as we can skip the recap and focus on their current needs with all the information at hand.”

 

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