Drive action from students with 2-way texting backed by AI
Expand your texting programs with a helping hand from the latest in AI technology, and watch your success rates skyrocket.
You already know that texting avoids the inbox of death. But that doesn't mean it's easy.
HigherEd teams love texting — or at least the concept of texting — because it gives them confidence that their message will land. Or at least be seen. But getting to the stage of actually realising that benefit is often ...clunky. And that's putting it mildly. Texting just isn't as easy as emailing. And so the undoubted benefits are lost because we succumb to the challenges of texting students well.
Teams are unprepared to handle responses
You receive a text, then you text back. We've been doing it for decades. But if even 10% of your students decide to respond, are you equipped to deal with it? It's tough with email, but even harder with texts. And if you're not prepared, you'll subconsciously start writing "one-way" texts that actively discourage responses.
Poor segmentation leads to boring texts
One-to-one texts with friends are hyper-personalized. But the more people you text, the harder it is to write a text that resonates with them. Without the ability to properly segment your audience, you're writing to a large, amorphous group — which leads totexts lacking in relevance and impact.
Siloed tools don't know when the job is done
You remind a friend to do something, then mentally check it off your list when they reply with done. You don't keep badgering them. But that's harder to do when you're asking 300 students to complete a task. How do you automatically know who's done, and who you need to keep reminding?
Can you text students within the next hour?
Our phone lives in our pocket, and we can text 5 people in the next 60 seconds. That's because we have access to everything we need — the contacts and the tool. This is far from reality for many HigherEd teams, where texting tools are centralized and they have limited access to student contact info.
Knowing what to text isn't easy for everyone
Responding to a friend's text is instant, because the knowledge is in your head and you know the recipient. In HigherEd, you is replaced by a team, and it's not always clear what the answer to the question is, who this student is, or why your team are even in a text conversation with them in the first place.
But texting your friends isn't a perfect analogy...
Reflecting on how we text our mates is a fun way to paint a contrast with how most of us text students. But our phone's text app doesn't have to worry about tracking our results for our boss, or recording our messages in another system, or coming up with a plan to be better next semester. So there's much more to think about in our day job!
When texting students, it’s time we moved beyond v1
Texting needs to grow up. And it needs the sophistication of its elder relation, the email.
Emails can be one-to-one or transactional. They can be scheduled, or triggered or sent manually. Emails can be highly segmented and super-personalised. And we can easily measure an email’s success against valuable outcomes.
Texts can do all of that too. We’ve just been waiting for the right tool to help unlock all that potential...
The Gecko way is
just a better way to text
Granular student segments
Start by selecting which students you'd like to text. This can be a granular segment of your student population. Ideal candidates for inclusion are those who you'd like to encourage to complete a goal or students who may have gone silent.
Structured, multi-text campaigns
Campaigns are crafted, incorporating multiple texts over a given timeframe, and leveraging all the personalization snippets you've come to expect. Campaigns are then launched on a schedule, or automatically triggered.
AI-handled responses
Our AI is trained on your school's knowledge, systems and (collective) brainpower. These datasets are then leveraged by bots to handle responses and chat with students on autopilot, 24/7.
Goal-focused campaigns
Campaigns can be tied to goals, such as submitting a certain form or scheduling to attend a specific event or meeting. Once a student completes the goal, they're suppressed from further texts within that campaign.
Automated CRM syncing
Your CRM and EdTech stack is kept in-sync throughout the whole process. Those tools remain your single source of truth, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Here's how it works
Combine audience segmentation and scheduled text messages with a world-leading AI assistant that helps your team handle off-the-cuff student responses.
.png)
Keen to learn how Gecko's approach to texting could help you?
Schedule a 30-minute call with our team. We’ll show you how our technology works, understand your current processes and help you decide on a suitable solution.
Our tech is leveraged by the world's most innovative institutions
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
Granular audiences are the secret behind super impactful campaigns
Don't spray and pray. Instead, focus your campaigns around a laser-focused group of students who share similar characteristics or who are at the same stage of the enrollment funnel. This leads to super-focused messaging and well-defined goals — and both of these help drive students down through your enrollment funnel.
Write more engaging texts when you're confident you can handle the responses
Teams often fear they wouldn't be able to handle a decent percentage of students responding to their texts. And so, subconsciously, their text messages are written in a way that discourages engagement — which makes them bland, unappealing, and everything they're trying NOT to be. But when you lean on AI to handle the back-and-forth conversations with students, the texts you do write instantly become more engaging.
Dynamically trim your audience once they take action
One surefire way to train students to ignore your communications is to message them about something that they've already done, or which isn't relevant to them. By tying your text campaigns to goals, you only text students who haven't taken action yet. So the laggards will receive more communication, but the early-responders are freed from annoying follow-ups.
So what kind of texting campaigns can you run with Gecko?
The Gecko method can be used for any student audience. It is particularly successful for driving students to take actions that form part of a larger funnel, or when students need extra support but might not be enthusiastic about proactively reaching out to your team.
Reduce summer melt amongst the silent majority
Not every student will proactively contact your team if they're confused about part of your admissions process. By flipping the process and reaching out to them proactively, you can tackle potential concerns before they've had a chance to fester.
Alleviate money worries for students who need help most
It's no secret that student concerns around finances can hinder their ability to access the curriculum and thrive within an institution. By proactively reaching out and leading the conversation, you can ask the right questions and share advice that has helped their peers.
Help more students meet their enrollment deadlines
You'll no doubt have a robust process for onboarding new students, laying out all the information you need from them. But across an incoming student population, it's fair to say that steps are always going to be missed. By tying a text campaign to the steps students need to take, you'll maximize the likelihood that they'll stay on-track.
Which teams can leverage Gecko's approach to texting?
In short, any team with a list of students they'd like to communicate with. Teams don't need an existing tech stack, and don't need integration access to their wider tools. You can get started with a list of students and an idea of what you'd like to communicate with them about.
Graduate Admissions
Help grad students get the information they need to be comfortable choosing your school.
Student Success
Success teams can help their students hit the milestones required for a productive semester.
OneStop Center
Leverage AI that can handle the vast range of questions handled by your OneStop team.
Online Learning
Online learners require an even better experience to compensate for a lack of face-to-face interaction.
Community Colleges
A lack of resources and an wide variety of students means 2-year colleges can get a great return from AI investment.
International Recruitment
The text is truly an international medium, and 24/7 access is a must for recruiting students from far and wide.
Student Affairs
AI gives teams capacity to proactively reach students who wouldn't raise their hands when they need help.
Visitor Services
Students have 1,001 questions about visiting campus, and AI can help your teams manage that workload.
Gecko integrates with HigherEd's most-used CRMs
Questions you should be asking about Gecko's approach to texting
Enough with the marketing speak. Here's the straight-talking answers to the questions our prospective partners often have for us.
Firstly, many schools can't handle when students want to reply to texts (at scale). Their systems are constructed around getting texts sent, not for handling two-way conversations. So they blast out texts that discourage responses, then struggle when students reply back in any case. Because there's no support from their texting tech stack, this places stress on teams. With Gecko, these responses are handled for you by AI, meaning you can comfortably ramp up your texting volume — driving more action from your students — without worrying about increasing your team's workload.
Secondly, many texting texting tools are siloed from the rest of your tech stack. This has two major drawbacks. The first is that your texting tool probably has no concept of when an action has been taken by a student (they've done what you've asked — yay!) so you keep sending them (now irrelevant) messages. The second drawback is that data never makes it to your CRM (or whichever system you use as your single source of truth), so it's impossible to understand the role texting plays in driving students to take action. Gecko solves both of these problems.
Firstly, AI works 24/7/265 and never takes a break. It handles hundred of concurrent conversations too, so your capacity to converse with students is massively increased by leveraging AI. And when you have increased capacity, it allows you to proactively engage students rather than waiting for them to come to you (remembering that a large percentage won't raise their hand for help).
Secondly, AI is like merging all the smartest brains in your team into a single person. Someone on your team will know the answer to pretty much every question a student could ask. Gecko's AI becomes that someone.
It's a fact that sometimes we just want to speak to a real human being. We've all experienced it in our personal lives when dealing with our cell phone provider or asking an obscure question to an online store. Gecko's platform was built to accommodate human-to-human interaction at scale. Our AI handles the majority of conversations in their entirety, but we have intelligent fallbacks to ensure that student questions are routed and queued for the appropriate team members to handle when they are available.
Firstly, teams are able to help more students, more frequently, around more granular topics. AI can help students overcome challenges with processes that are complex, but temporary (like submitting transcripts or uploading vaccination documentation or understanding how to solve problems with their accommodation). The number of issues students could potentially face is vast, and AI can help teams support students to overcome more of these issues proactively.
Secondly, teams can work on higher value tasks, where their expertise and personality are particularly beneficial. Teams won't have to answer the same questions over and over again, and they won't have to carve out mental brain-space to answer a query that a machine could handle. And it's great to know that you'll be coming into the office on Monday to a (mostly) empty inbox, rather than dreading the multi-hour catch-up from all the student messages received over the weekend.
Given your newfound ability to proactively reach out to students with an offer of assistance, they'll find that you "appear" for them when they need you, as if by magic. They'll be completing the tasks you require of them at a greater rate, and with lower levels of anxiety.
Students will also be able to reach out to you on their own schedule, day or night, and expect a response quickly, without having to wait until the next day — or fretting whether they'll even receive a response at all. And as the student becomes more comfortable conversing with your AI, they'll reflect with happiness on their decision to study with such a modern, forward-thinking institution. :-)
So we heard you don’t want yet another siloed tool
Be empowered to select the best tool for the job, without sacrificing the ability to track your datapoints across the rest of your EdTech stack.
Gecko plays nice with EdTech's finest
Gecko has battle-tested integrations with the tools you use every day, meaning your teams never have to worry about whether they have full visibility of all your student touchpoints.
Slate
Leverage Gecko's AI to communicate back-and-forth with students, then sync all those conversations directly to the Slate activity matrix, automatically.
Salesforce
We'll pipe all of your text message conversations to the Salesforce activity timeline in real-time, 24/7.
Ellucian
Gecko's integration with the Ellucian suite of products means you can level-up your texting game without changing up your existing (no doubt "baked in") tech stack.
Microsoft
Gecko's integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives your team confidence that what they're seeing in D365 is the full conversation history with your students.
How does the Gecko approach stack up?
We know Gecko isn't only way to text students. So let's look at our offering when compared with your other options.
"The tech looks cool, but what's it like working with the Gecko clan?"
You might have been in the game long enough to experience tech companies that over-promise then under-deliver. Gecko's different, and we know the people behind the tech are just as critical to your success.
Support that never leaves you hanging
With a chat widget built directly into our user interface, our Customer Success team are only ever a few clicks away. Every user has full access to our support channel, with sub-5 minute response times on average, as well as a full library of support documentation. Plus, we understand that a team's training needs evolves as their product usage becomes more sophisticated, so we provide ongoing opportunities to upskill your staff.
Onboarding that sets you up for success from day one
New tech can be daunting for teams, especially when you're on the clock and don't have the time muddle your way through on your own. Our dedicated implementation team can get you operational in one week. We know that implementation fatigue is real, but with Gecko you'll be getting a bang for your buck faster than it takes for you to even hear back from other EdTech vendors (not mentioning any names). :-)
Data integrations that never have you doubting your numbers
With over a decade of integrating with EdTech vendors, and a dedicated internal team managing those connections, we know how the importance of a robust data integration. If your team can't rely on having accurate (and complete) data within their CRM their job becomes 10 times harder, so we invest heavily in maintaining strong technical relationships with EdTech's top vendors.
Product innovation that keeps you ahead of the curve
The Gecko Product Management team maintain a dedicated system for gathering feedback, and roll-out product updates on a monthly basis. The team also aim to get on-campus with our partners as often as possible, to really get under the skin of how their teams work, and it's often these insights that influence our product roadmaps.
OK, what else does Gecko's texting platform have under the hood?
Text anyway you like
There's a bunch of ways to send texts with Gecko (including as part of campaign or in response to trigger events like form submissions or event registrations) and each way is backed-up by our AI engine, empowering your team to respond to student messages on autopilot.
Set goals for maximum impact
Goals bring focus to your text campaigns, and help with reporting. And when your students complete their goal, you can automatically un-enroll them from the campaign, so that they don't receive additional — and unwanted — text messages.
Humans + AI = 🚀
Combining AI with input from your counselors (where requested) is the perfect combo. The tech does the heavy lifting, freeing your team to focus on where they truly add value.
Department-specific
Gecko's AI can be trained on any topic, and our data and access siloing means that teams can focus on their own campaigns without worrying about crossing swords with cross-departmental colleagues.
Auto-updating
AI gets smarter every day, learning more about your school, your systems and the questions your students ask you. It's like the A* employee that goes from strength to strength.
Multilingual
Gecko can be trained to support multiple languages, giving you additional leverage from every piece of training material.
Runs 24/7/365
AI never sleeps, giving students support when they need them most, and freeing your staff from an overflowing inbox every morning.
Minimal upkeep
AI does need to be maintained, but we've provided tools and systems to minimize the time spent on upkeep.
CRM integrations
Your data is less valuable if it's disconnected from your other systems, so Gecko keeps everything in sync automatically.
Keen to learn how Gecko's approach to texting could help you?
Schedule a 30-minute call with our team. We’ll show you how our technology works, understand your current processes and help you decide on a suitable solution.