Enhance your business using technology

Note: Our guest blogger today is Jo-Ann Beserra.  She is an independent consultant in Boulder, Colorado. Operating an office is no easy task. Jo-Ann gives you tips on managing your office.

As an educational consultant, the technology options available to enhance my business are numerous. To simplify, I look at my business from two perspectives and keep one key center stone product as home base for each view.

My first perspective is my front office, or the customer view.  The center stone for my front office is my website. A website can be much more than an online brochure. I use my website for marketing campaigns, announcements, blogs or newsletters, and I track who is reading them. I maintain contact with prospective and current clients through my website. I share resources and provide information. My website also links in other tools that I select to use, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

My second perspective is my back office, and the tool I use to run my business, is Mycca, which offers such a large breadth of functions that play nicely with other pieces of technology. Here are the top 7 ways that Mycca integrates other tools:

1.      Scheduled student meetings are added to my personal iCal calendar so I have both my work and personal calendars in one view.

2.      Emails sent to students are stored on the student’s record and can be recorded as a session for payment.

3.      Branded reports are created instantly for print, storage or email. The professional look of these reports is very impressive.

4.      Students can view videos of colleges, which is often their preferred method of research.

5.      Links to other outside college resources such as test registration, reviews, college websites and tools are readily available in the right place.

6.      Special tools for organizing essays and scholarships can be accessed from within Mycca, without separate accounts.

7.      And my very favorite is that MyCCA is accessed from my website, so clients pass through my website and prospects see that I have special tool.  This links my back office to my front office.

 Comment:  See information about different features of mycca.net Jo-Ann mentions on the mycca website under Features.  You can also check in the HELP section for details about these and other features of mycca.

Student Motivation- The Magic Elixir

As students are launching back into a new school year, parents and college advisors both have the same question in mind, "How do I motivate my child?"  This is a question we receive often in connection to the student portal:
-How do I get my students to use the student portal?
-They have Naviance where they have to add information, how do I encourage them to add it to the student portal?
-If students keep information in the common app, will students feel keeping information in the student portal is redundant?

Over the past 18 months of working closely with students using the student portal, I have developed some tips for encouraging teens to use the student portal.

1. Make "go to the student portal" your mantra.  The more students know you are expecting them to use the student portal, the more they will do so.  Studies show students rise to the expectations others have of them. If you have a consistent message, "Use the portal", they will respond to that message.

2. Direct students to the student portal to retrieve information you have left for them there.  Don't print a college list and give them; put your comments in the shared comments section of their college list and send them to the student portal to look at their list. If students want to see their testing schedule, send them to the student portal to get it.

3.  Show students how the student portal benefits them.  Putting test scores in mycca.net and then notifying you the scores are there saves Suzie time and energy in emailing you back and forth. Doing research using college website links in mycca.net is faster than doing all their searching on google.  As students use the student portal, they see how it empowers them. Teach them how to set up their own college application plans.

4.  Use the Competitive Student Quotient (CSQ) gauges to motivate students and parents. Student love to view where they are in comparison to other students.  Parents love the CSQ gauges as well. CSQ gauges are exclusive to mycca.net.

5.  Put the student portal upkeep into each week's assignment. Students are used to having deadlines and assignments. Utilize the student portal as part of that pattern.

As you work with your students, try some of these tips. As you build this process, you will be empowering and engaging your students in a very dynamic college planning process.  Tell us what you have tried, and how has it worked?