Graduation Alliance was founded in 2007 to help the more than five million high school-aged youth and 31 million adults who don’t have a high school diploma. Partnering with state agencies and local school districts in 12 states, Graduation Alliance provides support, tutors and academic advisors to create pathways for students to graduate.
The Challenge
According to research,* people who don’t finish high school statistically make $36,424 less than college graduates; are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than someone with a bachelor’s degree; have a higher incarceration rate compared to college graduates; and on average, cost U.S. taxpayers $292,000 over their lifetime.
To help counter these statistics, Graduation Alliance recruits and enrolls high school dropouts into their programs to get them on a pathway to high school graduation and beyond. First, Graduation Alliance obtains lists of people who have dropped out of high school from its state agency and school district partners and the enrollment team reaches out to those students via multiple points of contact, including phone, text, mail and social media. Once contact has been made and students have enrolled in the program, the academic team of advisors and coaches work one-on-one with the students.
“Between both teams, we have between 200 and 250 representatives interacting with our students and possibly their parents, if they are under 18 years of age,” Rachel McBane, Director of Academic Operations at Graduation Alliance, said. “That represents a lot of touchpoints, and we want to ensure our students’ experience is the best it can be. We lacked a way to effectively obtain that information.”
Along with measuring student satisfaction, the company also needs to demonstrate to its partners that students and their parents find value from the program. “This is a key component of our overall growth, so we needed to find a tool that would help us easily showcase that information,” said Joanna Camburn, Chief Marketing Officer at Graduation Alliance.
In 2022, Graduation Alliance will help 5,000 students get a high school diploma, which will save taxpayers $1.45 billion. For every 100 students the company helps, U.S. taxpayers save $29.2 million.
The Solution
Upon hearing about Autopilot Reviews, Graduation Alliance piloted the tool with one student-facing team during August and September of 2021. “This allowed us to test the use case of the platform, both from a data perspective and from an individual rep and coaching perspective,” McBane said. “We liked what we were learning from the platform, so we rolled it out with all teams of student-facing reps on November 1, 2021.”
Implementation and training were easy and included communication on the benefits of using Autopilot Reviews and how feedback would be generated. After a coach speaks with a student or their parent, Autopilot Reviews sends a quick survey consisting of four questions.
“The first question asks our students to rate the experience they had on their most recent call on a scale of 1-100, then we ask them the likelihood of recommending our program to others on a scale from 1-10,” McBane said. “The third question asks what the student specifically found helpful from their last call, and the final question is open-ended, which allows the student to share ways we can improve.”
Because coaches may speak with their students multiple times a week, the company implemented a seven-day black out period after a survey is sent to a student or their parent, so they don’t get inundated with feedback requests.
Graduation Alliance sends approximately 15,000 surveys each month, and gets 2,000 back, representing a 13% response rate. McBane monitors the responses and looks at the results daily, as does the company’s CEO. “Rather than read the New York Times, he reads the Autopilot Reviews Digest each morning,” she said.
The Results
Before using Autopilot Reviews, Graduation Alliance had noway of gathering insight from its students about their experience with the program.
“We didn’t have a tool that enabled us to continuously survey our students and get a snapshot of how we are doing,” said Camburn. “We had no way of knowing if we were in fact providing the level of support we thought we were. Autopilot Reviews changed that.”
She continued, “With the data from Autopilot Reviews, we see we have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 82. We are thrilled with this because the industry average is 64, and the data tells us our process is working and we are meeting our mission of providing the best support to help students graduate high school.”
Graduation Alliance also uses the feedback to coach its student-facing employees, onboard new employees and continuously improve its processes.
Team members can see each other’s positive results and show their support by liking and commenting on the positive surveys. Any low scores are kept private with the coach and are used solely for coaching purposes.
“The support we provide our students is the largest component of what we do, so it’s imperative we know they are happy and
satisfied with us,” Camburn said. “We are now able to collect our users’ voice at scale and digest the data in a useful and meaningful way. This ultimately helps us recruit even more people into our programs and on the pathway to high school graduation. That’s powerful.”
To see what Autopilot Reviews can do for your customer-facing team, request a demo today!
*source: Frontline’s Dropout Nation
