St. Cloud State joined EAB's Navigate platform (formerly Student Success Collaborative - SSC) to improve campus engagement, retention, and graduation rates by empowering faculty and staff to better support all of our students.

In particular, we recognize that we need to identify and engage at-risk students before their time to degree is significantly increased, before they can no longer afford to attend, and before they decide to leave St. Cloud State because of any situation we could have helped them resolve. Improving our communication strategies and expanding our use of predictive analytics will help ensure that students who enroll at St. Cloud State stay enrolled, make timely progress toward a degree, and graduate with a strong sense of purpose.

While each student will ultimately define what success means for him or her, we have the responsibility to do everything we can to make sure that they all have the opportunity to reach their personal, academic, and professional goals.

Finally, we want to emphasize that we have partnered closely with the Student Government Association in bringing Navigate to our campus, and students have played an integral role in the implementation process. They recognize the potential for this platform to promote our students’ success, and we take the responsibility of this partnership very seriously.

• Increase retention
• Improve four- and six-year graduation rates
• Reduce overall time to degree
• Reduce and ultimately eliminate the retention and graduation gap for students of color and students from low-income backgrounds
• Provide targeted, timely outreach to encourage students to engage more effectively with academic advising, support services, and the campus community
• Improve communication among campus community members to support student success
• Streamline processes for advisors by incorporating course history, advising notes, placement test scores, registration codes, and a link to u.Achieve (DARS) from a student's profile 

• Improving how we communicate with our students by providing email and texting options that let us reach out to individual students and targeted groups to provide actionable information. We know that this type of proactive outreach has a direct and positive impact on student success, and Navigate offers us the tools we need to do it consistently and well.
• Improving how we communicate with each other about our students. With one click, you’ll be able to see the interactions your student has had with other professionals on campus and contact additional team members who can provide necessary support.

• Identifying undergraduate students at risk for not reaching their goals before problems become insurmountable, which allows us to connect students to resources they need in time to make a difference.
• Providing data that support useful, purpose-driven conversations between students and their support network about the progress they’re making toward their degree.
• Offering sophisticated search options that allow individual users to quickly and easily obtain actionable information about targeted groups of students that would previously have required queries from Analytics & Institutional Research (AIR).

• Enabling staff to spend more time providing direct student support and faculty on teaching, mentoring, and research by simplifying administrative processes (e.g., writing reports and notes, scheduling appointments, communicating with students, and preparing for meeting with students).
• Although Navigate is not a CRM (constituent relationship management) system, it does allow users to see communications sent from multiple departments. 
• Through our use of Navigate we are working to reduce the number of systems needed in advising settings. Much of the information folks previously sought from ISRS is now included in the platform, including registration codes, course schedules, and previous term performance. In January 2020, we included a direct link to uAchieve from Navigate that allows advisors to access degree audits. 

The Educational Advisory Board (EAB) is a research and consulting company that is a leader in providing colleges and universities with data analytics and communication platforms that support student success. The Navigate platform is one of their key projects.

Training on the platform is available through our small group sessions, and can also be arranged for individuals or departments interested in a training. Typical sessions last 30 minutes for an overview of platform features. Specific trainings on the campaign feature (which allows students to book appointments with you online within the day, time parameters you set) are offered each October and February to coincide with timely registration initiatives and the registration matrix. 

Individual training sessions can be requested by emailing ssc_help@stcloudstate.edu with your available dates/times. Your assigned trainer will reach out to confirm your meeting. 

We encourage users to explore the Training Handouts available. Handouts include step-by-step instructions with screen shots of our most common platform functions, including: 

• Searching for a Student
• Contacting Students 
• Responding to Progress Report Campaigns (early alerts)
• Writing Advising Appointment Reports 
• Syncing your Calendar with Navigate
• Creating an Appointment Campaign (allowing students to schedule appointments online)