Next Practices How an IR-Led Outreach Experiment Boosted Student Persistence at Greenville Technical College
When a simple check-in email leads to a 77 percent increase in student persistence, it’s clear something powerful is happening. At Greenville Technical College, data is more than numbers on a dashboard. It’s a way to connect, support, and transform student outcomes. What started as a pilot outreach project by a team of data analysts quickly became a catalyst for campus-wide change.
In this episode, Kevin McMindes shares how his team used predictive analytics and personalized outreach to make a real difference. From identifying students most in need of support to tracking the impact of advising appointments, Kevin explains how they turned insight into action and why even small efforts done with care can move the needle in a big way.
You’ll hear how one advising appointment per student became a game-changing goal, how initiative analysis revealed which programs delivered the greatest return, and how empathy combined with data can drive meaningful and lasting impact. If you're looking for practical ways to support students at scale without losing the human touch, this episode will give you a roadmap.
Show Notes:
[03:04] Greenville Technical College is one of 16 technical colleges in South Carolina. They serve 10,000 to 12,000 students per term. It's their mission to empower and impact student's lives.
[03:49] Kevin is Assistant Director of Analytics.
[04:33] We learn about challenges like persistence rate and retention rate.
[05:12] They adopted the four disciplines of execution.
[06:12] They had a goal to reach out to students who were in the lower persistence rate.
[07:05] They reached out to their students and tracked the results. When they charged it out they realized they were actually moving a lot of students.
[07:25] By the end of the fall, they had moved 219 students.
[08:23] The actual numbers were higher than their predictions. They went from a 32.5% predicted persistence to 58% actual persistence.
[11:13] There were a number of students who needed to be connected with resources.
[13:17] After the study, people wanted training and a lot of it was about convincing them that this is going to make their lives easier.
[13:35] A lot of students can be reached out to with a single email.
[14:40] They decided to set a goal to have each student have an advising appointment. They used the Inspire platform and pulled the data and put it in a dashboard to drill down.
[15:38] They accomplished 44% of their goal and then 109%.
[16:10] With that success, they started focusing on what's really good for students.
[17:16] Kevin shares his analysis strategy using the Civitas platform.
[19:40] Kevin shares how advising is structured at Greenville Tech.
[21:09] With the 40x results they've had, a lot of people are interested in using the predictive analytics platform.
[22:20] Being able to segment the students is key.
[24:48] As part of the Strategic Data Project that was operated out of the Harvard Center for Education Policy and Research, Kevin was able to look at success initiatives and analyze them.
[26:12] They also discovered Brainfuse Online Tutoring was effective and cheap.
[27:28] The idea of reaching out to scholarship recipients and asking how it's going.
[31:55] The importance of having a renewed focus on an advising appointment for the student. It's important for students to have a personal connection with somebody on campus.
[36:32] It's so helpful to be able to personalize messages even when they're sent out at scale.
[38:15] Individuals can make a difference.
Links and Resources:
Kevin McMindes - Greenville Technical College