Success Story
How Central and Western AHEC Boosted Student Evaluation Responses by Nearly 70% with SimpleTexting
Overview
Company: A health careers pipeline program, part of the Michigan AHEC network and hosted by Central Michigan University's College of Medicine, that introduces middle and high school students to health professions.
The Central and Western Area Health Education Center (AHEC), hosted by Central Michigan University’s College of Medicine, helps middle and high school students explore careers in health care through mentorship and hands-on programs. Jayme Martin runs program communications with a small team: she and a colleague are responsible for keeping students, parents, and mentors on track across several program sessions running at once. With high school students, she says, the best channel is the one already in their pocket.
The Challenge: Reaching High Schoolers Where They Actually Look
AHEC’s programs run for multiple weeks, with student participants, their parents, and program mentors all needing timely information. The team needed a way to:
- Reach students instantly with session reminders, since no-shows cost the program money in materials and planning
- Collect evaluation feedback from students without chasing each one
- Communicate with separate groups of students, parents, and mentors
- Avoid texting people one at a time in the middle of programming
Texting has become a thing, and people will peruse their text messages much more often than they will an email anymore, just because of that instantaneous notification. Plus, it’s that constant reminder — that ding, that notification number on their phone.
The Solution: Scheduled Reminders, Two-Way Replies, and Easy Contact Imports
Jayme chose SimpleTexting because texting is where high school students already are, and because it lets them reply. Students can answer a reminder, tell the team they can’t make a session, or tap a link to complete a program evaluation. She and her colleague use scheduled texts to preset reminders and notifications for an entire program in a single afternoon, and two-way messaging to hear back from students.
Contact management is another favorite. Jayme imports student and parent lists directly from Excel, sorts them into contact groups, and manages them from her computer or the mobile app.
It costs us money to run the program — the materials and the makeup of it. So if students get a reminder and can notify us ahead of time, or even complete an evaluation through a link we send, it was kind of a no-brainer. With SimpleTexting, it has been a real game changer, especially for the response numbers we’re getting from our students and participants.
Importing from Excel is probably one of my favorite things. I can make easy identifiers, click on which contact group to use, and then just drag and drop. I’m able to create and organize these lists easily, even from my phone, because I have the app as well.
It’s simple because you’re flashing a quick three- to four-liner on a phone screen, and people can just look at it.
The Results: Half the Texting Time and Nearly 70% More Evaluation Responses
Jayme estimates that SimpleTexting has made a measurable difference in both staff time and student engagement:
- ~50% time savings – Texting students, parents, and mentors as groups instead of individually frees up time, especially in the middle of programming.
- ~50% more responses to reminders – Students respond more often to attendance and homework reminders sent by text.
- Nearly 70% more evaluation responses – Putting the evaluation link directly in the text lets students respond in a tap, improving feedback and data reporting.
- Programs planned in an afternoon – Reminders for multi-week programs are scheduled in advance, so the team isn’t sending them by hand each week.
I’d say we save about 50% of our time, because I’m not texting parents, mentors, and student participants individually. And I’ve had almost a 70% increase in response rate for evaluations, because we can pop that evaluation link right in there and a student can just click it to respond. It increases our engagement, our feedback, and our evaluation information.
Considering we are one-man bands for a lot of our group planning, having this tool be such a time saver is huge. My colleague and I rely on it heavily.
What’s Next for Central and Western AHEC
Jayme’s advice to other organizations: the payoff depends on your audience, but for high school students, quick links for evaluations and reminders land well. She also recommends taking time to learn the list-import workflow up front.
Make sure you’re knowledgeable about Excel and the integrated systems so you can build your reports and lists, and maybe do a tutorial or two. For us, at first, it was almost a learning experience every time to remember how to create the lists we needed to upload and import. I’d definitely play with the system a little bit, because the drag-and-drop import is so helpful, but you have to understand the system first before you make that file to create your contact groups.
