Partnering for Success

By developing deep partnerships with institutions and encouraging collaboration on shared services, we create a network effect where a single institution's success yields collective benefits for many.

Success

Ed Advancement identifies opportunities

Ed Advancement identifies opportunities for and supports significant investments in the operational and technical framework of our partner institutions by funding infrastructure improvements that are often cost prohibitive due to historic and systemic underfunding. We focus our efforts on helping to enhance processes in enrollment, student success, fundraising, and general operations.

We provide strategic, operational solutions that are both immediately employable, and financially and logistically sustainable for our partners. Our intention is for implemented solutions to drive growth (and/or reduce costs) ensuring institutions can maintain solutions within their operating budget over the long term. Whenever possible, we facilitate collaboration on shared services to minimize ongoing costs and leverage economies of scale.

See Our University Partners

Front of Grambling State University - Tiger Mascot Statue

Big Ideas

Bringing big ideas and solutions together for student success

Ed Advancement provides operations and technology driven solutions to HBCUs to help them better serve their students. These solutions increase enrollment, retention rates, and lead to higher graduation rates.

Our three-tiered approach includes:

Partnering with individual HBCUs on a multi-year basis to transform and strengthen their operational infrastructure.
Providing shared services across schools to minimize ongoing costs and leverage economies of scale to improve student and institutional outcomes.
Building an HBCU community of practice with resources, such as playbooks and toolkits, that extends to all HBCUs and the students that they serve.

Our Solutions Provide Proven Results

Tailored Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions

Following a thorough discovery process and series of conversations with HBCU leaders, Ed Advancement developed a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) specifically tailored to address gaps in operations, technology and processes—from recruitment through alumni giving—that our partner HBCUs identified as priorities.

Increase Community Awareness with Raftr

Ed Advancement offered our partner institutions the opportunity to pilot a digital engagement platform designed to increase awareness of campus resources and foster a sense of belonging provided by Raftr. The campus-branded mobile platform simplifies message delivery to students and families in a way that is meaningful, collaborative, and social. Since launching the admitted student and parent/family solutions among seven pilot schools, over 1,000 student users have adopted the tool (more than two times higher adoption rates than Raftr university partners typically experience) and over 3,000 chat messages have been exchanged (more than ten times the chat messages that Raftr school partners typically experience).

24/7 Student Support Chatbot / SMS messaging

With three partner HBCUs, Ed Advancement piloted a managed service AI chatbot and SMS messaging service, provided by Mainstay, which provides students 24/7 support, saving hundreds of staff hours and getting critical information to students faster, improving the enrollment process — and the overall student experience. In the first quarter of using Mainstay’s tool, our three pilot institutions saved over 300 hours on average and their bots handled over 50,000 messages. We will extend the solution to ten additional institutions in the network in the coming year.

FAFSA College Support Strategy

Through their FAFSA College Support Strategy, the Department of Education is providing support to under-resourced higher education institutions as they work to assemble student financial aid packages amid the delayed rollout of Better FAFSA. Ed Advancement is one of the nonprofit partners tapped to support this endeavor. Our team's expertise in financial aid, higher ed operations, and enrollment management enables us to help prepare institutions to award aid on a compressed timeline. We provide training and surge support, including supporting institutions to make upgrades to optimize student information systems and streamline the import of FAFSA data while decreasing future risk. This work builds on support we are already providing for our existing partners.

HBCUs Committed

Both public and private committed to our efforts

Projects Launched

Focused on infrastructure, technology, and operations

HBCU students

HBCU students served by our partners (nearly half of all HBCU current undergraduates)