New in EdSights Retain: An interactive home for institutional insights

Student voice is central for student success – both for finding individual students who need support, and for understanding what's shaping persistence at the institutional level. The second piece is where many institutions struggle most, with strategic planning still largely running on lagging data like last semester's survey or last year's withdrawal rates.

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We’ve just launched two new features to change that. For the first time in higher ed, student success leaders can access continuously updated, representative student feedback, summarized for clear action – meaning far less time between when leaders learn of a problem and when they can solve it.

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The new Insights Hub makes spotting trends easy

In EdSights Retain, partners can now access the Insights Hub, an interactive view built specifically for finding trends, understanding subgroup risk, and sharing what you're seeing with leadership.

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What you can do:

• See which populations are having the biggest challenges, flagged proactively before they become a withdrawal problem

• Dig into a specific group to understand their barriers and how their experience compares to peers, built on real-time qualitative and quantitative data

• Read AI-summarized themes to digest students’ written feedback, no data analyst needed. See top reasons students are returning, unsure, or leaving to inform overall retention strategy.

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Campaign reporting draws out specific feedback at a glance

You've always been able to see how many students responded to a campaign. Now you can see what they said, without diving into piles of unstructured feedback.

With updated campaign reporting, one click now opens a full response breakdown by question. For open-ended questions, the AI reads the responses and pulls out the key themes, right alongside the numbers.

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Making a difference for our partners  

In just the first few weeks, we’ve already heard strong feedback from partner institutions about how they’re using these new insights. 

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Specific subdriver analysis

Many leaders find particular value in the breakdown of trends by persistence subdriver. One Chief Student Affairs Officer shared that she had been using her school’s annual survey to ask a single question about belonging that she could include in leadership reports – and now she can see that data updated in real time.

‍"The fact that you have a sense of belonging (on here) is super helpful. One of the KPIs in our student success plan is a sense of belonging – this really helps.” 

The breakdown is also valuable for understanding feedback from specific campaigns, particularly the AI summary. One leader shared:

‍“So this is amazing. [Previously] what I would do is I would pull it out, I would feed it into AI, I would say this is what we asked, tell me the themes... this [summary]  is so great.”

Finally, a Dean of Students called out that this data supports her own research in mapping persistence to subdrivers. “

This came at such a good point in time…those are the things that link into belonging and persistence. So dividing those into the different categories... I'm going to have so much fun with this.” 

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Communication with leadership

Another partner shared that this was particularly valuable in sharing data with leadership to inform higher-level strategy and reporting.

‍“This is really good... very helpful and easy just to share the dashboard with leadership if they had questions or wanted to see high level metrics.”

‍Another leader validated this sentiment, sharing:

‍“A lot of times at least our president and a lot of leaders ask for a dashboard like [this]. This is just such a great, fast way to get a dashboard...  And then it's quick to show what we're measuring too ... by category [...] I'm excited about this to be able to pull it up at any time.”

Reporting and strategy can support board-level conversations too. As another partner shared,

‍“We've got a board meeting next month, so that will be good to pull some of those graphics and information and show how we're able to talk with some of these students earlier...we'll let the board know what we're spending our money on and why we're doing that.”

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Both updates are live now in EdSights Retain. If you want to see how student voice intelligence can support your own retention strategy, learn more and request a demo.