This year, as ERI partners with Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) to refresh its website and strengthen its digital strategy, two key collaborators have been at the center of the work: ERI’s Slate Solutions Architect, Jackie Ose, and MCLA’s Assistant Director of Admission Operations, Justin O’Connor.
Together, they’ve navigated everything from personalized onboarding experiences to streamlined workflows, bringing shared strategy, technical insight, and a spirit of collaboration to each project. In this Q&A led by Jackie, Justin reflects on project successes, the power of interdisciplinary teamwork, and what’s inspiring him as MCLA continues to evolve its Slate ecosystem.
ERI Deliver Campaign:
Q: This summer, MCLA ran a focused ERI Deliver email campaign for inquiries, incomplete applicants, and deposited students. From your perspective as Slate Captain, what were some of the biggest successes or lessons learned from that project?
A: The work with our deposited students is the experience that stands out the most here. We started work with ERI after the rollout of a new onboarding portal and checklist, so I felt like we had reached a high-point with the ease- of-access and personalization we were bringing to the students. I admit I went into the process thinking, “well, if these guys can just get them into the new portal, the students can take it from there,” but Jackie and Nate really brought us to the next level. Jackie was creating to-do lists for these students right in the mailings where every item was personalized with liquid markup, and Nate wrote some elegantly simple content that got students engaged and linked them directly to their to-do items. This was humbling: When I started combing our deposited student timelines as the season winded down, I realized that most students completed their checklist by engaging with ERI’s messages than by visiting their portals! I learned that with a little effort, you can always add a few more touches that make an experience a little more personal and resonant with a student.
Teamwork & Impact:
Q: From your perspective, how did the collaboration between our teams contribute to the success of the ERI Deliver campaign? Is there anything that stood out to you about the process or the partnership?
A: Not to be too “Liberal Arts” but I loved that ERI brought an interdisciplinary approach to the planning process. As my institution’s Slate person, oftentimes I only come in at the end of the communications workflow: someone sends me copy, a CTA, and a target population, and it’s my job to put it together and send it out. When working with ERI, both the Slate specialist and the writer were in the room with me for every meeting, along with a rep from our First-Year Programs team and anyone else we wanted to loop in. We all got to respond to each other and build these communications in a natural, conversational way, and the result were messages that supported the best aspects of each of our areas.
Slate Wishlist:
Q: If you could wave a magic wand and instantly set up or deploy any new features or tools in Slate, what would be on your wishlist for MCLA?
A: Moving away from the deliver tab—reports! With the close of one cycle and the start of another, it bugs me that I am spending hours refining custom reports when it takes me just minutes to work up a query with the same data. I am trying to make things evergreen, but please reduce the number of clicks it takes to change section headers and column titles! Let me drag the columns to set the width!
Slate Summit Takeaways:
Q: You attended the Slate Summit 2025 in Las Vegas. What were your top two takeaways, ideas, or inspirations from the sessions and networking there?
A: I am a one-person team, so I went to anything that highlighted automation or streamlining processes. I think content blocks are going to be the thing that I lean into the most this year—Loyola’s presentation on using a single mailing as two years of different emails by filtering for different content blocks was probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen in Slate in all my time with it. We are already working towards using content blocks to send important, personalized but detailed financial aid follow-up out to our applicants this year. The other highlight for me was Whitworth’s presentation on their enrollment portal: I did get a few ideas to make our portal work a little better, but most valuable was seeing how you other institutions are leveraging Slate to build partnerships between different offices across campus that might be used to working in their own bubbles. (They also gave me a ring pop.)
Favorite Slate Tip or Trick:
Q: What’s your go-to tip, trick, or workflow in Slate that you think more people should know about?
A: I’m not sure if this is widely known, but here’s something I learned just recently that is already saving me a ton of time: When joining to a form or event to a person query, don’t join to the specific event—join to its template instead, and then filter your join by the form date and time. This way, if you ever need to copy out your query and link a different event, you wont need to start from scratch: Just change the date in the join and everything will update without issue.
I am also a big fan of appending URLs to pre-fill and personalize forms when I am linking to them in an email: If you are creative with your conditional logic and add a few tags to your URL, you can work up a few links to add to your email that will do most of the work for the student with just one click—all they’ll need to do is submit the form. (It helps to make your links into pretty buttons too if you’re someone who likes to play around in Canva.) This is huge when trying to boost engagement on things like event surveys and reply forms.
Bonus — The Slate “Wow” Factor:
Q: What’s a moment in your Slate journey that made you think, “Okay, this is actually pretty cool”?
A: I started at MCLA before Slate implementation, so it’s been amazing to see many processes that used to happen by hand (or were thought impossible) become projects that I can start and finish before lunchtime. For a long time, we had wanted to calculate cumulative GPAs to help with admission decisions for transfer students that attended multiple institutions. We were told that Banner couldn’t do it and that “maybe that’s something you can build in excel” and put in manually. One day I had some free time, and after learning one function in JavaScript and pouring a cup of coffee, I had a reader review form that would not only calculate a cumulative GPA, but check against the admission standards and tell a counselor if the student was admissible. My favorite about Slate is that it’s a platform where the only limits to what you can accomplish is how much time you have available to mess around and experiment (in a test environment of course.) Slate gets me as a DIYer.
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