That answer helps only if you can check what stands behind it. Compliance rests on the agreement you sign and on the system’s settings, so your best step is to ask each vendor the same questions and keep their answers on file.

Key takeaways

• FERPA-compliant software lets your campus stay within FERPA, because the vendor acts as a school official under your control and you limit who sees each record.
• FERPA’s duties fall on your campus, so a vendor’s “FERPA compliant” label is where your questions begin.
• Ask about the agreement before the features, because the agreement is what puts a vendor under your control.
• FERPA itself sets no breach notification requirement, so the notice terms have to come from your contract and your state’s law.

What does FERPA compliance mean for software?

FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, is the federal law that protects student education records. It gives students the right to see their records, to ask for corrections and to have some say in who else sees them. At a college these rights belong to the student, whatever their age.

FERPA’s duties fall on schools that receive funds from U.S. Department of Education programs, not on software companies, and the Department’s guidance on online educational services says it expects schools to comply. No software is compliant on its own, then. When a vendor calls its product FERPA compliant, the claim to check is that your campus can use it within the law. That holds when the vendor can act as a school official under your control and the system lets you limit who sees each record. The school official part rests on four conditions, set out below, and one of them sits in your own annual notice. If FERPA is part of a wider compliance effort for you, our guide to building a higher education compliance program covers the other areas.

Education records

Under FERPA, education records are records directly related to a student and kept by your campus or by a company or person working for it, in any format. The visit logs, appointments, referrals and session notes your center keeps about named students are usually education records, including when a vendor’s system holds them. One narrow exception covers a note that only its author ever sees, kept as a memory aid. A note saved in a shared system does not qualify, because other people can open it.

The school official exception

As a general rule, your campus needs a student’s written consent before it shares information from their records that identifies them. Software vendors usually receive records under the exception for school officials instead. The Department’s explanation of who counts as a school official sets four conditions for an outside company:

• It performs a service your campus would otherwise use its own staff for.
• It is under your campus’s direct control in how it uses and keeps the records.
• It uses the records only for the purpose they were shared for and does not pass them on.
• It meets the definition of a school official in your annual FERPA notification, the notice of rights your campus publishes each year.

FERPA does not require a written agreement for direct control, but the Department notes that schools usually set it up through a signed contract or through terms of service with the right protections. That is why the contract is the first thing to check.

Directory information, such as name, email address and dates of attendance, is a second route, because a campus can share it after public notice. The Department warns that this route may not work well for vendor accounts, because students who opt out cannot be included.

Contract questions to ask a vendor

Start with the contract, because the school official conditions depend on what it says. Send these questions to each vendor in writing:

• Does the contract or the terms of service make you a school official under our direct control?
• Will you use our students’ data only to provide the service, with no selling and no marketing?
• Which other companies handle our data, and will you tell us before that list changes?
• Can you change the terms without our consent?
• How quickly will you tell us about a breach, and what will you do about it?
• When the contract ends, how do we export our data, and when do you delete it, backups included?

What a good answer looks like

A strong reply names the vendor as a school official and limits its use of student data to running the service. The Department’s model terms of service checklist treats a promise not to market to students as good practice and flags any clause that allows such marketing. The same checklist says a promise to tell you about changes to the terms is good, and a promise not to change them without your consent is better.

The other companies in that list, often called subprocessors, are the hosting, email, text message and AI providers behind the service. You cannot control records that move to a company you have never heard of, so the list and notice of changes belong in the agreement.

Breach notice and the end of the contract

The Department’s data breach response checklist states that FERPA itself contains no specific breach notification requirement, although state laws can still apply. The Department recommends that your agreement describe each side’s duties in a breach, and its model terms ask the provider to share its incident response plan on request. We recommend a set number of days for notice, because “promptly” can mean a day to one vendor and a month to another.

The Department’s guidance on online services also recommends that the agreement say what happens to student records when the contract ends, so that nothing stays on the vendor’s systems. That comes down to three answers: how you export everything, how long you have after the subscription ends, and when the vendor deletes your data and backups.

System questions to ask a vendor

FERPA’s regulations expect your campus to use reasonable methods so that staff can open only the records they have a legitimate educational interest in, which means a reason connected to their work. The system questions test whether you can do that in practice, and it helps to see each answer in the product itself rather than in a sales presentation:

• Can we build roles that give each staff member only the records and reports their job needs?
• Does it support single sign-on with our campus login system?
• Does it keep an audit trail of who viewed or changed a record, and for how long?
• Where is our data hosted, and is it encrypted in transit and at rest?
• Which student data does it require, and what can we leave out?
• Does any feature send student data to an AI provider, and can we switch it off?

Your IT office may also send a security questionnaire, such as the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) that EDUCAUSE publishes for college purchasing.

Roles that match each job

Least privilege means each person sees only what their job needs. A tutor needs the day’s appointments and a coordinator needs the reports for one center, while very few people need every student at every center. Reports deserve extra care, because one report can list every student who visited. It is worth checking how report access is controlled and how much a new staff account can see.

Single sign-on and audit trails

Single sign-on lets staff and students sign in with their campus accounts instead of a separate password. That means a person who leaves loses access to student records as soon as IT closes their campus account, provided nobody keeps a separate password in the system. Ask whether the vendor supports SAML, a common standard for campus sign-on, and whether every edition includes it.

An audit trail is a log of who viewed or changed a record and when. You will need it if a student asks who changed their records, so how long the vendor keeps it and whether you can export it matter as much as what it records.

Hosting, encryption and the data you share

Campus IT will want the hosting country and provider, and whether data is encrypted while it travels and while it is stored. The fields a system requires also matter, because each field you leave out is one less to protect. AI features belong on the list as well, because a writing or dictation assistant may send the text you enter to an outside company.

Privacy is only part of the purchase. Our guide to choosing higher education software covers the rest, from buying versus building to the budget request.

How Accudemia answers these questions

Accudemia, the academic center management software we make, comes in three editions: the full Accudemia License, Accudemia Light and Essentials, which covers appointment scheduling only. Light and Essentials leave out some features of the full License, so check which of the settings below come with the edition you are pricing.

Status as a school official and data use

Accudemia treats the information it stores as education records protected under FERPA. It acts as a school official with a legitimate educational interest, solely to provide the service, and processes your records only as your campus instructs. Your campus owns the records, and requests to see or correct one go to you. Data in Accudemia is never sold or used for third-party advertising or marketing, as the Accudemia privacy policy sets out.

Roles, reports and sign-on

The top administrator builds roles from 51 permissions and limits each role to the whole college, a group of locations, one center or one classroom. Eight ready-made templates cover common jobs, from a Viewer who can only view and run reports to a Referral Issuer who can only raise and update referrals. Cleveland Community College, for example, gave its athletic coaches their own access to check athletes’ study hall progress during the week. No administrator can give an account more permissions than they hold.

Report access is granted by type of report, so a center administrator can get attendance and appointment reports without student lists or survey results. You can also hide the student ID on session logs, center screens and some exports. Accudemia supports SAML 2.0 single sign-on through your own portal and sign-on through Canvas, and the mobile app uses the same campus sign-on. The College of San Mateo, for one, connected Accudemia to its campus single sign-on.

Audit trails, hosting and AI features

Audit trails record who changed an appointment, a session log or a setting and what the change was, and three permission reports show who holds which permissions. Accudemia keeps your data and backups in the United States on Amazon Web Services, and every edition encrypts data traveling between your browser and its servers with SSL. A user import needs only a first name, last name and user ID, and you can export ten types of data as CSV files, from users and enrollment to session logs and appointments.

Accudemia’s AI features are the AI Assistant, which drafts text, and Wiggins, which answers questions and books appointments. They do not send student names, ID numbers or email addresses to AI providers, and staff are asked to keep education records out of the text they enter. You can switch the AI Assistant off for your whole account, and booking through Wiggins has its own switch.

AccuClass for class attendance

If class attendance is what you are buying, AccuClass, our class attendance software, includes hosting on the Amazon cloud with backups and SSL in its license, and it supports SAML single sign-on with Microsoft Entra.

Limits to know before a demo

A new staff account can see the whole college until you narrow it to a center or location, so set that limit when you create it. Audit trail records are kept for 90 days. Single sign-on is included in the Accudemia License, costs a one-time setup fee on Light and is not part of Essentials.

For anything this page does not cover, such as our contract terms, breach notice commitments or a completed security questionnaire for your IT office, contact us and your account representative will answer directly.

If your review is waiting on these answers, request an Accudemia demo and bring your IT and privacy staff to see the role, sign-on and audit settings on screen.

Before you sign

You are ready to sign when every question above has a written answer you can file with the contract and your own campus has finished its share of the checks. These steps take you there:

1. Check that your annual FERPA notification defines school officials broadly enough to include contractors.
2. Send the contract questions to each vendor before the demo, along with your IT office’s security questionnaire.
3. In the demo, look at the role settings, the sign-on setup and the audit trail on screen.
4. Decide each staff member’s role, and make sure everyone who will have access has had FERPA training.
5. Have campus IT and your privacy office or counsel review the answers and the terms.
6. Confirm that the person accepting the terms may sign for your campus, since the Department notes that clicking “accept” can bind you much like a signed contract.
7. Before you start using the system, write down who would export your data and when the vendor would delete it if you ever leave.

The number only helps if your campus calculates it the same way every term and your center keeps visit records that show which course each student came in for.

Key takeaways

• A DFW rate is the percentage of students in a course who earn a D or an F or withdraw, and it shows which courses students struggle with most.
• You calculate it by adding the Ds, Fs and withdrawals in a course and dividing by the number of students enrolled on the census date, just after the drop deadline.
• The highest rates usually sit in large first-year gateway courses, and a D or F in the first term is linked to lower graduation rates.
• To show that tutoring lowers a DFW rate, you need visits recorded against each course and a fair comparison group, not only a visit count.

What is a DFW rate?

A DFW rate is the percentage of students in a course who finish with a grade of D or F or who withdraw after the drop deadline. Campuses calculate it for each course and section to see where students need more help.

An F earns no credit, and neither does a withdrawal, which shows as a W on the transcript. If the course is required, the student has to take it again. A D often earns credit, but at many colleges it does not meet a prerequisite or major requirement that asks for a C or better. A student with a D may therefore still have to repeat the course.

DFW, DFWI and other versions

Campuses do not all count the same grades. Some add incompletes and call the measure a DFWI rate, and some also count grades such as WF (withdrawn while failing) or U (unsatisfactory). Rates built on different definitions cannot be compared, so ask your IR office which version it uses and keep to it every term.

What counts as a high DFW rate

There is no national standard for a high DFW rate, but the best-known cutoff comes from SI. SI is a set of peer-led study sessions attached to a difficult course, and when it was developed at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, its developers targeted “historically difficult” courses. In those courses, more than 30 percent of students earned a D or F or withdrew, semester after semester. Many campuses still use a cutoff of that kind to choose courses for extra support.

Compare a course with its own record over several terms before you compare it with other courses. A small section can swing by several points from one term to the next, but a rate that stays high across terms and instructors points to the course itself.

How to calculate a DFW rate

To calculate a DFW rate, add the Ds, Fs and withdrawals in a course, divide by the number of students enrolled on the census date, and multiply by 100.

DFW rate = (D grades + F grades + withdrawals) ÷ students enrolled on the census date × 100

Who counts as enrolled

The drop deadline ends the add and drop period. The census date usually falls just after it, and that is when your college takes its official enrollment count. A student who drops before the census date leaves no grade and no W, so they are not part of the rate. The withdrawal deadline comes weeks later, and a student who leaves between the census date and that deadline receives a W and counts. Some offices divide by the number of grades given instead, which gives the same result when every enrolled student receives a grade. Decide once, too, how to treat audited and pass/fail enrollments, because counting them differently from term to term changes the rate.

A worked example

Take one section of an introductory course with 120 students on the census date. At the end of the term, 9 students earned a D, 14 earned an F and 7 withdrew. That makes 30 students, and 30 divided by 120 is a DFW rate of 25 percent.

Now split the same section by how often each student used tutoring for that course. The numbers are made up to show the arithmetic. Say 40 students visited the center three or more times for the course, and the other 80 came less often or not at all:

A gap like this is what a budget committee will want to see, but it does not prove that tutoring caused it. Students who come for help can differ from those who stay away, so the comparison needs a fair method before you report it.

Why DFW rates matter

DFW rates run highest in large first-year gateway courses, and that matters because an early D or F is linked to a lower chance of graduating on time.

In a 2021 study, eight Big Ten universities, including Indiana, Penn State and Rutgers, found the highest rates in college algebra, precalculus, calculus I and introductory chemistry. They also found that first-generation students (the first in their family to attend college) earned more Ds, Fs and Ws than other students. So did students eligible for Pell Grants (federal grants for students with financial need). Among the students who entered in 2014, those with one D or F in their first term had a four-year graduation rate 24.9 percentage points lower than students with none.

The universities note that this link is not causal, since a D or F can signal problems that would have slowed the student anyway. Those courses are still where your center’s support reaches the most students at the point they are most likely to fall behind.

How to lower DFW rates

You can help lower DFW rates by focusing your center’s support on the few courses where rates stay high, and by reaching students while they can still recover. Course design and grading belong to the faculty, so these are steps your center can take on its own or with a department’s agreement.

Start with the courses that stay high

Ask your IR office for the DFW rates of the courses your center supports, over several terms, with enrollment beside each rate. The courses that combine high rates with large enrollment are where the same tutoring hours reach the most students who need them. Pick a short list of those courses, because a short list is easier to staff and to measure than a promise to cover everything. Then share the rates and your visit data with the instructors who teach them, and agree where tutoring or SI fits their syllabus.

Bring structured support into those courses

Drop-in tutoring waits for students to decide they need help, and the students heading for a D, F or W may never decide to come. SI goes to them instead, because its sessions are scheduled for one course and led by a student who did well in it. Embedded tutoring places a tutor inside the class itself.

A 2014 systematic review in the Review of Educational Research found that students who attend SI earn higher grades and fail or withdraw less often, which matches what the U.S. Department of Education reported in the 1990s. That is a correlation, so it cannot say whether the students who attend were already stronger, and you will meet the same question when you measure your own program.

Reach students before the withdrawal deadline

A faculty referral early in the term can lead to tutoring, while the same referral after the withdrawal deadline leaves the student few options. Time your early alerts so faculty raise concerns while students can still recover, and send every referral to a named person who contacts the student. Our guide to identifying at-risk students early in the term covers that route, from the referral form to the reply faculty receive. A withdrawal is sometimes the right call, for example after a family emergency, but even then the student should decide with an advisor.

How to show your center’s effect on DFW rates

To show your center’s effect, compare the DFW rate of students who used the center with similar students in the same courses who did not, and repeat it every term. A course’s rate can fall for reasons that have nothing to do with tutoring, such as easier grading, so the course rate alone proves little. Finding similar students is the difficult part. Students who choose to come may be more motivated than those who stay away, which makes tutoring look better than it is. They may also be the ones already struggling, which hides its effect.

Build a fair comparison

These steps give you a comparison a budget committee can trust:

• Record the course at every visit, so a visit to the math lab counts toward the right course.
• Get the course rosters and final grades from your IR office or the registrar. Agree who sees student-level results under your campus’s FERPA policy (FERPA is the federal law that protects student records).
• Group students by how often they visited for that course, such as none, one or two, and three or more, and set those cutoffs before you see the results.
• Count visits only up to a fixed point, such as the withdrawal deadline, because students who withdraw early have less time to visit.
• Compare students within the same course and, where you can, the same instructor.
• Ask your IR office to match students on prior preparation, such as high school GPA or placement scores.
• Repeat the comparison for groups such as first-generation and Pell-eligible students, and pool sections or terms when a group has only a few dozen students.

Match students on prior preparation

Matching pairs each student who came with a similar student who did not, based on records such as GPA, so the gap stops reflecting only two different kinds of students. It cannot account for what no record shows, such as motivation, but it makes a gap more convincing. A study in the Journal of Experimental Education matched students this way across 21 courses. It found that SI participation was linked to higher course grades and retention, most strongly for students who attended at least five sessions. Because the students were matched first, that finding is stronger than a plain correlation.

Compare a course with its own past

When a new program starts in a course, its earlier terms make a natural comparison group. In one of our keynote webinars, the director of Ball State University’s learning center describes judging an embedded tutoring pilot against earlier semesters of the same courses taught by the same instructors. Whichever comparison you use, report it course by course with the number of students in each group, because a campus-wide average blends courses tutoring reaches with courses it barely touches.

What your tracking system needs to do

The comparison works only if every visit records the course it was for. A paper sheet with a course column can do that, but someone has to type every line before your IR office can use it. Your system also needs course rosters from your student information system (SIS) and an easy way to send visit data to IR.

Accudemia, the academic center management software we make, imports enrollment but not final grades, so it does not calculate a DFW rate by itself. What it gives you is the visit side of the comparison. At sign-in, you can ask students which service, course and professor the visit was for. If you make the course step required and limit the list to each student’s own classes, every visit arrives tied to a course. Scheduled imports keep those course lists current from your SIS, and they accept the single-file extracts that systems such as Banner and PeopleSoft produce, so nobody has to retype rosters.

Reports and exports for the comparison

You can break visits down by student, course, instructor or class, with each student’s total for each course, which gives you the comparison groups. The Zero Visits report adds the students your center never saw at all in a period.

For the rest of the comparison, you can build student groups such as first-generation students from demographic fields in your import. Session logs and enrollment can be exported by semester as CSV files that your IR office joins with final grades. SI sessions belong to class sections, so their attendance fits the same comparison, as our page on running SI programs in Accudemia shows. The full list of reports is on our reporting and analytics page.

How campuses use the data

Santa Barbara City College’s IR office uses the center’s Accudemia data to show the services’ effect on retention and success each semester, as a staff member explains in the college’s user spotlight. The Community College of Denver’s tutoring center designed its session questions with its IR office. The center credits the impact data it kept in Accudemia with saving it from closure in 2020.

What the system leaves to IR

Because final grades stay in your SIS, the DFW calculation happens where the grades are, usually in your IR office, using the visit export. Accudemia shows who came for help with which course, and the matching above is still what lets you judge whether that help moved the rate.

If you also want faculty referrals for early alerts, or more than one center, you need the full Accudemia License. Accudemia Light, the single-center edition, covers visit tracking, SI attendance, imports, exports and scheduled reports.

If your sign-in records who came but not which course they came for, request a demo of Accudemia and see visits, course rosters and term reports set up around your own courses.

Your first DFW report

A first comparison takes one full term of visits recorded by course, plus the weeks your IR office needs once grades are final:

1. Ask your IR office for several terms of DFW rates for the courses your center supports, and which definition it uses.
2. Choose about five courses with large enrollment and rates that stay high from term to term.
3. Make the course a required step at sign-in before that term begins.
4. At the end of the term, send your IR office the visit export and ask for DFW rates by number of visits, matched on prior preparation.
5. Share the results with those courses’ instructors before the following term, and agree where tutoring or SI fits.

The phases run from a year or more before the event to the days after it, so you can start at the phase you are in.

Key takeaways

• An event coordinator checklist covers every task from first planning to follow-up, by phase: budget, venue, vendors, registration, badges, event day and after.
• The venue contract fixes your dates, capacity and much of your budget, so a conference of a few hundred people often books its venue a year or more ahead.
• Registration fields, prices and credit rules are hard to change once people sign up, so you settle them before the form goes live.
• Setup day, teardown, final invoices and certificates fall outside the event days, which is why each one needs an owner on the checklist too.

A year to six months out: goals, budget, team and venue

Everything in this phase feeds the venue contract, which fixes your dates, your capacity and a large part of your budget. Settle the goal and the money first, so the contract fits them.

Goals and audience

The goal decides who you invite and where the money goes, so write it down before you look at dates or venues. Write it as a SMART goal (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound), so you can judge the event against it afterward. “Register 300 paying attendees by the registration deadline” is a goal you can check, while “a strong turnout” is not.

Do this with whoever approves the event, so the goal does not shift later:

• Write the main goal in a form you can measure.
• Name the audience, such as members, licensed professionals or exhibitors.
• Ask the people who approve the budget what they will look at afterward.

Format, size and date

Format, size and date decide which venues can host you, so fix them before you contact venues. Choose the theme now as well, because your save-the-date will carry it.

• Choose the type of event, such as a one-day seminar, a multi-day conference or a trade show.
• Estimate how many people will come.
• Decide whether to add online sessions (a hybrid format).
• Pick a date and length clear of holidays and other events your audience attends.
• Choose a theme or tagline, if you use one.

If you add online sessions, our guide on how to host a virtual conference walks through the online side step by step.

Budget and sponsorship

Build the budget before you sign any contract, so every quote you collect has a line to go into.

• List expenses, such as the venue, catering, audiovisual equipment, marketing, speakers, travel, staff time, insurance and payment processing fees.
• Project revenue from registration fees at each price level, sponsorships and exhibitor fees.
• Add a contingency line for costs nobody planned for.
• Set sponsorship packages at different price levels, each with clear benefits such as booth space, logo placement or a sponsored session.
• Write an exhibitor prospectus with booth sizes, prices and what each booth includes.

Offer sponsorships and booths now, so sponsors and exhibitors can fit your event into their own budgets.

Team and roles

A task that belongs to everyone tends to wait until someone notices it, so give each area one owner. On a small team, one person may cover several areas:

• Logistics, for the venue and vendors.
• Program, for the agenda, speakers and schedule.
• Registration, for sign-ups, registrants’ questions and badges.
• Marketing and communications, for promotion and every email registrants receive.
• Volunteers, for recruiting, training and scheduling helpers.
• Sponsors and exhibitors, for contracts and what each one was promised.

Venue and hotel rooms

Hotel rooms for out-of-town registrants are often negotiated with the venue contract, so handle both together. If you are starting less than a year out, contact venues in your first week, because the dates you want may already be taken.

• Visit the venue to check capacity, location, parking, accessibility and cost.
• Check the contract for how long your dates are held, the deposit schedule, cancellation terms and the insurance you must carry.
• Confirm your setup and teardown hours, overtime charges and the minimum you must spend on food and drink.
• Ask whether the venue requires its own caterer or audiovisual team, and reserve any outside vendors it does not supply.
• Consider event cancellation insurance once deposits are paid, if losing the event would be costly.
• Confirm internet bandwidth and power for badge scanning and any streaming.
• Block hotel rooms nearby at a group rate, with a booking deadline you can share at registration.
• Get a floor plan showing the check-in desk, session rooms, catering, exhibit space and signage.
• Send a save-the-date to past attendees and members once the contract is signed.

Read the attrition clause twice. Attrition is what you owe if registrants book fewer hotel rooms or meals than the contract promised, and it can turn a slow registration month into a bill. The force majeure clause matters too, because it says what happens if the event cannot go ahead for reasons outside your control.

Program and speakers

The program is what people register for, so it has to be ready to publish when registration opens. If you offer continuing education credits, the program also feeds the application to the accrediting body (the organization that approves your credits, such as a licensing board or a professional association), which usually asks for session details and learning objectives.

• Open a call for proposals, or invite speakers directly, with a deadline.
• Send each speaker an agreement covering fees, travel, recording rights and deadlines.
• Ask the accrediting body for its application deadline, how long approval takes and whether you may advertise credits before it approves them.
• Collect learning objectives and any disclosure forms the accrediting body requires from speakers.
• Start the credit application, including the minimum time an attendee must spend in a session and whether a quiz or session evaluation is required.

Tools and processes

Before registration opens, choose the system that will hold your registrations, badges and attendance, because switching tools halfway through means typing attendee data in again. Whatever you choose, check that it covers registration, payments, badges, check-in and credits, or that the tools you combine share one attendee list. Ask which tasks keep working when the venue internet fails, and plan a paper backup for the rest. Set up the team’s working habits at the same time:

• Keep one shared task list, with an owner and a due date for every item on this checklist.
• Hold a team check-in, weekly at first and daily in the final week.
• Keep contracts, badge designs and attendee lists in one shared folder.

Conference Tracker, the event management software we make, keeps registration, badges, check-in, session attendance and credits in one attendee record. You manage it in a web browser, and your staff scan badges with a free app on their phones or tablets. The app stores scans on the device when the venue Wi-Fi drops and uploads them once the connection returns, while the parts that run in a browser, such as the self check-in station, need a working connection.

Four to six months out: registration and credits

Registration is where your attendee data begins, so a mistake here follows you to the check-in desk and the certificates. Open it once the program and prices are ready, early enough for early-bird pricing to work. Publish the event page with the registration form, and announce it to everyone who received the save-the-date.

Registration and payments

Each of these is harder to change once people have registered, so decide them before the form goes live:

• Choose the fields you will need later, such as dietary needs, accessibility requests and license numbers for credit.
• Decide whether you approve each registration by hand or accept registrations automatically.
• Set prices for early-bird, member, group and on-site registration, and decide how you will check member status.
• Create complimentary codes for speakers and staff, and a separate registration path for exhibitors and sponsors.
• Write your refund and cancellation policy, and a consent line for photos and recordings.
• Decide where payments go and how registrants who cannot pay online will pay.

In Conference Tracker, payments run through your own PayPal, Stripe or Authorize.net account, so the money goes straight to you, and registrants who cannot pay online can be invoiced instead. Refunds happen outside Conference Tracker, so you return the money through your payment account and then mark the payment as refunded.

Promotion

Promotion starts the day registration opens and runs until it closes, so plan the whole stretch now and use the channels your audience already follows:

• Email past attendees and members before each price deadline.
• Post speaker announcements on the social networks your audience uses.
• Ask partners, sponsors and speakers to share the event with their contacts.
• Give each partner its own discount code, so you can see how many registrations each one brings in.

Compare registrations week by week with your goal. If one channel brings in most sign-ups, shift your time there before the early-bird deadline.

Badges

Design the badge now and print as late as you can, so late changes do not cost you a second print run:

• Show the name and organization in large type, with a color or ribbon for roles such as speaker, staff and exhibitor.
• Add a QR code if you scan people into sessions or exhibitors capture leads.
• Decide whether to print in advance or at check-in, and choose your badge stock and holders.
• Plan a way to reprint badges on site for walk-ins and name corrections.

Waters Edge Counseling used badge colors to help people find each other. It printed attendee badges in one color and volunteer leaders’ badges in another, so attendees could tell the groups apart and start conversations. Its marketing director walks through the badges in a short customer video.

Conference Tracker prints badges on standard badge stock with an office printer, or on thermal label printers that need no ink or toner. At the check-in desk, your staff can check someone in and print the badge in one step.

Continuing education credits

If your event offers credits, set up how you will track them before registration opens, because registrants will ask how credit works:

• Explain on the event page how attendees earn credit, once the accrediting body allows you to advertise it.
• Build the session evaluation form, and the quiz if credit requires one.
• Decide how you will record time, with badge scans in and out or with sign-in sheets.
• Decide who signs the certificates and when attendees receive them.

With Conference Tracker’s continuing education tracking, you set the time requirement for each session as a percentage of the session or a number of minutes. The system then works out each attendee’s credits from their scans, or from times your staff enter by hand, and fills them into each certificate.

You can also hold credit until the attendee completes the session evaluation. The South Carolina Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers did this at its symposium and issued certificates only to attendees who completed every evaluation, which its administrative director describes in a short video. Our explainer on how continuing education units are calculated covers the math itself.

If registration, badges and credits are the parts of this checklist that take your team the most time, request a Conference Tracker demo and see all three working from one attendee record.

Two to four months out: vendors, exhibitors and safety

The vendors you reserved with the venue now need details, such as menus, the equipment for each room and delivery times. They work from your estimated headcount until you give them final numbers in the last weeks.

Vendors

Every vendor should get the agenda, the floor plan and one contact on your team, so nobody has to guess at the event:

• Choose menus that cover dietary needs, and agree the date for the final headcount and a few extra meals for late arrivals.
• Confirm the audiovisual equipment and a technician for each room, plus recording if you will share sessions afterward.
• Rent tables, stages and booths, with delivery and pickup times agreed with the venue.
• Design directional and sponsor signage, and book the printer.
• Give each vendor an arrival and setup time and the entrance to use.

Two people tasks belong in this phase as well. Recruit volunteers for check-in, session doors and the help desk, so you can train them in the final week, and book travel and hotel rooms for speakers and other guests now that the program is set.

Exhibitors

Exhibitors need setup times and shipping details weeks before they pack, so send their logistics early:

• Assign booths on the floor plan.
• Send an exhibitor manual with setup and teardown times, shipping instructions, and power and internet options.
• Register booth staff and plan their badges.
• Explain how lead capture works at your event, if you offer it.

Permits, insurance and safety

Some permits take weeks to arrange, and your venue may ask for your insurance certificate before you can set up:

• Apply for any permits your location requires for a large public gathering or alcohol service.
• Pay for music licensing if you play recorded or live music, and ask whether the venue’s license already covers it.
• Buy liability insurance and send the venue its certificate of insurance.
• Arrange accessibility, such as ramps or elevators, reserved seating and the interpreters registrants request.
• Plan first aid, the route to the nearest medical facility and an evacuation plan your team has walked through.
• Add security for a large event and a weather plan for any outdoor space.

The last two months: final program, communications and checks

Registration usually closes in this window, and many registrants sign up close to the deadline, so your final numbers arrive only weeks before the event. Print orders and catering counts wait until now for that reason, and they cannot wait any longer.

Final program and printing

Printers and badge suppliers need lead time, so lock the program early enough to order everything that carries it:

• Publish the final schedule and room assignments.
• Collect speaker slides by a set deadline.
• Order printed programs, signage, badge stock and lanyards, with time for printing and delivery.
• Give the caterer your final headcount by the date in the contract.

Emails to registrants

Each email answers questions your check-in desk would otherwise get at the event, so plan the whole sequence now:

• Send a last-chance email before registration closes, and a reminder before the hotel booking deadline.
• Send a “Know Before You Go” email a week before, with times, directions, parking, dress code and agenda highlights.
• Send a reminder the day before, with what to bring, such as photo ID.
• Confirm arrangements with each registrant who asked for dietary or accessibility support.

If you use an event app, ask people to download it in the week-before email. Conference Attendee, the attendee app we make, puts the sessions, maps, exhibitors and announcements on each attendee’s own phone.

The week before

Use the final week to confirm what you planned, while a problem can still be fixed quietly:

• Confirm times, contacts and final numbers with every vendor.
• Share the run of show (the minute-by-minute plan for setup, sessions and teardown) with staff and vendors.
• Train volunteers on check-in, session scanning and their shifts.
• Count badges, programs and handouts against the registration list, plus a few extras.
• Charge your scanning devices and update them with the final schedule.
• Send the team the contact list and confirm your weather plan.

Event day

Setup the day before is what lets event morning start on time. Without it, room sets, sound checks and the check-in desk all compete for the hour before the doors open.

Setup day and morning briefing

Set up the day before if the venue allows it, and keep event morning for a short briefing:

• Load in, set every room and run a sound check.
• Put up signage and set up the check-in desk.
• Test your scanning devices and badge printers on the venue network.
• Brief the team in the morning on the schedule, any changes and each person’s duties.
• Share who handles the venue, speakers, registration and emergencies, and how to reach them.
• Agree how the team will talk during the day, such as two-way radios or a group chat.

Walk every room once more before the doors open, because a missing chair or a dead microphone is quick to fix in an empty room.

Check-in

Check-in is the first thing attendees see, so staff it for the busiest half hour:

• Run several stations at peak times, each with a trained person and a working device.
• Keep printed attendee lists, sorted by last name, and a mobile hotspot as backups if devices or the venue network fail.
• Open a separate line for walk-ins, with a way to take their details and payment.
• Reprint badges for name corrections and anyone who left theirs at home.

Conference Tracker’s staff scanning app is free to download and runs on iPhones, iPads and Android phones and tablets, so your team can scan badges on devices they already carry. A spare tablet can also run as a self check-in station to shorten the line at peak times. The offline storage covers scans, so keep the hotspot and printed lists ready for desk check-in and badge printing.

Schedule and attendance

Running on time protects meals, room changes and the hours you pay the venue for, so give one person the job of watching the clock:

• Appoint a timekeeper or stage manager to give speakers time cues.
• Announce each session a few minutes before it starts.
• Put a scanner at each session door if credits depend on badge scans, and remind attendees to complete each session evaluation.
• Keep an open discussion ready for a session that runs short, and shorten a break if one runs long.
• Check session counts during the day, and add chairs, open an overflow room or repeat a session that is over capacity.
• Keep spare microphones, cables and a backup laptop for presentations.

Tell attendees about any change as soon as you make it, so nobody finds out at a locked door.

Keeping attendees involved

Participation has to be planned, because a full day of listening leaves people little reason to visit exhibitors or talk to each other. Pick a few ideas that suit your audience:

• Run live polls and audience questions in sessions.
• Give networking time some structure, such as topic tables at breaks.
• Plan exhibit hall activities, such as product demos or a passport game in which attendees collect booth scans for a prize draw.
• Choose an event hashtag and show attendees’ posts and photos on a screen at the venue.

In Conference Attendee, each session has its own social wall beside the conference-wide one, and attendees can give feedback on a session as soon as it ends.

After the event

After the event you still owe thanks to attendees, speakers and sponsors, payments to vendors and records to the accrediting body. If the event repeats, ask the venue about next year’s dates before you leave.

Teardown and closing the books

Leave time and people for teardown, because the venue can bill overtime once the contract hours run out:

• Pack materials, return rentals and check every room for anything left behind.
• Check the venue’s final invoice against the contract, including food and drink counts.
• Pay vendors and collect any unpaid sponsor and exhibitor fees.
• Record final revenue and costs against the budget.

Thank-yous and the survey

Send thank-yous within a day or two, while the event is still fresh. Attendees get links to slides, recordings or photos with a short survey, and each speaker, sponsor and volunteer gets a personal note that names something specific about their part. Keep the survey short, and decide before you send it how you will use the answers.

Results against your goal

The people who approved the budget will ask how the event did against its goal, so put the numbers side by side:

• Compare attendance with registration to see how many registrants did not come.
• Review engagement, such as session attendance, app use and exhibit hall visits.
• Compare revenue and costs with the budget, line by line.
• Count the registrations each promotion channel and partner code brought in.

If registration and check-in run in one system, such as Conference Tracker, much of this comes from its reports. Its attendance analytics chart check-ins by date and visits by room, an export lists every registrant who never checked in, and its financial report shows revenue by payment method and the discount codes used.

Certificates and reporting to accrediting bodies

A wrong name or credit total means sending a certificate twice, so check the records before anything goes out:

• Chase missing session evaluations or quizzes, if credit depends on them.
• Fix incomplete attendance records, such as a sign-in with no sign-out.
• Check names and credit totals.
• Send certificates to everyone who qualified, with a note thanking them.
• Report attendance and credits to the accrediting body by its deadline.
• Keep the attendance records in case the accrediting body audits the event.

Debrief

Hold the debrief within a week or two, while your team still remembers the details. Ask what happened at each step, so people describe the process openly. Leave the meeting with three things written down:

• List what went well and should stay.
• List what went wrong, with a fix for each item.
• Write a short summary for leadership or the client, with results against the goal, feedback highlights and the budget outcome.

Starting late and planning the next event

If your venue is not booked yet, book it first, whatever phase you are in. If your event is less than six months away, find the phase you are in, then check the credit application, registration and badge tasks before anything else. Credit approval can take the longest, and registration and badges are the hardest to fix once attendees arrive. If your event is further away, start with the first phase and give every task an owner this week.

After the event, update this checklist before you file it. Add the task that surprised you and remove the ones your audience did not need, so next year’s list is built for your event.

Once you measure it, you know which sessions filled, which booths got visitors and who answered the evaluation. You can then decide what to repeat next year and show your sponsors what the event gave them.

Key takeaways

• Engagement happens with sessions, with other attendees and with exhibitors, and it carries on after the event through surveys, follow-up and re-registration.
• You can measure it with session attendance, app activity, evaluation results and, where exhibitors use a lead retrieval app, booth scans.
• An engagement idea is worth repeating when one of those measures shows its effect.
• Booth scans and session attendance are also the numbers sponsors and exhibitors want to see.

What is attendee engagement?

Attendee engagement is what people do at your event beyond being present, and it is the part of attending that you can measure and improve. An attendee who sits through the keynote counts toward your attendance. One who also asks the speaker a question, visits an exhibitor and rates the session afterward is engaged, and you can count or ask about each of those actions.

The four kinds of engagement to plan for

Engagement takes four forms, and each one needs its own ideas and its own measure:

• Attendees engage with sessions and speakers when they attend, stay to the end, ask questions and rate the session.
• They engage with each other through conversations, messages and meetings, in the room and in your event app.
• They engage with exhibitors and sponsors through booth visits, product demonstrations and appointments.
• They engage with the event after it ends when they answer your post-event survey, use the materials and register again.

Engagement before, during and after the event

Engagement starts as soon as people register. Registrants who can browse the program, choose their sessions and talk to each other arrive with a plan and a few people to look for. During the event, a mix of talks, workshops, demonstrations and time on the exhibit floor keeps them taking part. After the event, give attendees a way to discuss what happened and suggest ideas for next year, so they stay invested in your event.

How to measure attendee engagement

You measure attendee engagement by counting what people do at each stage. Most conferences can collect these measures, some from records you already keep and some with a scan or an app:

• Session attendance against session sign-ups, which tells you whether people came to the sessions they chose.
• Time in sessions, for sessions where attendees sign out as well as in.
• App sign-ins and activity, such as bookmarked sessions, posts and messages.
• Booth scans and appointments with exhibitors. Scans count the visitors exhibitors chose to scan, so they undercount casual visits.
• Evaluation responses, both the number of attendees who answered and the scores they gave.
• Re-registration for your next event.

Compare attendance with sign-ups as well as with room size, because a session that filled its room may still have lost many of the people who signed up for it. Without advance sign-ups, compare each session with the same slot last year. Re-registration is the slowest measure, and budgets and travel approval move it as much as your program does. For an earlier read, some events open next year’s registration on site.

Measuring without software

Most of these measures need nothing more than a few volunteers. One with a tally counter can count each room, and a card that exhibitors stamp shows which booths each attendee visited. Paper evaluations also work, as long as you hand them out before people leave the room. Tell attendees at registration what you record and why, especially if you scan badges, because session scans show where each person went during the day.

Measuring online sessions

Online sessions are easier to measure than in-person ones, because streaming platforms usually record who joined and how long each person stayed. If viewers leave at about the same point in several sessions, add a poll or a discussion question just before that point. Most platforms also show a live viewer count, so a moderator who sees people leaving can ask the speaker to take questions.

Ideas to increase attendee engagement

Start with the kind of engagement your last evaluations or numbers showed to be weakest, and choose ideas aimed at it. The measures above will then tell you which ones to keep.

Use the phones attendees already carry

An event app puts the program, speaker details, exhibitor listings and live updates on each attendee’s phone, so people can plan their day without a printed schedule. Their bookmarks, posts and messages also leave a record you can read later.

Gamification, which means points, challenges and prizes for taking part, works best when a challenge takes people somewhere useful. A scavenger hunt that requires a stop at each sponsor’s booth moves attendees around the exhibit hall, and a quiz on session content brings them back into the sessions. Booth scans or stamped cards then count the visits the hunt produced.

If you are comparing event apps for their engagement features, our comparison of Whova alternatives lists what each platform includes for attendee interaction and what costs extra.

Plan content people take part in

Sessions are where attendees spend most of their time, so most of your engagement happens in the program. When you build the program, these choices decide how much people join in:

• A varied speaker lineup that mixes well-known names with newer voices from different backgrounds and career stages.
• Interactive sessions, with audience polls, questions from the floor or small-group discussion built into the time slot.
• Different formats, such as panel discussions, fireside chats and lightning talks, so the day does not run as one lecture after another.

If you run a call for proposals, ask each presenter how they will make their session interactive. The question gets speakers planning for participation while they write the session, and it gives your reviewers one more way to compare proposals. Add a question to the session evaluation about how much attendees joined in, and the scores show which formats worked.

Make networking easy

Networking needs the same planning as the program, because attendees who know nobody rarely approach a stranger unless they have an excuse to. Put a networking lounge away from session noise, with seating, charging points and refreshments, so attendees have a place to meet. A short icebreaker helps too, but choose one that suits your audience, because some people find icebreakers awkward.

You can also ask about role and interests when people register, then introduce people who gave similar answers by email before the event starts. Ask permission before you share anything an attendee tells you. A checkbox on the registration form lets people choose to show their interests or a social media profile to other attendees.

Messages and meetings booked in your event app show whether people connected. They do not capture hallway conversations, so ask about useful contacts in your post-event survey as well.

Add hands-on and immersive formats

Hands-on formats let attendees do something instead of only listening, and people who made or tried something have more to tell colleagues afterward. Which ones suit you depends on your budget and your audience:

• Workshops and demonstrations where attendees practice a skill or try a product.
• Experience zones, such as a tasting area, live music or an art installation, placed where attendees already pass.
• A virtual exhibit hall, where attendees browse exhibitors’ videos and product materials online, as an alternative to the physical hall or alongside it.

Sign-ups and attendance against capacity show how much demand a workshop has. For zones and exhibit halls, ask in your post-event survey which ones attendees would want again.

Keep the conversation going after the event

After the event, your aim is to stay in contact with attendees until registration opens again. Start with a short post-event survey on the overall experience, favorite sessions, what to improve and what attendees want next time. Keep it easy to find, and consider a prize draw for everyone who completes it.

Session recordings, articles or a webinar on the event’s topics keep attendees coming back to you between events. Speakers may provide this content in exchange for a perk or the chance to promote their work. An online group for past attendees keeps them talking to each other all year, so they arrive at the next event already knowing someone.

Follow-up takes staff time, and your team may not have it to spare. Past attendees who enjoyed the event may be willing to volunteer, for example at the registration desk or as session hosts, and they can help you recruit next year’s audience. Whatever you add at this stage, survey response rates and re-registration are the two measures to watch.

Measuring engagement with Conference Tracker

Conference Tracker is our event management software. It records session sign-ups when attendees register online and attendance at each session, and where a session requires a sign-out it also records how long each attendee stayed. Two of our apps add the rest, with Conference Leads recording booth scans and Conference Attendee recording app activity and evaluations.

Session attendance

Staff scan badges at the door, or attendees scan the session’s QR code in the Conference Attendee app, so you can see which sessions drew a crowd. If a session has no sign-out, Conference Tracker records only when people arrive.

The Texas Emergency Management Conference ran on Conference Tracker with 2,623 attendees across 186 sessions. Its 22 rented scanners recorded 7,611 session sign-ins, and attendees downloaded their own attendance certificates afterward.

Booth scans

Conference Leads is our lead retrieval app for exhibitors. Exhibitors use it at their booth to scan attendee badges and save each attendee’s contact details. Exhibitors need a license to scan, which they buy through your exhibitor registration in Conference Tracker or which you can buy for them. You can see every lead those exhibitors capture and report the scan counts to each exhibitor and sponsor. You can also draw prize winners at random from the attendees exhibitors scanned, so a booth challenge needs no entry forms.

App activity and evaluations

The Conference Attendee app is our app for attendees. They download it for iPhone or Android, and you switch it on in your Conference Tracker account. Points for social actions on the app’s social feed, such as posting or liking a comment, add up to an Engagement Score on each attendee’s profile. A social activity report then shows the sessions attendees interacted with most, bookmarks per session and the most active attendees. Conference Tracker also lets attendees message each other privately and book one-to-one meetings, and attendees request appointments with exhibitors from the app.

Because the score counts social activity only, read it alongside attendance rather than in place of it. Our page on Conference Tracker’s attendee engagement tools covers the scoring and the social feed in more detail.

Attendees answer the session evaluation in the app as soon as a session ends. The evaluation report averages the scores for each question, so you can compare sessions and speakers. A detailed report filtered by presenter lets you hand each speaker their own scores and comments. Paper evaluations do not reach the report on their own, so count them separately.

Session attendance, booth scans and evaluation scores are what sponsors and program committees usually want to see. Request a Conference Tracker demo to see those reports before your next event.

Check-in, maps and help for attendees

Every minute an attendee spends in a queue or looking for a room is a minute out of the sessions, so the practical side of your event affects engagement too. Conference Tracker and the Conference Attendee app take most of that effort off attendees:

• Badges go out by email before the event, together with instructions for checking in without staff.
• At the door, attendees check themselves in at a browser-based station with their email address and last name, and anyone who forgot the printed badge can show it on a phone.
• The app carries venue maps and floor plans with rooms and booths marked. It also holds directions, local weather and your announcements.
• Push notifications go to everyone using the app, to one attendee or only to the attendees of one session. Attendees without the app can get the same message by email or text.
• A built-in help desk takes attendees’ support tickets and alerts your staff by push notification and email.
• Attendees download their own certificate of attendance and CEU (continuing education unit) report, and they can follow their attendance and credits in the app as the event runs.

When attendees check in, Conference Tracker can also text them an invitation to download the app, because many already have a phone in hand at that moment. Conference Tracker’s live dashboard shows help desk tickets as they arrive, so you can see where attendees get stuck and fix it while the event is still running.

Make engagement accessible

Every tool and format you add should work for all of your attendees, so check these points before you add one:

• The event app runs on both iPhone and Android phones, or a browser version covers attendees who cannot install it.
• Anything attendees do in the app, such as checking in or answering an evaluation, can also be done without it, for example at a check-in desk or on a paper form.
• Every session room, workshop and experience zone has a step-free route and seating for attendees who need it.
• Streamed sessions carry captions, and slides or handouts are shared in advance for attendees who follow at their own pace.

Count the alternatives in your measures too, or attendees who cannot use the app will look disengaged in your numbers even though they took part another way. With Conference Tracker, staff can sign anyone in by hand, and its attendee web portal covers part of what the app does, such as the virtual exhibit hall. The social feed and venue maps are in the app only, so post key announcements and printed maps where everyone can see them.

Test one idea at a time

Choose two measures before you choose any ideas. Session attendance and evaluation scores are a good pair, because most events can count attendance at the door and collect scores with a short evaluation.

Then test each new idea against the measure that can show it. A change that works before people choose a session, such as a clearer session description, shows up in sign-ups and attendance. One inside a session, such as an audience Q&A, shows up in that session’s evaluation scores. These steps keep either kind of test fair:

1. Pick pairs of sessions likely to draw a similar audience, such as two sessions in the same track on the same day, in rooms of similar size.
2. Use the idea in one session of each pair and leave the other as it is.
3. Compare that measure between the two sessions of each pair after the event.
4. Run the test again at your next event before you make the idea standard, because a small session gives you few evaluations and one difference can be chance.

If your program is too small to pair sessions, use the idea across the whole event and compare the scores with last year’s.

Whether an app earns its cost depends less on its feature list than on whether attendees open it and whether you use the numbers it collects. Choosing one therefore starts with what you want attendees to do on it, and what you want to know when the event is over.

Key takeaways

• A conference app puts your event’s schedule, live updates, networking and check-in on attendees’ phones, and shows you which parts they used.
• The features worth paying for are the ones that answer attendees’ questions without your staff and give you numbers you will use after the event.
• Before you choose, find out whether the app shares one attendee record with your registration and check-in, and what happens when the venue Wi-Fi fails.
• Attendees use an app when you introduce it before the event and give them reasons to open it during sessions.

Why conferences use apps

Most of what attendees ask at an event is information, such as where the next session is, whether a room changed or who is speaking. An app answers those questions on the attendee’s own phone, so your team spends less time repeating directions at the desk.

An app also changes what you know afterward. Every check-in, bookmark and evaluation answer is saved, so you can see in numbers which sessions drew people and which did not.

What a conference app does for organizers

For you as the organizer, an app takes over work that used to run on spreadsheets, printed programs and email.

Logistics in one place

An app gives you one place to keep the schedule, speaker details, attendee lists and exhibitor information, so a change you make there reaches everyone at once. Without one, the same change has to go into a spreadsheet, a printed program and an email, and some attendees will still see the old version.

That matters most on the day itself. If a session moves to another room, you update it once and send a push notification (a message that appears on the attendee’s phone screen) instead of printing a correction sheet.

Data that shows what worked

An app records what attendees do at your event, which a paper program never could. Check-ins, session ratings and booth scans end up in reports, and those reports are what your sponsors and your board will ask to see.

When you can show a sponsor how many attendees its staff scanned at the booth, or show your board which sessions filled, the app starts to pay off. The same numbers become your case for keeping the app next year.

Updates when plans change

Plans change during every conference, so you need a direct line to attendees as they move around the venue. When the keynote is about to start or a session changes rooms, a push notification reaches their phones right away. It also answers questions people would otherwise bring to your help desk, so your team spends less time repeating the same news.

How an app keeps attendees engaged

For attendees, a good app turns the program into something they can act on, and each feature they use gives them another reason to keep it open.

Personal schedules and session content

With an app, each attendee can build a personal schedule by bookmarking the sessions they plan to attend. The app can then remind them before each of those sessions starts, so they always know where to go next.

Apps can also share session material, such as slides and handouts, for attendees to open whenever they need it. An attendee who wants to check a speaker’s background or look back at a slide can do it on the spot, without waiting for a follow-up email.

Interaction and networking

Attendees take part in a session when responding takes little effort, so look for live polls that show results as soon as people answer and a Q&A feature that lets them send questions from their seats. A social feed, where they post comments and photos, then keeps people talking between sessions.

If meeting people is the main reason your audience attends, networking features deserve a close look in any demo. Attendees should be able to set up a profile, find other people at the event and message them or book a meeting. Ask whether the app suggests people to meet based on shared interests or only lists everyone.

Gamification and prizes

Gamification means adding game elements, such as points and prizes, to encourage the things you want attendees to do. You might award points for checking in to sessions, visiting exhibitor booths or posting on the social feed. A leaderboard then shows attendees where they stand, and a prize for the top scorers, such as a free registration for next year’s conference, gives them a reason to climb it.

A scavenger hunt or a prize wheel works the same way for places attendees tend to skip. It can send them through the whole exhibit hall rather than only past the booths nearest the entrance.

Must-have features in a conference app

Most mobile event apps list similar features, so it helps to know which ones matter most. Test these four first in any demo, because they do the daily work at almost every conference.

Real-time updates and push notifications

The app should let you send updates by push notification the moment something changes, whether that is a schedule change, a reminder for an upcoming session or an urgent announcement. Attendees see the message on their phones, so nobody has to keep checking email or a printed schedule.

You should also be able to send a message to one group, such as the attendees of one session, so that everyone else is not interrupted. Reminders you can write before the event and schedule go out on time while your team is busy at the venue.

Registration, check-in and badges

An app speeds up check-in when it works from the same attendee records as your registration. When the two are connected, each attendee’s QR code is already in the app on arrival. Checking in then takes one scan, by your staff at the door or by the attendee at a self-service station. When they are separate, someone has to import lists before the event and fix mismatches at the door.

Look at badges in the same demo. Some systems print each name badge at check-in, which means badge printing at the venue, while others show an electronic badge in the app that attendees can use instead of a printed one.

If your event awards certificates or continuing education credits, check that the app tracks attendance at each session and shows attendees the credits they have earned. Otherwise attendees will email your staff to ask.

Schedules and venue maps

Attendees rely on the schedule all day, so they should be able to search it and filter it by day, topic or speaker. If you group sessions into tracks by theme, a track should work as a filter too. Bookmarked sessions should build a personal schedule, and any change you make to a time or a room should appear in every attendee’s schedule right away.

Venue maps matter more as the event grows. At a conference spread over several floors or buildings, an attendee should be able to tap a room or a booth on the map and see what is happening there or who is exhibiting. That helps attendees find rooms on other floors, and it brings visitors to booths they might have missed.

Analytics and feedback

After the event, the app’s reports are how you judge it. These are the reports worth asking for in a demo:

• Attendance for each session, and how long attendees stayed.
• Check-ins by day and by time of day.
• Activity on the social feed and other features, by session.

Reports you can export matter more than a dashboard you can only look at, because your board and your sponsors will want the numbers in their own files.

Collect feedback in the same app. An evaluation that appears on the attendee’s phone as a session ends catches people while the session is fresh, and it is easier to answer than a survey emailed a week later. A short rating for each session and one survey about the whole event can be enough to show you what to keep and what to change.

Questions to ask before you choose an app

Before you compare feature lists, ask each vendor these questions:

• Does it run on iPhone and Android, and is there a web option for attendees who will not install it?
• Does it share one attendee record with your registration and check-in, or will you import lists into it?
• Can attendees check in, follow their sessions and get their certificates without asking your staff?
• What happens at a venue with poor Wi-Fi?
• Who can post on the app, and who can remove a post?

Conference Tracker and its three apps

Conference Tracker, the event management software we make, handles registration, check-in and continuing education credits for your event. Three apps work from its attendee records. Attendees use Conference Attendee, your team uses the Conference Tracker staff app, and exhibitors use Conference Leads.

If you register attendees in another system, you can import them from a CSV file (a plain spreadsheet format). Conference Tracker is built around sessions and proof of who attended them, so if your event has no sessions to track, much of what it does will go unused.

Conference Attendee for attendees

Conference Attendee is available on iPhone and Android. Attendees who do not install it can use the conference’s website instead, but venue maps and the social feed work only in the app. Because the app works from the same attendee record as registration and check-in, each attendee sees their own attendance and continuing education credits as they earn them. They download their certificate from the conference’s website without asking your staff.

In the app, attendees browse sessions by name, speaker or location, bookmark the ones they plan to attend and keep notes on them. Where you switch it on, they check themselves in and out of a session by scanning its QR code. If they forget the printed badge, the app shows their own QR code as an electronic one. Your push notifications can go to everyone, to one attendee or to the attendees of one session or group, and you can schedule them in advance.

You upload the venue’s maps and floor plans and mark rooms and exhibitors on them, so attendees can find both. Attendees can also search a directory of everyone at the conference, message each other privately and book one-to-one meetings.

The social feed has a general wall for the conference and a wall for each session, where attendees post messages, photos and files. During a talk, the session’s wall is where attendees post their questions, and presenters can post there too. Posting and liking earn points toward an Engagement Score that ranks attendees against each other. A moderator you choose can delete posts and block anyone who misuses the walls, attendees can flag a post for review, and you can switch the feed off entirely. After each session, attendees rate it in the app.

The staff app and the organizer’s view

Your team checks people in with the Conference Tracker staff app, which is free to download for your Conference Tracker account. Staff scan badges with the camera of a phone or tablet, or with a barcode reader, and each check-in appears in your account as soon as the device is online. When the Wi-Fi drops, the app stores scans on the device and uploads them when the connection returns, so check-in keeps working. On the attendee side, ask any vendor, us included, what attendees can see in the app without a connection.

You design badges in Conference Tracker and can print each one as the attendee checks in, on a badge printer or on standard badge sheets in an office printer. Conference Tracker also works out the continuing education credits each attendee earned, using the rule you set for each session, such as a share of the session time. A session can require a passed quiz before it awards credit, and attendees take that quiz in a web browser rather than in the app.

Conference Tracker itself runs in a web browser. While the event runs, a live dashboard shows registrations, check-ins and how many attendees have logged in to the app. Afterward, the attendance records show how long each attendee stayed in each session, and a social activity report shows which sessions attendees bookmarked, viewed and talked about most. Every record exports as a CSV, HTML or Excel file.

Online and hybrid sessions can show a Zoom meeting, a live feed from OBS (Open Broadcaster Software, a free streaming program) or a recorded video that starts at the scheduled time. Streaming needs the Conference Tracker Virtual Package, a paid add-on, and a Zoom meeting also needs a Zoom Pro account or higher.

Conference Leads for exhibitors

Conference Leads is the exhibitor app, which booth staff use to collect attendee contacts by scanning badges. Exhibitors buy a license for each person who will scan, and only through your event, so you decide whether to offer it at all. Each license works on one device at a time.

A representative scans an attendee’s badge with the phone’s camera, and the contact record opens already filled with what the conference holds on that attendee. The exhibitor’s qualifying questions, the short questions its sales team uses to judge a lead, then appear on screen, and any of them can be required before the lead is saved. You can add questions for every exhibitor, and theirs follow yours. Scanning works with no internet connection at the booth, but the app needs a connection once before the show to set it up and once afterward to upload the leads.

Exhibitors export their leads as a CSV, HTML or Excel file and import that into their CRM (the customer relationship management software their sales team uses), because the app has no direct CRM connection. Each exhibitor sees its leads by representative, date and time of day, alongside show-wide figures such as average leads per exhibitor. Exhibitors can also buy push notifications to every Conference Attendee user, at a price you set and up to a limit you set for each company.

Once the exhibitors’ devices sync, every lead is visible to you in Conference Tracker, so the booth numbers are yours to report. You can also draw prizes from the attendees the exhibitors scanned most, so booth visits count toward your prizes.

If your attendees still ask your desk where the next session is, request a Conference Tracker demo and see the three apps working from one attendee record.

How to get attendees using the app

An app only helps the attendees who install it and open it, so how you introduce it matters as much as which app you chose.

Promote the app early

Tell attendees about the app when they register. Put the download links in the confirmation email and on the event website, and name two or three things they can do with it, such as building a personal schedule.

Closer to the event, send one email that explains how to download the app, log in and bookmark sessions. Brief your speakers, exhibitors and team as well, since they use the app too. That way most attendees arrive with the app installed, and your team does not have to teach it at the desk. Conference Tracker can also text attendees an invitation to download Conference Attendee as they check in.

Give attendees reasons to open it

Some attendees will not install another app without a reason. Make the app the first place news appears, such as room changes and announcements, and run a points contest with a prize for the most active attendees.

During sessions, ask moderators and speakers to point people to the app, for example by asking the audience to post questions or photos on the session’s feed. Post a few things on the feed before the event as well, because a feed that already has posts is easier to join than an empty one.

Learn from the first event

Treat the first event on a new app as a trial. In your post-event survey, ask attendees whether the app was easy to use, what they used most and what confused them.

The app’s own usage figures tell you the rest. A feature few people used may have been hard to find, or your audience may not have wanted it. A feature that drew heavy use, such as the session feed, deserves more room in next year’s program.

Start with the questions your desk hears most

Write down the three questions attendees ask most often at your registration desk, such as where a session is or how to get on the Wi-Fi. Make sure the app answers them on its first screen. Then switch on the features that give you numbers you will use, such as session check-ins and evaluations, and leave the rest off until you need them.

Because each office chose its own system, any new purchase has to fit with the ones already there. Once you know what each type of system does and where the types overlap, you can show which data your campus already has and which it is missing. A budget request for a new system has to show exactly that.

Key takeaways

• Higher education software is the set of systems a college runs on: the student information system, the learning management system, admissions software, finance and HR systems, and student services tools.
• Support services such as tutoring, advising and learning centers are often the missing piece, because the large systems rarely record who used which service.
• A new system that reads from your student information system and accepts your campus login is easier to run and more likely to be used, because nobody re-enters a student list by hand or remembers a second password.
• Homegrown systems often fail when the one person who maintains them leaves. A vendor-hosted system still needs a campus administrator, but its servers and updates do not depend on one member of your staff.

What is higher education software?

Higher education software, often shortened to higher ed software, covers every system a college or university uses to run teaching, administration and student services. It ranges from campus-wide suites that hold every student’s record to small tools that one office buys for a single job.

Most campuses end up with many systems rather than one. The registrar keeps enrollment and transcripts while the business office runs payroll and budgets, so each buys a system built for its own records. Some vendors sell suites that cover several of these jobs, yet even a campus on one suite tends to add smaller tools for the work the suite does not reach.

The main types of higher education software

Many campuses run some version of each system below. Student support services are where the gaps between them show most, since the large systems are built around enrollment, courses and money.

Student information systems (SIS)

A student information system (SIS) is the campus record of every student, and most other systems read from it. Your registrar’s office keeps it, with enrollment, course registration, grades, transcripts and account holds alongside each student’s contact details. Banner and Jenzabar are two examples.

An SIS shows what a student is enrolled in, but it rarely shows what the student does outside class, such as a tutoring visit or an advising appointment. School districts and private schools run the same kind of system, sometimes sold as a school management system, so if your institution also works with schools, our guide to choosing a school management system covers it from a school office’s side.

Learning management systems (LMS)

A learning management system (LMS) is where your courses run online. Instructors post materials and grades there, and students submit assignments and read feedback in one secure place. Canvas, Blackboard and D2L are common examples.

An LMS records what happens inside a course. A student who visits the writing center about an essay for that course leaves no record there unless your center’s tool is connected to it.

Customer relationship management (CRM) for admissions and advancement

A customer relationship management (CRM) system tracks your relationships with people outside the classroom. Admissions tracks prospective students in it from first inquiry to enrollment, and advancement, the fundraising office, keeps in touch with alumni and donors. Some campuses also run retention outreach to current students from a CRM, but the academic record stays in the SIS, and visits to support services seldom reach either one.

Finance, HR and ERP systems

Finance and HR systems run the business side of your campus: budgets, purchasing, payroll and staff records. When one vendor’s suite combines them, often together with the SIS, it is called an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The business office and human resources work in these systems every day, and what they record about students is mostly billing and payments.

Portals and single sign-on

A portal is the web page where students and staff handle routine business, such as requesting a transcript, paying a bill or recording work hours. Many campuses pair it with single sign-on, which lets one campus login open the portal, the LMS and other systems without a separate password for each.

Campus IT runs single sign-on through an identity provider, the service that checks each login. Any new system you buy should accept it, since students are less likely to use a system that asks them for yet another password.

Student services and center management

Tutoring centers, writing centers, advising offices and other support services need a record of who came in, for what and for how long. Your SIS rarely holds that, which makes it hard for a center to compare its visits with grades and retention, the evidence a budget review asks for.

Accudemia, the academic center management software we make, keeps that record. We host it in the cloud, so its servers, backups and updates are ours to run. More than 500 academic centers use it for appointments, sign-in kiosks, session notes and reports. After Davis & Elkins College moved its center onto Accudemia, it recorded over 4,000 more visits in a year than its old tools had captured the year before, and it found that the center serves 61 percent of the college’s students.

Accudemia works with your SIS and LMS rather than replacing them. It reads students and courses from those systems and connects directly to Jenzabar, Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle. It also works with Outlook and Google calendars and with Zoom.

Scheduling and space management

Scheduling software books rooms, labs and equipment. The registrar or facilities office schedules classrooms, while libraries and centers may manage their own study rooms and labs. They can book those smaller spaces with room scheduling software for colleges, which replaces paper sign-up sheets with live availability. Accudemia includes room reservations for this.

What software changes on campus

Software changes three things for a campus office: how its records are kept and protected, what you can learn from them and how predictable your costs are. Measure all three in your own office before you buy, because those numbers make the case for the purchase.

Administrative work and security

Software takes over the record-keeping your staff once did on paper. Compiling the reports for the University of West Alabama’s UWA Cares program once took a full working day of typing paper sign-in sheets into Excel. On Accudemia, its coordinator now pulls as many as fifteen reports in under an hour, including the required-hours reports that stakeholders receive every Monday before noon.

Paper also needs guarding, with locked cabinets and someone in charge of the keys. With software, you decide who gets which account and can remove a person’s access on the day they leave. On a vendor-hosted system the vendor runs and secures the servers, while your campus still decides who may see each student’s records.

Data you can report on

When your records live in software, you can combine and analyze them, which paper and scattered spreadsheets make slow. Your tutoring visits mean more next to course grades, for example, because together they show where to put staff time and which students to reach before they fall behind.

To make that comparison with Accudemia, you export its visit records and match them to grades from your SIS. Monmouth University does this for its athletes. It compares the GPAs of those who log required study hours in Accudemia with the GPAs of students who have no such requirement.

Cost over time

Enterprise systems are expensive, and on a tight budget the subscription is the number everyone notices first. Your total cost also includes the staff who keep a system running and the hardware it needs. A cloud subscription makes that total easier to plan, since the vendor runs the servers and the yearly fee covers them, so the main question becomes how the fee grows with your campus. Before you buy a separate tool for a smaller need, such as student surveys or text messages, check whether a system you already pay for covers it.

Buying versus building your own

Buying is the safer choice for most campuses, unless you have developers whose job includes maintaining the system for years. A homegrown system starts when someone at the institution automates a task that used to be manual, and it often fits that first process well. It can stall once the person who wrote it leaves, though, and it seldom grows with the campus.

Davis & Elkins College’s learning center tried three ways of tracking visits before it moved to Accudemia. Work-study students first compiled paper sheets for weeks. The center then moved to Google Forms, copied into Excel by hand, and finally to a homegrown program whose author left.

A vendor that sells to many colleges keeps developers on the product, so it can change the software when campuses need something new. The move online in 2020 tested this, because tutoring and advising centers that had tracked visits in person suddenly had to track online sessions. In April 2020, Accudemia added remote sign-in links that staff share with students, so students could join a virtual session from wherever they were. Monmouth University, whose student-athletes book tutoring through Accudemia, set up a virtual sign-in and sign-out link so its athletes could complete required study hours from anywhere.

A purchased system will not match every office’s routine, so expect to change some processes to fit it. You will still need a campus administrator to manage accounts, settings and the data feed from your SIS.

How to choose higher education software

Start by mapping what your campus already runs, then ask every vendor how its system would fit with it. Without the map, a demo shows you what a product does rather than what your campus is missing.

Map what your campus already runs

List the systems each office uses, what data each one holds and who owns it. The gaps tend to show quickly, and support centers are a common one, since their visits seldom appear in any other system. If your campus already runs a student success or advising platform, check what it records about center visits before you add a tool, because some of those platforms handle appointments as well.

Questions to ask every vendor

Put the same questions to every vendor, so you can compare their answers directly:

• Does it read from your SIS, and how often does that data update?
• Does it accept your single sign-on?
• How does it handle FERPA, the federal law that protects student education records?
• What training and support come with the subscription, and what costs extra?
• Can you export your data in a standard format if you leave?
• How is it priced, and what makes the price grow?

How Accudemia connects to your systems

If your SIS or LMS is not among Accudemia’s direct connections, its data comes in through our import tool. Your IT staff export student, course and enrollment files from the SIS as CSV files, the spreadsheet format most systems can export. The tool then loads them from a Windows computer at your campus on a schedule your staff set, such as nightly, so nobody re-enters the student list by hand.

Most of the setup work on your side goes into those exports, especially student demographic data, which needs more preparation than names and IDs. With that data in place, Accudemia can limit each student’s tutoring options to the courses they are registered for. Students and staff can also log in with your campus single sign-on, because Accudemia supports SAML 2.0, a common standard for campus logins.

How Accudemia handles privacy, support and price

Accudemia’s privacy policy treats what you store in it as potentially protected education records under FERPA. Under that policy we act as a school official, using those records only to provide the service and only as your institution instructs. Your data and backups are hosted in the United States on Amazon Web Services, and data travels encrypted between your computers and our servers.

Every subscription includes a Getting Started session. Text messages to students use credits, and each renewal adds a yearly allotment, so you pay extra only for messages beyond it. You can export your data as CSV files, and each license covers a set number of active students, so the student count is what you size it by.

Allow for a long purchase and a learning curve

Clear answers matter because a campus purchase is slow and hard to undo. A large purchase such as a new SIS can take years from first request to contract, so a system that cannot connect to your SIS may stay long after you notice the problem.

Getting people to use a new system is the second risk. Many staff have no say in the software they use, and students almost never do, so people tend to drop a system that feels hard to use. Ask what training the vendor gives your staff and how quickly support answers once you are live, since your staff will lean on both during the first term.

If your support centers still count visits on paper or in spreadsheets, request an Accudemia demo and see how it fits beside the systems your campus already runs.

What to put in your budget request

Your budget request is stronger when it shows the gap before the product. Open it with your map: the systems your campus runs, the data each one holds and the records nobody keeps yet, such as visits to your support centers. Then name the system that would fill the gap, with its answers to the vendor questions and the work its SIS connection will leave your staff each term.

If your SIS itself is about to be replaced, put that decision first, because every system you add will read from it. A center tool bought before the new SIS is chosen may need its connection set up twice.

Most of that documentation describes training you design once. The part that takes longest is the record of how many hours each tutor has spent with students, because that number differs from the hours they were paid for and it only exists if you have been collecting it.

Key takeaways

• CRLA certification is the College Reading and Learning Association’s certification of a college tutor training program, awarded at three levels.
• Each level adds at least 10 hours of training on 10 or more CRLA topics and at least 25 hours of direct tutoring per tutor, along with a hiring standard and regular evaluation.
• The application asks for samples of the logs you keep of each tutor’s training and tutoring hours, and CRLA states that timesheets alone are not enough.
• A first certification lasts two years, and each renewal lasts four.

What is CRLA certification?

CRLA certification usually means the International Tutor Training Program Certification (ITTPC), which the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA) awards to a tutor training program at a college or university. It certifies the program rather than the people in it. It works like the accreditation of a degree program, where an outside body reviews the program and the program then awards its own credentials.

CRLA has certified tutor training programs since 1989. It counts data for accreditation reviews and a credential tutors can put on a resume among the benefits to your institution and your tutors.

How tutors earn a CRLA certificate

The phrase CRLA tutor certification usually refers to the certificate a certified program gives its own tutors. Tutors cannot apply to CRLA themselves. They complete a certified program’s training and tutoring hours at Level 1, 2 or 3, and the program then issues their certificate from a template CRLA provides.

So when a tutor asks how to get certified, the answer is to tutor at a college whose program is certified. A tutor’s certificate never needs renewing, because it records training already completed. Your program, though, can only issue certificates within the dates its own certification covers. CRLA keeps no list of the tutors who completed certified training, so a tutor who loses a certificate has to come back to you for a copy.

ITTPC and IPTPC

ITTPC covers peer, embedded and volunteer tutors, and writing or speech consultants. Mentors, coaches and Supplemental Instruction leaders fall under a separate CRLA program with its own application, the International Peer Educator Training Program Certification (IPTPC). If your center runs Supplemental Instruction sessions for historically difficult courses, the training of the students who lead them is certified under IPTPC.

The four requirements every level shares

Every level checks how you select tutors, how you train them, how many hours they tutor and how you evaluate them. CRLA publishes the full rules and each level’s topic list on its ITTPC requirements page, along with the new and renewal application forms.

Tutor selection

Before training begins, you show that each tutor knows the subject. For every tutor, your program needs:

• a grade of A or B in the subject they will tutor, or equivalent experience you can justify
• a recommendation from someone who knows the subject, such as a former instructor or a department chair
• an interview in which you explain what the job involves.

Equivalent experience can be work experience, related coursework or a test result, as long as you explain how you judged it.

Training

Each level needs at least 10 hours of training, spread over at least 10 topics from CRLA’s list for that level, with 30 minutes or more on each. The topics come from five groups at every level (the basics of tutoring, communication, learning and study skills, ethics and equity, and electives), with a minimum number from each group. At Level 1, for example, the basics include the role of the tutor and conducting a successful session.

At least 5 of each level’s hours must be TIS (tutor-trainer led, interactive and synchronous), which means a trainer runs the session live and the tutors take part. Beyond that, the format is up to you, so workshops, a two-day retreat, a course or a series of meetings all qualify, in person or online. The remaining hours can be self-paced reading or video. Whatever the format, you record each tutor’s attendance and the time spent on each topic.

Tutoring experience

Each tutor needs at least 25 hours of direct tutoring at each level, and you track those hours tutor by tutor. Direct means time spent with students, so front-desk coverage, Supplemental Instruction sessions and planning time do not count. CRLA also states that timesheets alone are not enough to document these hours.

Evaluation

CRLA asks for an evaluation process, formal or informal, that runs regularly, is specific to each tutor and lets the tutor see the results. Each level needs at least one evaluation during its training period. CRLA recommends that the evaluation match your training goals and that a trainer or supervisor who knows those goals take part.

CRLA certification levels, hours and fees

The three levels are sequential, so each one adds at least 10 training hours, 10 topics and 25 tutoring hours to the level before it. Level 1 covers the basics, Level 2 adds metacognitive skills (how students think about their own learning) and psychosocial ones (the emotional and social side of learning), and Level 3 widens to learning center management and student development theory.

These fees have applied to new and renewal applications since January 2024 and are current in 2026. Each additional program or campus on the same certificate adds $100 for members or $150 for non-members. You do not have to join CRLA to apply, but members pay $200 less at every level.

A member center that certifies Levels 1 and 2 for its main campus and one satellite campus pays $750, which is the $650 application plus $100 for the second campus. Without membership, the same application costs $1,000. Both campuses have to select, train, track and evaluate tutors the same way, and every tutor the center certifies at Level 2 has completed at least 20 hours of training and logged at least 50 hours of direct tutoring.

Review time, validity and renewal

CRLA reviews most applications within four to six months. A first certification is valid for two years, and it counts back up to one year before its approval date for tutors who had already met the approved requirements. A renewal with the same levels, programs and campuses is valid for four years, and you renew every four years after that.

Your renewal is due by the expiration date of your current certification. You can still renew up to 180 days after expiration for an extra $100 late fee, but a longer lapse means a new application.

What the application asks you to submit

The application asks for two kinds of material, documents that describe your training and records that show training and tutoring happened. CRLA posts the application questions and sample answers from a certified program on its requirements page, so you can see the format before you start.

Training documents

For each level, you submit:

• a syllabus, schedule or set of agendas showing which sessions cover which topics, for how long, and with what methods and materials
• materials from sample training sessions, two for Level 1 and one for each higher level
• for each sample session, its plan, the slides or handouts used, the learning outcomes it serves and how you assess them, and a short annotated bibliography of its sources
• the strategies you use to keep training materials within copyright law, such as fair use or permission from the copyright holder.

Hour logs

Your program keeps two logs for every tutor at each level. The training log records the hours and topics each tutor completed. The tutoring log records each tutor’s direct hours with students, and CRLA wants to see how you collect that data and how you count it.

For the tutoring log, the application asks for a sample. You attach a tracking log for at least one tutor covering at least two weeks within the last year, plus the report that adds that tutor’s hours up over time. You redact last names and ID numbers in every log.

Each level also needs at least one sample trainee evaluation, redacted the same way. Pick one that shows the evaluation was specific to the tutor and that the tutor saw the results, since CRLA requires both.

New or renewal application

Which form you use depends on what you are asking CRLA to certify. The application for new certification covers a first certification, a return after a lapse, and any added level, program or campus. The renewal application covers only a renewal with the same levels, programs and campuses as before.

A first application has no deadline. If you plan to add a level, CRLA suggests doing it when your renewal is due, using the new-certification form, because that costs least and keeps all your levels on one timeline. The certification that results counts as new and runs for two years.

Keeping the hour records CRLA asks for

The tutoring hours requirement depends most on how your center keeps records, because CRLA wants each tutor’s time with students counted apart from the rest of their paid hours. A payroll timesheet cannot separate the two, since it only shows when a tutor clocked in and out. Your tutoring log has to record sessions instead, meaning which student met which tutor and for how long, whether tutors keep it on paper, in a spreadsheet or in tutoring center software.

Decide how you count group sessions before you start, too. An hour with three students is one hour of the tutor’s time, even if your records show three visits.

Separate tutoring time from work time

Accudemia, the academic center management software we make, keeps tutoring time and work time in separate records. Each visit signed in through Accudemia produces a session log with its start and end times and the tutor the student met. A tutor’s own clock-in and clock-out is stored separately as a work-hour log.

You can filter the visit data by tutor, down to each session and the time spent, without exporting it. A report called Tutor Activity puts one tutor’s student activity beside that tutor’s work hours, though you run it one tutor at a time. That suits the one-tutor sample the application asks for. For the rest of your tutors, you work from the visit data filtered by tutor, and you still apply your group-session rule to it. Front-desk time is already out of that data, because it sits in the work-hour log, and Supplemental Instruction attendance is tracked in a separate module with its own reports.

Training attendance and gaps to watch

Tutors can register for training workshops in Accudemia. An event sign-in station (a kiosk set up for the workshop) then records who attended, while the time spent on each topic still comes from your training schedule. The reports only cover what was recorded, though. If you run online tutoring and let students join a session from the online waiting line on their own, those visits leave no session log unless staff add one. Your syllabus, session plans and evaluations stay documents your staff write.

How three colleges keep these records

Hardin-Simmons University, a private Texas university with just under 1,700 students, runs a CRLA certified tutoring program in its Academic Center for Enrichment. The center uses Accudemia data to show it meets its certification requirements, and the same records give its tutors the session history they need for their own certificates. Our account of how Hardin-Simmons runs its certified center includes the director explaining how the data documents tutor hours for CRLA.

Slippery Rock University’s tutoring program has also earned CRLA certification. In one of our user spotlight sessions, the coordinator of its tutorial center walks through the attendance and tutor hours reports the center uses for the direct-hours requirement.

Geneva College’s Academic Support Office shows the timesheet problem in practice. Before it logged sessions in Accudemia, its tutoring record came from the payroll system, which showed how long tutors worked but not which students they met or what they covered.

If you are preparing a first CRLA application or a renewal, request an Accudemia demo and see how session logs and tutor hours reports would document your tutors’ direct hours.

Where to start

CRLA certifies training that is already running, so you design and deliver your training before you apply. The hour logs take longest to build, because they only exist once tutoring has been recorded, so begin with them even if you plan to apply next year. These steps get a first application moving:

1. Start logging each tutor’s direct tutoring hours apart from their work hours this term, since the application needs at least two weeks of logs from the last year.
2. Choose the level that matches the training you already deliver. Level 1 is the base every higher level builds on.
3. Map your current training sessions to CRLA’s topic list for that level, and count the hours a trainer leads live.
4. Gather each tutor’s hiring evidence (grades, recommendations and interview notes) in one place.
5. Decide whether to join CRLA before you apply, since members pay a lower fee.

It helps to settle those choices before the first meeting, because each one shapes the next. The coaches you can staff, for example, limit how many students you can take and how often each one can meet a coach.

Key takeaways

• Student success coaching pairs a student with a trained coach who helps them set goals, build study habits and reach campus support before problems grow.
• Coaching works on a student’s habits, time and use of campus help, while advising plans courses and degree requirements and tutoring teaches course content.
• A new program is easiest to run with one group of students, such as first-year students or students referred by faculty, who meet their coach on a set schedule.
• You can tell whether coaching works from coached students’ re-enrollment and course results, but only if each meeting leaves a note from the start.

What is student success coaching?

Student success coaching is a one-to-one, goal-centered relationship in which a trained coach helps a student build the habits, skills and connections they need to stay enrolled. Campuses also call it academic coaching or success coaching, and the staff who do it are often called academic success coaches. The coach works on what sits around the coursework, such as time, study habits and knowing where to get help.

Coaching vs. advising and tutoring

Coaching sits between two services your campus already runs, which is why the lines blur. The three usually divide the work like this:

Advisors usually carry large caseloads and spend their time on degree plans, while coaches carry smaller ones, which leaves time for the habits and the problems outside class that get in a student’s way. If your coaching will sit inside the advising office, our guide to academic advising software covers what advisors look for in a system.

Counseling is a separate service that supports mental health, so a coach sends a student in crisis to a counselor.

What does a student success coach do?

Most coaching meetings mix three kinds of work, and the balance shifts as the term goes on, from planning in the first weeks to follow-up near exams.

Goals and a plan for the term

Early meetings usually turn a general goal, such as passing every course, into a plan for the term. The coach and student go through the courses, the deadlines and how many hours are left after a job, family care or a long commute. Later meetings then have something concrete to check against.

Time management and study habits

Here a coach helps the student change what they do each week. The coach might help them block study hours around a work schedule, break a research paper into weekly pieces, or try a different way of preparing for exams. The aim is to make better use of the hours and the campus help the student already has.

Getting to the right campus office

A coach is often the person who connects a student with the rest of the campus. That might mean tutoring for a difficult course, counseling, financial aid or career services. The connection only counts if the student goes, so the coach asks at the next meeting whether they did and notes the answer.

How to set up a coaching program

A coaching program is easiest to start small, with one group of students, one meeting schedule and one meeting note that every coach uses.

Choose who you coach first

Pick one group whose needs you can describe, such as first-year students, students returning from academic probation, or students referred by faculty with a concern. Also decide whether meetings are required or optional for the group. Required meetings reach students who would not come on their own, which suits a group such as students on probation. Then size the group to the coaches you have, because follow-up is the first thing to slip when a caseload grows too large.

There is no standard caseload for coaches, so work it out from the meetings you want. Multiply the number of students by the meetings each should have in the term, then by the hours one meeting and its note take, and compare the result with the hours your coaches can give.

Decide who coaches and how you prepare them

Coaches can be full-time staff, graduate students working part-time, or trained undergraduate peers, and many programs mix them. We recommend staff coaches for students whom faculty refer for absences or failing grades, since those cases need experience. Trained peers suit a broad group such as first-year students, where reaching everyone matters more.

Name your coaches before the term starts, and train them before their first meeting on at least these points:

• The goals of the program and the students it serves.
• How to run a first meeting and build a plan with the student.
• When to send a student to counseling or another office.
• What coaches may share with faculty under FERPA, the federal law that protects student records.
• How to write the meeting note.

If your coaches are students, CRLA (the College Reading and Learning Association) certifies peer training programs, including those for peer coaches and peer mentors, through its International Peer Educator Training Program Certification (IPTPC). The first level of that certification asks for at least 10 hours of training.

Set a meeting schedule

Decide how many meetings each student should have in the term, and book each student’s first meeting for the first two weeks, before the term gets busy. Regular meetings hold a student to the plan, because a goal that nobody asks about again tends to fade. Offer meetings in person and online, leave room for a drop-in between appointments, and agree how soon a coach reaches out after a missed meeting.

Connect coaching to referrals

Faculty, advisors and tutors notice problems that a coach does not see, so agree in advance how their concerns reach a coach. Each referral should go to one named coach who contacts the student. Decide what the person who sent it hears back. That can be whether the coach reached the student, what the student agreed to do and how the referral closed, while personal details stay in the coach’s notes. Our guide to spotting at-risk students and routing faculty referrals covers how to build a referral route that faculty keep using.

Decide what each meeting records

Before the first meeting, decide what a coach writes down afterward. A short meeting note is enough, as long as it records these four things:

• What the coach and student discussed.
• What the student agreed to do.
• Any office the student was referred to.
• The date of the next meeting.

Keep the note’s questions the same for the whole term, because a note that changes halfway through splits your records into two halves that will not compare. Decide at the same time who can read the notes, since a student may tell a coach things they would not want passed to an instructor.

What your coaching system needs to do

For a pilot with one or two coaches, a shared spreadsheet and a simple form can carry the meeting notes. Once several coaches are meeting students, separate calendars and documents stop showing you who has been seen, who has not, and what was agreed. At that point you need one system for appointments, notes and referrals.

Accudemia, the academic center management software we make, was built for tutoring and academic support centers, and coaching runs on the same appointments, notes and referrals. East Carolina University’s Pirate Academic Success Center runs two Accudemia centers, one for academic coaching and one for tutoring, so each service keeps its own policies while students reach both in one system. We describe that setup in how East Carolina brought coaching and tutoring together. Slippery Rock University runs its tutoring and peer academic coaching teams as separate centers too. In an Accudemia user spotlight, the head of its tutorial center explains that this keeps each team’s data apart.

Booking with the student’s own coach

Students should be able to book the coach assigned to them, and coaches should see their week in one calendar. In Accudemia, a center can limit each student to their assigned staff, and those assignments can be imported from a file rather than entered one by one. A single service can offer in-person and online appointments alongside drop-ins. Each center can also rename its Tutor and Tutoring labels, so your students see Coach and Coaching instead.

A record of every contact the next coach can read

Every meeting should leave a note that another coach could pick up, and that only the right people can read. Accudemia logs each visit with the student, the staff member, the service and the time, and coaches can add comments that students do not see unless you share them in a report.

A center can also build a one-page meeting note form, which Accudemia calls a Session Assessment. Its questions can cover the goal, the agreed actions, any office the student was sent to and the next date. Instructors can read those forms only if you let them run the assessment reports, and then only for their own students. Southern University at Shreveport’s success coaches complete that form after every meeting, as the center explains in a video on how its coaches track each contact.

Referrals that reach a coach and report back

In Accudemia, each referral sends an email to the person named as its follow-up owner. Each one is also marked unassigned, assigned or past its due date, so the ones that need attention stand out. Referral updates are kept apart from the coach’s meeting notes, so the coach decides what goes into an update the instructor sees. At Shreveport, referrals on at-risk students go to a Success Coach, and the center chose to keep faculty closely informed. The faculty member who made the referral is alerted at every contact and agreed action until the referral closes with the student back on track.

Limits to know before a demo

Accudemia does not replace your student information system. It imports students, classes and enrollment from it on a schedule, including the single-file extracts that Banner and PeopleSoft produce, so degree plans and registration stay where your advisors already keep them. Referrals and multiple centers need the main edition, called the Accudemia License, rather than the single-center Accudemia Light.

To see coaching appointments, meeting notes and faculty referrals working in one record before your first term, request an Accudemia demo for the group you plan to coach first.

How to tell whether coaching is working

Coaching is working when the students you coach stay enrolled, pass their courses and act on their plans more often than similar students who were not coached. A randomized study at eight public, private and for-profit universities, published in 2014 in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, tested whether assigning students to a coach kept more of them enrolled. In the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse review of the study, 66 percent of students assigned to a coach were still enrolled after 12 months, against 61 percent of students in the comparison group. The 5-point gap is statistically significant, and the review gives the study its top rating for research quality.

That coaching came from an outside service by phone, email and text rather than from campus staff in person. Most participants were nontraditional students, who are often older or working, so a campus program may see different results. The review also found no statistically significant difference in degree completion, which was measured two years after coaching began, a short window for finishing a degree. The study shows that coaching kept more students enrolled, then, but not that it raised graduation.

Track these measures for the students you coach:

• How many enrolled for the next term.
• How many passed the courses they were taking.
• How many reached the office their coach sent them to, and how many referrals were closed.
• How many met their coach as often as the plan said, which shows whether the program ran as designed.
• What students say in a short survey at the end of the term.

Compare the results with a similar group, such as last year’s students with the same profile, because coached students are often chosen for being at risk. Their raw numbers can look worse than the campus average even when coaching helps them.

Where to start

A first term of coaching needs one group of students, enough trained coaches to serve it and a meeting note, and you can set all three up before the term begins. Then follow these steps, from before the term to midterm:

1. Pick one group of students and invite them before the term starts.
2. Name your coaches and train them on the plan, the meeting note and what they may share.
3. Book every student’s first meeting in the first two weeks of the term.
4. Agree with faculty how a referral reaches a coach and how they will hear back.
5. Review the meeting notes at midterm and adjust the schedule if students are slipping.

Software helps, but a monitoring program starts with a weekly review of the data and a named person who contacts each flagged student.

Key takeaways

• Academic monitoring is how a college collects and acts on data about student progress, such as attendance, grades and center visits, before problems grow.
• Attendance, missing assignments and visits to support centers often change before grades do, so they warn you first.
• Every warning sign needs a named person who reviews it and contacts the student.
• You judge the program first by what happens after each flag, such as whether the student got help and returned the next term.

What is academic monitoring?

In higher education, academic monitoring is the process of collecting data about each student’s progress and engagement, reviewing it on a regular schedule, and acting on what it shows before a student fails or withdraws from a course.

For a long time, monitoring meant watching grades, which only change after a student has fallen behind. Today it also covers three measures that move earlier: class attendance, LMS activity and center visits. When all three drop together, you usually still have weeks of the term left to act.

How monitoring relates to early alerts

Monitoring is the regular reading of student data across the term. An early alert is a flag about one student, raised by a faculty member or by an automatic rule, and sent to the person who will follow it up. Our guide to identifying at-risk students explains how early alerts reach the right person and how faculty hear what happened.

Why academic monitoring matters

Academic monitoring matters because it lets your staff make the first move instead of waiting for a struggling student to ask. Retention, funding and fair access to support all depend on how early that move comes.

Retention

Every student who leaves before finishing takes their remaining tuition with them and lowers your college’s graduation rate. Students often leave after weeks of missed classes and unfinished work, so a program that spots that pattern gives your staff time to step in. Our guide to student retention strategies covers the advising and support programs that help those students stay once you have contacted them.

Funding

By 2020, more than half of the states tied part of their public college funding to student outcomes through performance-based funding models, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO). The share of funding at stake varies widely by state. In those states, a record of which flagged students stayed and passed their courses shows the outcomes the state pays for.

Equity

Students who struggle for reasons outside class, such as long work hours or family duties, are often the ones who do not come in on their own. Vincent Tinto’s book Leaving College ties retention to a strong sense of community on campus, in class and outside it. A student who never visits a center or an advisor may lack that connection and be drifting away even while their grades hold.

What to monitor

The most useful data is usually already on your campus, spread across offices that rarely compare notes. Start with the sources you have and add others as the process grows.

Academic data

Your student information system (SIS) holds enrollment, course load, grade history and academic standing, including probation. Your LMS shows logins and submitted work in each course. Submissions change early, so a student who stops turning in work can be flagged well before midterm.

Engagement data

Engagement data covers class attendance, check-ins at tutoring and learning centers, advising appointments and attendance at campus events. A student who never visits the center, or whose visits stop partway through the term, deserves a second look when attendance in the same course is slipping too.

Financial and administrative signals

A hold on a student’s account or a change in financial aid can block registration and push a student toward leaving. Falling short of Satisfactory Academic Progress, the grade and pace standard for keeping federal aid, can do the same. These signals sit with the business office and financial aid, so agree in advance on who may see them and who acts on them.

Concerns people report

Some of what puts a student at risk is never typed into a system. An instructor may notice that a student seems overwhelmed, and residence life staff may hear about a crisis at home. Give faculty and staff one simple referral form, and those concerns can join the rest of your data.

Measures to watch

Once you collect the data, these measures help you decide which students and courses need attention first:

• Pace to degree, which shows whether a student is earning credits fast enough to finish on time.
• DFW rate, the share of students in a course who earn a D or an F, or withdraw. It matters most in the large introductory courses that many majors require, often called gateway courses.
• Engagement, a combined measure of LMS activity, attendance and use of support services.
• Sudden change in any of these, because a sharp drop in LMS activity or grades says more than one low score.

A four-step monitoring workflow

A monitoring program repeats the same cycle all term: collect the data, review it, contact the student and record what happened. Give each step a named owner before the term starts.

Collect

Pull the data from each system on a schedule your team can keep, automatically where you can, so nobody has to retype it. A weekly pull is enough for most signals while the program is new.

Review

Before the term starts, agree on the patterns that count as a flag, for example two missed classes in a row in one course or a week with no LMS login. That way every reviewer makes the same call. A pattern that shows up in two sources, like falling attendance and falling LMS activity in the same course, is a stronger case than one low quiz score.

Intervene

Each flag goes to the person best placed to act on it, and who that is depends on what the flag shows:

• Advisors for course load, registration and degree planning.
• Success coaches for barriers outside class, such as work hours or money worries.
• Center staff for tutoring in the course where the student is struggling.

Faculty can raise a flag too, and they add context the data cannot show. Whoever makes the contact, the first message works best when it names the class the student has missed and the service that can help.

In a short video walk-through, the Center for Student Success at Southern University at Shreveport shows its referral process in Accudemia, the academic center management software we make. A faculty member submits a referral and a success coach invites the student in. When the student completes an academic plan, the faculty member is told which actions were agreed, and the referral closes.

Measure

After each contact, record what happened, for instance whether the student came to tutoring, met an advisor or returned to class. Record false alarms as well, because they show you which flags to adjust.

Choosing tools for academic monitoring

Test each tool against the data and the process you already have. These questions are worth asking in any demo:

• Can it bring in the data you plan to watch, such as class enrollments from your SIS, or will staff enter it by hand?
• Can you limit each kind of flag to the roles your Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) policy allows?
• Does every contact with the student leave a record that the next staff member can read?
• Can it report at the end of the term on what happened to flagged students?

How AccuClass fits in

If class attendance is your earliest warning sign, our class attendance software, AccuClass, covers that one signal. It raises alerts automatically by rule.

Attendance comes in through the instructor’s roll call, sign-in stations or the AccuClass mobile app. You set the rule, for example a number of absences in one class. When a student triggers it, the alert goes to the student and the instructor, and you can add other recipients, such as an advisor.

Once a week, administrators receive a summary of every flagged student, so nobody has to run a report. AccuClass covers class attendance only, so the follow-up still needs an owner in your advising office or center.

How Accudemia fits in

Accudemia covers the records your support centers keep. It imports your classes and student enrollments from your SIS, logs each visit through sign-in kiosks and appointments, and lets tutors add comments and an assessment of the student’s progress to each session log.

In Accudemia, referrals come from tutors and instructors who are worried about a student, and Accudemia also calls them early alerts. Each referral goes by email to the follow-up person you assign and appears on a dashboard your staff check. If the follow-up person changes, the new owner can read every earlier comment in the referral’s history.

Accudemia’s built-in visit reports and its referrals summary show which referred students came in for a visit. Grades and assignment data stay in your SIS and LMS, so your team reads those systems alongside Accudemia.

To see visits, referrals and session notes kept together for each student, request an Accudemia demo and bring the warning signs you plan to watch.

Rolling out monitoring in phases

Start with one group of students and widen the program once the process holds up, because a small start shows how much staff time each flag takes.

Pilot

For the first term or two, run the process with one group, such as first-year students or a single college. Build a small team from advising, your support centers and institutional research, and agree on a few measures and who reviews each one. Keep the group small enough that your team can contact every flagged student within the same week.

Expand

Once the pilot shows which contacts help, adjust your flags and add colleges and support services one at a time. Train the faculty and staff in each new group as it joins, so every group starts with a process that already works. This is also the stage to connect your tools to the SIS and LMS where that saves staff time.

Scale

In the second year, the process runs campus-wide. Predictive models become worth considering at this stage, once your own records cover several terms and you can check a model against them. Comparing results across courses can also show which courses or policies hold students back.

Privacy, bias and faculty buy-in

Before the first flag goes out, decide who may see what, how you will check flags for bias, and how faculty will hear back.

FERPA

FERPA is the federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. It lets a college share records with school officials who have a legitimate educational interest, without the student’s consent, and those officials can include faculty. Your college’s annual FERPA notice defines who counts as a school official and what counts as a legitimate educational interest.

Check each monitoring role against that notice and against the US Department of Education’s FERPA regulations and guidance. It also helps to tell students what you monitor and why, for example at orientation, so a message from an advisor does not come as a surprise.

Bias in predictive models

Because predictive models score each student’s risk from past data, they can repeat any inequities that data reflects. Each term, check how flags fall across student groups. Use a risk score to decide whom to contact first, and leave decisions about the student to the people who meet them.

Faculty buy-in

Some faculty will see monitoring as surveillance of their students. Explain what you collect, who sees it and what a flag leads to, which is usually a conversation with an advisor or coach. Faculty also keep raising concerns when they can see where each one goes. Tell them when someone has contacted the student, and share a summary at the end of each term.

Measuring the results of academic monitoring

The first test of a monitoring program is what happened to the students it flagged, such as whether they used a support service after someone contacted them and whether they stayed enrolled. Your contact records answer that within a term. Over several years, the program should also move these campus measures, compared with the years before it started:

• Course success, for example a lower DFW rate in the gateway courses you targeted.
• Retention, especially from the first year to the second.
• Time to degree, or how long your students take to graduate.

To estimate the return, take the net tuition kept from students who would otherwise have left, subtract what the program costs, and divide the result by that cost. Count the tuition for every term those students stay. You can only estimate which students would have left, so state your assumptions whenever you present the figure.

Long-term reporting is easier when your centers record every visit. At Santa Barbara City College, which runs its centers on Accudemia, the Institutional Research office draws on those records each semester when it reports how the centers affect student retention and success.

Your first term of academic monitoring

The first version of your monitoring program can run this term on the systems you already have, in three steps:

1. Pick two or three warning signs you can pull without new software, for example absences in gateway courses, missing LMS work and center visits.
2. Name who reviews each one and how often, such as the advising office every Monday.
3. Record each contact and what came of it.

After one term, those records show how much staff time each kind of flag takes and which contacts led somewhere. Bring that evidence to any decision about adding or changing a tool.

Schools often start shopping when their separate tools stop agreeing and the same student has a different record in each. If most of the trouble sits in one area, such as attendance or fees, a specialized tool connected to the system you have may be enough. If it is spread across every office, one system that holds a single record for each student is usually worth the larger project.

Key takeaways

• A school management system is software that keeps student records, attendance, class schedules, grading, fees and family communication in one place.
• The jobs your offices do today tell you which modules you need.
• How well a system connects to the tools you keep matters as much as its list of modules, because otherwise your staff type the same data twice.
• Training and a named owner keep your staff using the system after the first weeks.

What is a school management system?

A school management system is software that holds your school’s student records and daily routines in one place, so every office works from one shared record for each student. Vendors also call it a school administration system or a school information management system, and the names usually describe the same kind of software.

Most systems are built from modules, one for each job, and many vendors let you buy only the ones you need. The common modules are:

• Student records hold each student’s enrollment, contact details, attendance history and disciplinary records.
• Class schedules set which teacher, room and students meet in each period, and when clubs and activities run.
• Attendance tracks who was in each class and who was absent or late.
• Grading and assessment keeps the gradebook, calculates results and produces report cards and progress reports.
• Family communication sends messages to parents and guardians, often through a parent portal (a website or app where families see grades and attendance).
• Fees and finance collects tuition, issues invoices, records payments and tracks spending against the budget.

An all-in-one system saves you from keeping a student’s record in several places, but every office changes its routine at once, so it asks more of your staff at the start. The alternative is a few connected tools. Connected means that data entered in one appears in the others without anyone retyping it.

What a school management system does for your school

Most of what a school management system saves comes from one change. Offices stop keeping their own copies of a student’s details, so a detail entered once reaches everyone who needs it.

Less time on administration

In many school offices, staff type the same details into several places. A new student, for example, needs an enrollment file, a class list and a fee account. With one system, the office enters those details once, and online registration forms let families type their own details for your staff to check.

Faster communication with families

When grades, attendance and contact details sit in one system, a teacher can update a family without hunting for a phone number. A system can also notify parents automatically when a student is marked absent, so they hear that day rather than at the next report card.

Data you can act on

With attendance and grades in one place, you can spot a student whose absences rise in the weeks before the grades fall, and step in while there is still time to help. Attendance is often the earliest of those signs, which is why our guide to tracking student attendance covers how to turn attendance records into an early warning. The finance module helps at budget time too, because it shows fees collected, payments outstanding and spending against the plan.

How to choose a school management system

Choose from a written list of your school’s needs, made before the first demo. A demo shows what a system can do, and only your list shows whether your school needs it.

Start from your school’s needs

Ask the people who will use the system what slows them down today. Your teachers, office staff and IT support each see a different part of the work, so put the problems every group names on the list.

Size and setting change what matters. A large school needs a system that handles many users at once, and a school with many electives or after-school programs needs flexible schedules. If your school has no IT staff, weigh how much setup and upkeep each option needs, because the vendor’s support team may be the only technical help you have. Colleges run a wider set of systems, which our guide to higher education software covers.

Then agree with your team on what the system should improve, for example a shorter enrollment process or faster replies to families. Those goals become the measures you check after launch.

Questions to ask vendors

The answers to these questions show how a vendor’s school management software will fit your school:

• What does the price include, how does it grow with enrollment, and are there setup or data-migration fees?
• How does it import the records you already hold, and who does that work?
• Which of your tools does it connect to, such as your learning platform, accounting software or online payments?
• Is it hosted in the cloud by the vendor, or installed on your own servers?
• How is student data protected, and who can see each kind of record?
• Who owns your data, and how do you get it out if you leave?
• What training and support come with it, and for how long?

Ask for a demo built on your own scenarios and, where possible, a trial with a sample of your own data. Score the answers against your needs list. Bring a teacher and someone from the office to the demo too, because they will try the screens they would use every day.

Jobs you can give to a specialized tool

You do not have to buy every module from one vendor. Many schools keep their main system, often an SIS, and connect a separate tool where they need more than it offers. Attendance is a good candidate, because it is taken in every class, every day, and a general system may not check students in with ID cards or send alerts on rules you set.

AccuClass, our class attendance software for schools and colleges, records attendance for each class session. Teachers can take roll on screen, or students can sign themselves in by swiping an ID card at a station or scanning a QR code with the AccuClass phone app. QR sign-in needs every student to install the app and log in first, so roll call or ID cards suit schools that keep phones out of class. AccuClass is built around class periods, so it fits middle and high schools, where students change rooms, better than an elementary school that takes attendance once a day.

You set the alert rules, and AccuClass can email any student marked absent for a class. When a student’s absences reach the limit you set, AccuClass adds the student to a staff list. It also notifies the student, the teacher and anyone else you name, such as a parent.

AccuClass is built for attendance and keeps no grades or fees, so it works beside your SIS rather than replacing it. It imports rosters from the files your SIS exports, on a schedule run from a Windows computer at your school, and sends attendance logs and summaries back the same way. Your IT staff can also connect it through published APIs (technical connections a developer can build on), or we can build a direct integration on request.

AccuClass runs in a browser on cloud hosting we manage, so you set up no servers, and data travels over an encrypted connection. Teachers see only the classes they are assigned to. The price is set by the number of students you track. There is no setup fee and no charge for extra classes or teachers, but card readers and other hardware cost extra.

If attendance is the job that takes your school the most time, request an AccuClass demo and see roll call, alerts and attendance reports set up around your class schedule.

Rolling out your new system

A new system pays off once your staff use it every day, and that habit forms in the first weeks after launch. So settle training and the rules for student data before launch day, while records are still being moved in.

Train staff and teachers

Train each group on the tasks it will do, for example grades for teachers and enrollment for the office. Practice with your own data teaches more than a slide tour, and a short written guide gives staff who join later the same start.

Name one person who owns the system after launch. That person answers questions and collects problems, so small issues get fixed before staff drift back to their old spreadsheets. Support matters most in the first weeks, so plan regular check-ins with each group and a simple way to report a problem.

When staff resist the change

Some staff will resist a new system, often because it changes routines that already work for them. Their objections usually point at real problems, so involve them in choosing the system and ask what would make the switch worth it. Then start with the module that removes the most retyping, because staff who see less work in the first week are more willing to learn the rest.

Protect student data

A school management system holds records that families expect you to keep private, so decide who can see each kind of record before any data moves in. In the US, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) limits who may see education records at schools that receive US Department of Education funds. The rules themselves are in the FERPA regulations, which the Department publishes on its student privacy site. A private school that takes no such funds is generally outside FERPA, but your state may still set student privacy rules of its own. Whatever system you choose, require secure sign-in, encryption, regular backups and access limited to each person’s role.

How to tell whether your system is working

Your system is working if the problems it was bought to fix have shrunk, so check them a few months after launch and then every year. These four measures fit most schools, and counting them before launch gives you a baseline:

• How many hours your office spends each term on enrollment and report cards.
• How many attendance records need correcting after the school day.
• How many families read your messages or log in to the parent portal.
• How many teachers use the system every week instead of paper or spreadsheets.

Parent surveys and re-enrollment figures add the families’ side, because a system your staff like can still frustrate parents. To improve a school management system you already run, review it once or twice a year. Look for duplicate records, permissions that outlasted someone’s job and modules nobody opens, then ask staff and parents where the system still slows them down.

Check your vendor’s updates in the same review. If it has added AI features, for example automatic reports or predictions about which students may struggle, ask what student data they use and whether you can turn them off. If it has added a mobile app, check whether families can use it or only staff.

Decide what to replace first

If most of your problems sit in one area, such as attendance or fees, add a specialized tool and connect it to the system you have. Ask the vendor to show the connection working with your own files before you sign, because a connection that needs retyping brings back the problem you set out to fix.

If the problems are spread across every office, plan for one system, because one record for each student ends the retyping everywhere at once. Choose during the school year, move your records over the summer and launch before the first day, so no records change systems mid-term.