Pikes Peak were relying on multiple software platforms, each requiring different logins, training and licences. When it discovered that Gecko could cover the work of all of these, it reduced its tech subscriptions, cut costs and made much better use of its resources, while communicating more efficiently and effectively with its students.
Spread across four main campuses in Colorado Springs, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Pikes Peak State College aims to support all its students as they reach for their own personal learning pinnacles. The college has a diverse student base so its communications strategy has to be both broad and targeted from recruitment through to graduation. Gecko has been instrumental in helping deliver this.
As the college celebrates two years of using Gecko, we spoke with Krissy Trujillo, Assistant Director of Communication Technology, Marketing and Communications at Pikes Peak State College to understand why she feels it has been so transformative for her and her team. “I am so excited to talk to you guys about Gecko,” she begins. “We’d been using a few different platforms before we adopted Gecko in March 2023 and our initial intention was to just use Gecko as a chatbot. But, once we started exploring what Gecko could do, we realized that if we switched to Gecko, we could get rid of three other software platforms that were not higher-ed specific. Each of these had its own account manager, customer service teams and training and they were all costly.”
At this point, it dawned on Krissy how much she had struggled to adapt business-to-business or business-to-consumer software for higher education’s unique needs. “Some of this software had contact limits, which restricted the amount of communication we could send and meant we had to take time managing our contacts so that we wouldn’t move to the next price band, which we couldn’t afford. We could spend a whole day segmenting audiences in Excel and building all the different templates for all the different audience segments,” she says. “I’ve done the math, cutting our ties with our old software and moving to Gecko saved us thousands of dollars in subscription fees and 250 hours a year for each campaign series.”
The college began with Gecko’s chatbot and email and SMS broadcasting. The chatbot was designed to help manage student questions and make its admissions team more efficient. It’s recently been upgraded with AI. “AI was integrated really well into the chatbot and our message success rate jumped tremendously after it was implemented. In the first month that we implemented the chatbot without AI, our message success rate was 62%, which was okay, and then it rose to 82%. When we added ChatGPT, it jumped to 95% and now we’re at 100%,” says Krissy. The college is now much more focused on keeping its website up-to-date, so that the Gecko chatbot is always able to provide accurate answers.
Now, students are encouraged to use the chatbot whenever they have questions about communications they have received from the college and to respond to Facebook and Instagram messages. The chatbot is bilingual too, a student can ask it questions in Spanish and it will pull the answers from the Spanish microsite.
When it comes to emails and text messages, the college now largely relies on Gecko, which has made it so much easier to segment its audience. “It’s simplified our processes so much,” says Krissy. “We plug in all the different pieces of data into the Gecko email or text template and, because we’re not spending a whole day segmenting with Excel, we have more time to spend on building hyper-personalised content. We create hyper-personalized emails using Liquid coding, a very easy coding language to learn, and we put all the details into one template. For example, we might nudge students to register for a class, remind them which campus their class is on or provide parking information, we put all this in one email instead of four or five. And, we can also segment by language.”
Some people find the idea of using Liquid coding to build an email template intimidating, but Krissy says that it’s super easy to get the hang of. “Liquid is a pretty simple coding structure to learn, even if you’re not technical, it’s pretty logical. It doesn’t take long to teach someone else on the team. I always say to someone trying it for the first time, ‘do a test email and see how it looks.’ You feel a lot more confident sending something to thousands of students when you’ve tested it to one email first and you know it’s going to work,” she says.
The college looked at the stats from one particular email marketing campaign and was seriously impressed by the results. For the Fall 2024 registration cycle, it used Gecko’s Liquid coding to create four email templates. These were then highly personalized for each student based on their motivations and goals for attending the college, their academic interests and/or their first-generation status. It found that it increased open rates, registrations and enrollment.
Krissy is in no doubt that Gecko has been a game changer for Pikes Peak State College and she’s now pushing to buy the full suite of Gecko software in the next budget. ”With Gecko we’ve saved a whole bunch of money and made our time a lot more efficient, because we can do so much on a single platform. And, the customer service we receive is fantastic. When I have a question, it’s answered and resolved faster than I’ve ever had with any other software platform. Plus, we’ve even had ideas for ways that Gecko can be improved and they’ve been implemented, which is a real standout feature for us.”
Asked whether she would recommend Gecko to other colleges, Krissy says she does regularly! “I tell them it’s the least painful implementation I’ve ever done and the platform itself is so powerful, it’s a flexible, fast and effective communication tool and it quickly pays dividends.”
Like Pikes Peak State College, you could save time, cut costs, and create more personalised student communications. Book a demo today to see Gecko in action and discover how it can be tailored to your unique needs.
