DURING A TYPICAL YEAR, about 600 students at Bucknell University travel away from the central Pennsylvania campus to destinations around the world. But, Bucknell’s Study Abroad office had been relying on inefficient systems to get its work done. First, a homegrown applicant system was slow and allowed little flexibility. Symplicity by Horizons didn’t solve those problems and others when Bucknell deployed it a few years later.
Bucknell was looking for a faster, more efficient and streamlined approach to study abroad management. Here’s what happened when they deployed Terra Dotta.
With Terra Dotta’s Study Abroad platform, students apply online and can stay on top of other deadlines. And study abroad offices can go paperless — updating applications in batches or collaborating with departments across campus through the solution.
The work to add a new program to the system took an entire day. And it was merely a “data dump,” with mostly text.
Updates took forever. When Bucknell’s travel policy changed, for example, the team had to update it in every single program, a tedious process.
The vendor solution was confusing for students to use. And the homegrown system could take more than a minute to load.
The solution is intuitive for students, and load times are lightning fast. Plus, Bucknell can add videos to the appropriate pages to walk students through the process. “We get far fewer questions.”
With a small client base and no place for community, there was no meaningful way to discuss issues and concerns with other Horizon users.
Terra Dotta customers become part of a community of active users and have access to an extensive knowledge base where Coats can dig deeper into questions and find answers.
In times of crisis, AlertTraveler makes it easy for study abroad teams to find students around the world and ensure their safety.
Bucknell couldn’t quickly:
After the November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, Bucknell’s Study Abroad office needed to check in with every student in Europe. The process took:
AlertTraveler allows Bucknell to:
As the world shut down in March 2020 because of COVID-19, Bucknell had to reach out to every study abroad student. With AlertTraveler, the process took:
