Montgomery County Community College redefines and redesigns student data, journeys, and engagement with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Montgomery County Community College (MCCC), a technologically advanced community college recognized for providing high-quality, affordable, and accessible education, wanted to optimize its technology stack to transform and enhance student communication and engagement. The college is deeply committed to student success and well-being, believing that student engagement is one of the most important predictors of student success. It wanted a solution that would reshape the MCCC student engagement experience within the existing technology stack and with clearly defined automation, personalization, and data-management capabilities.

MCCC was working with an existing solution built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 that helped the college to compose and send messages manually to students and run reports to identify certain demographics. The college needed to analyze the effectiveness of its messages and determine if there was active student engagement. The goal was to elevate and automate this process to create student journeys that would not only ignite engagement but allow staff and students to build richer relationships.

The college wanted to develop a marketing module of this caliber, so it collaborated with Coffee + Dunn, a Microsoft partner that creates connected experiences and has a proven reputation within the higher education environment.

Elevating student engagement and communication

For MCCC, engagement sits at the core of the solution because students who show increased engagement are more motivated to learn, have greater resilience, achieve higher grades, and develop better relationships with professors and administrators. They are also more inclined to manage their learning pathways and classes. Therefore, the solution had to connect with students on multiple levels, reduce manual workloads for MCCC staff, and provide data and analytics that could improve future communications.

“Our students not only have class responsibilities, but they also have life requirements that impact their time, and this made it important that our communications were effective and personalized,” says Mary Beaver, Director of Enterprise Software Solutions at MCCC. “We also wanted a centralized space where messages are scheduled within an accessible calendar so that they are uniform and consistent.”

Once the college began rolling out the solution, it received student and staff buy-in quickly. “It was such a smooth experience; everyone was on the same page in terms of why this change was taking place,” says Thomas Manders, Managing Director at Coffee + Dunn. “MCCC is strongly committed to placing the student at the center of technology. The college’s student-centric approach, staff engagement, and involvement of senior leadership are impressive.”

Driving engagement and connections with technology

Because MCCC was already a Microsoft customer, it made sense to use its existing investment in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power BI. Dynamics 365 Marketing was integrated within the existing Dynamics 365 environment to provide personalized and orchestrated communications, centralized visibility into campaigns, goal-based reporting, and deeper insights into student engagement levels. MCCC uses Dynamics 365 to automate recurring communications with existing students and correlate engagement with overall registration and enrollment. The college also uses Microsoft Azure to provide richer visibility and critical data integration.

The solution combines all the student data, information, communications, and scheduling in a centralized space that provides a 360-degree view of the students and their individual journeys.

“The relationship between Coffee + Dunn and Microsoft meant that we always had relevant, hands-on support. Because Coffee + Dunn met weekly with the product engineering team at Microsoft, we could directly raise issues and challenges,” says Joe Mancini, Executive Director of IT at MCCC. “The solution is still undergoing development as we add on more capabilities and explore newer technologies, such as AI, but it has already transformed student engagement and communications and really helped us to realize the benefits of a connected student experience.”