Here for the journey.

All about Behavioral Intelligence:How technology and people are shaping the future of

student engagement

Table of contents

Copyright 2021 AdmitHub, PBC dba Mainstay

Foreword

Introduction: Technology for good?

Building Behavioral Intelligence

Bridging humans and machines

Conclusion: Asking the right questions

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ForewordDrew MagliozziCEO and Co-Founder, Mainstay

It’s most important to ask those questions at life’s major inflection points — moments like the journey to and through college, for instance. Even before the pandemic, the process of navigating from application to enrollment to persistence to completion was not an easy one. Complicated paperwork and unclear instructions led too many students to fall victim to summer melt before they even arrived on campus. Academic pressure and emotional stresses, coupled with the work and family commitments that a growing number of college students find themselves managing, contribute to the fact that some 40 million Americans have some college credit but no degree. All of that was already true before COVID-19 caused widespread disruption and economic turmoil that stopped many students’ educational journeys in their tracks.

Through Mainstay’s partnerships with hundreds of colleges and universities, as well as nonprofits focused on college access and success, we’ve come to understand that these problems may be messy, complicated, and unrelenting — but they’re not unsolvable.

In many cases, the right conversation at the right time can make all the difference for a student seeking to take the next step. Our work with Georgia State University and other pioneering institutions has proven that it’s possible to help millions of students not just get the accurate answers they need, but also tap into their own curiosity to help them keep moving forward. Using the best elements of artificial intelligence to provide timely, empathetic, and responsive support can bridge the gap between awareness and action, between setting a goal and making progress toward that goal.

That’s the experience and the vision at the core of this paper — and at the heart of what Behavioral Intelligence is. Our work has shown us that it’s possible for this approach to have a profound impact on students’

Every year, people ask the internet 2.5 trillion questions and get back 2.5 trillion sets of answers. Many times those answers are good; sometimes, they’re even amazing. Before Google, most people did not know how valuable instant answers were. Today, we’ve all become accustomed to a world in which nearly any question we have can be answered almost immediately.

So, what’s next for a world that has all the answers? These days, technology is beginning to play a new role in our lives: Helping us to ask the questions that inspire progress toward our goals.

The magic of automated answers is just the latest in a long line of human achievements. Telescopes, microscopes, and oscilloscopes, for example, have each enabled us to see our environment in new ways. And every time we have looked at the world through the lens of a new tool, we’ve gained countless new answers. Yet, the paradox of the curious mind is that every answer breeds at least twice as many new questions (and often more than that). Even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our recognition that there are things we don’t yet know expands even faster. Still, too many of us do not appreciate how a well-timed, inspiring question can help us achieve our goals.

The true power of a good question is the unique alchemy of thoughts it can inspire in an open mind. Questions are what help us engage with those around us. They open us up to ideas and approaches that we might not have come up with on our own. An open mind is nothing to take for granted — particularly in these polarizing times. Thankfully, new technology is creating the conditions for more people to not just get the right answers, but also to get help asking the right questions that will shine a light on their paths forward.

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journeys toward postsecondary success. It takes a combination of accurate and timely information (IQ), delivered with equity and empathy (EQ), with careful consideration of cultural and contextual relevance (CQ). That’s not easy, but when it’s done well, the results can be transformative.

At Mainstay, we believe technology can help shape behavior — not by forcing people to take a certain action, but by guiding them toward the questions and the decisions that will empower them to take the next step toward a more fulfilling life. At the end of the day, of course, we can’t make any student complete the FAFSA or meet with their counselor. What we can do is spark the conversations that will light the path — and in many cases, that spark is exactly what students need to continue on their journeys.

4All about Behavioral Intelligence:How technology and people are shaping the future of student engagement

Introduction: Technology for good?

In many ways, the history of humankind is a history of technology.

Today, forward-thinking colleges are taking new approaches that combine sophisticated technology with a research-driven approach to communication. Those institutions are embracing strategies that are designed to realize the potential of technology as a tool to expand access to resources and opportunities for students — while also drawing on the uniquely human emotional element and meaningful connections that today’s technology so often lacks. Their human-centric strategies enable scalability that over-extended and under-resourced campus offices like theirs are rarely able to achieve. Research shows that by adopting Mainstay’s approach these institutions are able to expand access, improve engagement, and drive positive outcomes for students.

We refer to this approach as Behavioral Intelligence, and our experience has proven that it works. Based on research conducted over the past several years, as well as Mainstay’s partnerships with hundreds of colleges and organizations, we’ve outlined the key elements of the Behavioral Intelligence model, what it looks like in practice, and why it helps institutions leverage technology to meaningfully support students at scale.

This white paper examines the building blocks of Behavioral Intelligence and the role three critical components of the model — IQ, EQ, and CQ — play in helping to improve student engagement and drive positive outcomes. It also explores the interplay between humans and technology that is crucial to Behavioral Intelligence, and the remarkable ways that both people and machines contribute to successful strategies.

From the most rudimentary tools to the complex algorithms that underpin 21st-century society, so much of civilization is rooted in the idea that human ingenuity can create things that simply make people’s lives better. In recent years, however, that notion has been tested as never before. While we live in a time of unprecedented technological progress, this is also, ironically, a time of unprecedented skepticism about the value of technology.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, we’re coming face-to-face with its many downsides: Facial recognition systems that perpetuate bias in hiring, cryptocurrencies with pernicious environmental impacts, and a widening digital divide that has prevented useful and productive technologies from reaching many of the people who could benefit from them the most.

This skepticism is, in some ways, particularly relevant in the context of higher education. On college and university campuses, technology is often — rightfully — thought of as a hindrance as much as a help. Too many institutions have seen their investments in new tech tools fall flat, and entire organizations like the Empirical Educator Project have emerged to call for better use of research and evidence in edtech.

While this skepticism is often justified, it can also stymie institutions’ efforts to realize the profound potential of technology tools. Research shows that with the right approach, emerging tech like artificial intelligence can have a transformative impact on student engagement and success.

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Building BehavioralIntelligence

In order to understand how Behavioral Intelligence works in practice, it’s important to align on a shared definition of what the term means and where it comes from.

This section outlines Mainstay’s definition of Behavioral Intelligence and offers some historical context on the study of behavior. It also explores the three core building blocks of Behavioral Intelligence: IQ, EQ, and CQ.

Defining Behavioral Intelligence

At Mainstay, we think of Behavioral Intelligence as a combination of multiple elements that, when applied thoughtfully, drive people to make better decisions for themselves. That may sound more like a magic potion than a research-backed methodology, but Behavioral Intelligence is very much rooted in science. It applies data science to analyze and draw conclusions from large data sets, as well as behavioral science to examine how and why humans make decisions. These disciplines offer a better understanding of people and an ability to provide guidance that shapes behaviors in ways that lead to positive development and growth for students.

Simply put, we define behavioral Intelligence as: A method for helping people identify and achieve their goals through conversations that combine accurate information, empathetic responses, and contextual relevance.

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Behavioral Intelligence:\bi-ˈhā-vyə-rəl\ \in-ˈte-lə-jən(t)s\

A method for helping people identify and achieve their goals through conversations that combine accurate information, empathetic responses, and contextual relevance.

Dr. Morgan Lee, a behavioral scientist who leads Mainstay’s research division, frames Behavioral Intelligence as the process of “understanding where a learner is at, predicting where they’re probably headed, and shaping their journey in a more positive direction without manipulating them.” Simply put, she says, “It’s up-front, honest communication to help them achieve their goals.”

Behavioral Intelligence works when it enables colleges and universities to not just engage students in conversations, but also provide them with the knowledge they need to overcome fear, doubt, a lack of information, and so many other factors that can result in inaction or unwanted outcomes. By bringing data analysis and behavioral science to bear on these challenges, Behavioral Intelligence enables institutions to help students take the next step toward persistence, completion, and long-term success.

Behavioral Intelligence vs. behavioral science

To fully explain Behavioral Intelligence, it’s helpful to start with some historical context. The study of behavior, after all, is hardly a new field.

Most historians trace the history of behavioral science — the discipline that informs Behavioral Intelligence — to the early 1900s, and the work of psychologists like John Watson. These early researchers sought to understand the mechanisms of human and animal behavior, by exploring both the reasons for certain types of behavior and the ways those behaviors could be influenced. This led to seminal studies like the “Little Albert experiment” of 1920, in which a

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young boy was conditioned to fear a white lab rat. That one example (and many others) demonstrates that while early research was critical to developing an understanding of behavior, it often relied on unethical practices that ignored — or actively subverted — the overall health of its subjects.

In the ensuing decades, the study of behavior has become significantly more sophisticated, and with those advancements, the application of behavioral science has matured to help solve countless problems. Subsets of behavioral science like cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational inquiry seek to use our understanding of behavior to help people cultivate healthy habits and mitigate unhealthy ones — from diet and exercise to quitting smoking. While we at Mainstay developed our approach to Behavioral Intelligence through experimentation, rather than relying solely on any singular methodology, we soon found that frameworks for Behavioral Intelligence not only existed but were proven to be effective in other areas. Our own approach only further validated those examples.

While behavioral science offers an empirical foundation for Behavioral Intelligence, it isn’t the whole story. Behavioral Intelligence looks to behavioral science to inform how to best help students engage. However, Behavioral Intelligence also utilizes artificial intelligence to do the work of engagement at scale. Beyond that, Mainstay’s approach taps aggregate student insights and data analytics to understand which kinds of interventions work best to drive positive outcomes, and replicates those strategies.

The building blocks of Behavioral Intelligence

Breaking down Behavioral Intelligence into a few key component parts can help explain how it works. We think of Behavioral Intelligence as an approach that layers three primary elements on top of one another: IQ, EQ, and CQ.

IQ: Sweating the small stuff

IQ, or intelligence, is the foundational element of a successful Behavioral Intelligence strategy, and perhaps the most basic of the three. We describe IQ as the facts and figures: The accurate information that a student needs to make the right decision at the right time.

After all, in order to take the next step in their educational journey, a student needs to understand exactly what that step is, along with the information they need to take it. That’s why our approach to Behavioral Intelligence means updating our AI knowledge bases in real time, to respond correctly to questions from “when is the FAFSA due?” to “how can I get in touch with a career counselor?”

Behavioral Intelligence that effectively uses IQ does so by providing students with accurate and up-to-date information — often by responding to a question they ask via text message. Done right, IQ enables advisors and other support staff to focus on the more challenging and complex issues that matter for student success.

“It comes down to Mainstay handling the majority of first questions, second questions, and third questions,

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so that my staff can go more in-depth and make the biggest impact,” says Dawn Medley, who first encountered Behavioral Intelligence while Associate Vice President at Wayne State University. (She now serves as Vice Provost for Enrollment Management at Stony Brook University.) “We need to be individually connecting with our students if we want them to be successful,” says Dawn.

While the underlying principles of IQ are fairly straightforward, the results of putting it into practice can be substantial. By tapping into IQ, Winston-Salem State University’s (WSSU) chatbot, Winston, significantly freed up enrollment management staff resources by reducing phone calls by 36% during its first year. Their bot’s ability to provide accurate, real-time responses streamlined communication between students and the university and helped WSSU empower students to complete critical enrollment steps. As a result, the university achieved a 74% improvement in on-time tuition payments for first-time freshmen over the previous year.

EQ: The way you say it matters

While IQ is necessary for effective Behavioral Intelligence, it’s far from sufficient on its own. Our experience and research have taught us that the way you say it is just as important as what you say when it comes to providing important information to students. That’s where EQ, or empathy, comes in.

Empathetic conversations start by actively listening to what your students are saying. That’s nearly impossible for humans to do at scale, but thanks to

advancements in analytics, a Behavioral Intelligence Platform can compile and analyze millions of digital conversations in real time. Mainstay makes it easy to consider these aggregate insights and then infuse empathy into “smart nudges” that drive positive behaviors. For example, sending automated two-way SMS text messages can give students gentle reminders to enroll in classes before the deadline, or encourage them to attend a career fair — but phrasing those reminders in a positive and encouraging way will dramatically increase the likelihood that recipients will take action.

“The sender really matters,” says Dr. Lindsay Page of Brown University, whose groundbreaking research has examined the application of behaviorally intelligent chatbots to boost student success, retention, and completion. “When we think about scaling these tools, the intervention is more successful when the sender is somebody, or some entity, with whom the student has a relationship. It’s important that it be a relationship of trust, and a relationship that’s ongoing for some amount of time,” she explains.

Developing this type of relationship gives people a judgment-free way to pose questions that they may feel too embarrassed to ask otherwise. Many students find it easier to communicate their real feelings to a supportive, unbiased party like a chatbot, than they would with a human. According to the Los Angeles Times, college students are engaging with behaviorally intelligent chatbots more than ever “with 90% or more of students on some campuses passively or actively opting in.” This is, in large part, because chatbots are able to provide positive interactions that resonate deeply with students and deliver on their needs.

Reflecting on her time implementing Behavioral Intelligence at Wayne State University, Dawn Medley believes their chatbot’s EQ changed the perception students had about the university. “Students now see us as a support system, and not just the big behemoth they have to go up against,” she says.

For many institutions, tapping into EQ means infusing a chatbot with personality. That’s why so many

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institutions end up naming their chatbot after their school mascots. Providing students with a texting partner who is familiar and trusted can help create a safe environment for more meaningful — and more effective — conversations.

As an article in EdSurge put it, “In selecting words, images and emojis, [schools] not only deliver information, but also establish the voice, identity and character of a college chatbot. This ‘personality’ matters in part because a chatbot can come to represent a university, like a mascot during a college sporting event. But it also has a serious job to do, and students’ perceptions of the tool affect how successfully it can draw them into meaningful, interactive conversations about admissions, enrollment, academics, and campus life.”

According to Ilana Habib, who directs Mainstay’s Managed Services team, EQ also succeeds when it builds on previous interactions between a student and a chatbot. “The more you get empathy right, the more effective every other messaging campaign becomes.”

Ilana shares this example: “One student sent an unprompted message to [their school’s chatbot] at 2:00 in the morning that started with ‘Hey, I’m sad.’ The chatbot can handle those sensitive interactions really well, and was able to respond with tips about how to get more involved in campus life.” She continues, “But that conversation actually began earlier in the day, when the student received a message from the chatbot that sparked the conversation,” she says.

This type of relationship-building over time is a prime example of EQ in action. As Ilana puts it, “Those are the kind of transformational moments where earlier in the day, you remind a student that you’re here as a resource, and then they act on it.”

Joel Lee, formerly of Winston-Salem State University, has found EQ to be one of the most surprising aspects of his institution’s chatbot — but also one of the most effective. Joel has noted that students talk to Winston “like a human,” showing their gratitude for the chatbot’s help by thanking it and sending emojis

as responses. He says, “They engaged with it like they would text a friend. Just seeing how different the engagement was with the text versus the email campaigns we’ve been sending out — the chatbot exceeded my expectations.”

CQ: Culture and context

“A lot of Behavioral Intelligence comes down to relationship building,” says Ilana Habib. “It’s about considering the context in which a student is operating when you’re trying to support them through a particular process.”

True Behavioral Intelligence goes beyond accurate answers and individual empathy to also provide authentic support that includes CQ, or contextual relevance. Particularly for first-generation students navigating the transition to higher education and those from traditionally underrepresented populations, it’s critical to foster a sense of belonging. Behavioral Intelligence makes it possible for institutions to accomplish this by anticipating individual needs and responding in a way that drives action and engagement across a wide range of topics.

Mainstay’s Morgan Lee describes CQ as “pulling in all of the other stuff that’s happening around the student.” She explains, “Students may be working, they may have a certain living situation, they may be in a city with particular things going on. CQ is about pulling in all this information that surrounds them at their institution or workplace — to try to give them information

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that is both timely and relevant based on all those external factors.”

Another way to put it is that Behavioral Intelligence delivers not just accurate information, but the best response for every individual. “When students receive outreach tailored to their status in the world, that reflects some understanding on the part of the sender,” says Dr. Lindsay Page. “That means it’s important to make sure that communication is relying on info that the student knows the institution has.”

Not doing so, she points out, could result in communication that may be technically accurate, but is, in her words, “downright creepy” — and therefore fails to help the student take the desired next step.

What does this sort of contextual and cultural relevance look like in practice? The truth is that CQ can take many forms. From sending messages at a specific date and time that reflects an understanding of key deadlines, to building custom campaigns based on aggregate feedback from the student body, the capabilities of CQ can be as multifaceted as the students it supports. Critically, that level of contextual relevance includes tailoring messages to students based on factors like their socioeconomic, racial, and geographic backgrounds, as well as designing differentiated messaging for first-generation college students.

That personalized approach is proven to drive meaningful outcomes, as in the case of Georgia State University’s use of a chatbot to boost FAFSA completion and registration rates by 6% in the first year of implementation. By designing messaging campaigns specifically for first-generation students and Pell Grant recipients, they significantly improved engagement rates: Students from those communities sent 9.4% and 31.7% more messages to their chatbot respectively

Wayne State University has demonstrated that offering contextually relevant, authentic support when students need it most can create a culture of belonging that drives measurable outcomes. A year after the university shifted to a student engagement

“When students receive outreach tailored to their status in the world, that reflects some understanding on the part of the sender.” Dr. Lindsay PageAnnenberg Associate Professor of Education Policy

Brown University

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strategy powered by Behavioral Intelligence, Wayne State welcomed the largest incoming class in their history. The role of Behavioral Intelligence in supporting students from underserved communities was especially evident in WSU’s incoming Class of 2022, which represented huge improvements over the previous year, including:

• 18% more first-generation college students• 13% more Pell-eligible students• 28% more Hispanic students• 13% more Black students

California State University Channel Islands began using CQ in a unique way after they shifted to a remote learning model at the outset of COVID-19. Mainstay’s platform enabled them to crowdsource songs that students associated with their time on campus. They used that aggregate data to compile and share custom Spotify playlists. The idea was designed specifically to help students feel more connected to their peers and their college — even when they weren’t physically on campus.

What does Behavioral Intelligence look like to students?

The previous sections provide a conceptual understanding of various ways colleges and universities might use IQ, EQ, and CQ to engage students. Now, let’s examine a more concrete example of how students interact with the three key components of Behavioral Intelligence, and the ways those elements reinforce one another to create an interaction that is as effective as possible.

IQ interaction:

A student texts their school’s chatbot, asking “Hey, what do I do at orientation?”

The bot responds, “First, you should reconcile your outstanding bill with the bursar.”

This is a straightforward, direct interaction in which the chatbot provides only an accurate answer explaining the student’s requisite next step.

IQ + EQ interaction: Oli — the Mainstay chatbot that the Common App uses to reach aspiring college students — under-stands that higher education has a “hidden curricu-lum,” and some students may not be familiar with all of its terminology. So, instead of just explaining the next step the student should take, Oli uses Behavior-al Intelligence to find out if they need more informa-tion.

In that case, Oli might say, “While you’re on campus, you should reconcile your outstanding bill with the bursar. Do you know what the bursar is and where you can find their office? Just let me know if you have any questions like that.”

“That helped us understand that many students didn’t actually know what the bursar was, so IQ-only communication wasn’t actually helping them take the next step,” explains Mainstay’s CEO and Co-Founder Drew Magliozzi. “It’s incumbent upon us to use Behavioral Intelligence to make this information available to students in an empathetic way, and invite them into knowing things they wouldn’t otherwise know.”

IQ + EQ + CQ interaction: Now, imagine that the student receives a message saying “You have an outstanding balance of $88.25. The next step is to visit the bursar, Susan Jones, in Room 301 of the following address. She’ll be able to help, and she’s waiting for you.”

That kind of personalized, contextually relevant communication takes even more pressure off the student, and creates a smoother path for them to complete whatever task is needed to move through their educational journey. “That’s why you need to do all three — IQ, EQ, and CQ,” says Drew. “Each element alone is necessary, but only by putting them together can you help students move forward as effectively as possible.”

All about Behavioral Intelligence:How technology and people are shaping the future of student engagement

Bridging humans and machines

It takes both people and technology to make the three fundamental components of Behavioral Intelligence work in concert.

An effective Behavioral Intelligence approach draws on qualities that are uniquely human — like empathy and contextual understanding — as well as those that only emerging technologies can support — like automation, analytics, and scale. This section explores the details of what humans and technology contribute to Behavioral Intelligence, and how they work together to drive positive outcomes.

The human side of Behavioral Intelligence

A crude breakdown of the three building blocks of Behavioral Intelligence highlights the primacy of human interaction and engagement. Both EQ and CQ are fundamentally human traits. Without context and empathy, Behavioral Intelligence couldn’t exist — because just delivering accurate answers is not enough to impact student behavior.

Alejandra Acosta’s landmark report “How You Say It Matters” provides a compelling case for the human side of Behavioral Intelligence. For institutional leaders, in particular, she argues that effective communication should be a top strategic priority, given its influence on student success, retention, and equity.

In her introduction, Acosta says, “Having good intentions does not guarantee success, and ineffective communication can cause serious harm. Extensive behavioral science research shows that how institutions communicate to students really matters.”

What does effective student engagement look like, then? That’s where empathy and context come in. The former

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can help an institution be more sensitive to the challeng-ing circumstances in which students often find them-selves. The latter can ensure that students receive messages at the appropriate time and in the most relevant way possible. As Acosta puts it, “Messages should be positive so that students are not discouraged, especially because communicating predictive system findings can often be sensitive in nature. Making students feel like they are not the only ones struggling, encouraging them to get help, and emphasizing that they have the capacity to improve their academic performance will minimize harm and increase the likelihood that they take action.”

This relationship-building work is one of the guiding principles that informs Mainstay’s Managed Services team. “When you send messages that are aware and use Behavioral Intelligence, students are incredibly grateful,” says Ilana Habib, who leads that team. “But we are also aggressive in sharing back conversations and reactions with our partners — which is how we demonstrate that the approach is working.”

Ilana and her colleagues constantly review incoming messages from students, as well as the responses sent by their institution’s chatbot, to see if the bot is responding as effectively as possible. This level of human-powered knowledge base maintenance supplements the automated “learning” that Mainstay’s behaviorally intelligent chatbots perform on their own simply by having millions of conversations with students each week.

By noting the types of questions that a chatbot might be struggling to answer, human reviewers are able to

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update the bot’s knowledge base and equip it with better information to respond better to similar questions in the future. With these human elements in place, Behavioral Intelligence can fulfill its promise as an engine to drive improved outcomes for students.

Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus (formerly Kansas State University Polytechnic), is a regional public university in Salina, Kansas. They implemented a behaviorally intelligent chatbot in 2019 and have seen dramatic increases in student engagement ever since — particularly regarding housing form completions and orientation registrations. These are key steps that students need to take to stay on a path to success throughout their higher education journey. However, the human side of Behavioral Intelligence has enabled the institution to make a much deeper impact for some students.

They’ve heard from students whose lives were changed thanks to their interactions with the university’s chatbot. Interacting with their institution through Behavioral Intelligence has made the difference between successfully navigating the transition to campus and slipping through the cracks, particularly for students who had less support at home.

Empathy and contextual relevance are what make that possible, according to Dr. Christopher Smith, who leads Enrollment Management and New Student Engagement for Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus. He shares a story of a student who reached out to their chatbot, Willie, to express the anxiety they were feeling about an ill family member.

“This student was grappling with an urgent issue, and they knew just where to go to get help that would not be judgmental or hard to reach — but would just offer a listening ear and help point them in the right direction,” Dr. Smith says. “Every student deserves an opportunity to be treated with respect. People just need to know other people care. That’s the type of impact, as a leader in higher education, I want to make with students.”

Developing Behavioral Intelligence proficiency

Creating an infrastructure for Behavioral Intelligence on campus doesn’t have to require hiring a new team. Instead, the right combination of partnership and technology can empower existing teams to develop their own internal expertise.

When it comes to resources, institutions approach Behavioral Intelligence differently depending on the objectives they have in mind. For some schools, admissions and enrollment teams lead the implementation of Behavioral Intelligence. Others centralize the work in their student success or retention departments. Others still may rely on specialists within their alumni and advancement teams, or even within their athletics departments.

Mainstay partners with existing staff members at colleges and universities to help them build their skills and increase their level of comfort delivering empathetic messages that are suited to the unique context of the student population. Mainstay also offers an option where we manage the entire process on a school’s behalf.

“ Every student deserves an opportunity to be treated with respect. People just need to know other people care.” Dr. Christopher SmithExecutive Director of Enrollment Management &

New Student Engagement

Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and

Technology Campus

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The technology that makes Behavioral Intelligence possible

While the human elements are critical to Behavioral Intelligence, technology is what makes it actionable. Without systems that effectively operationalize Behavioral Intelligence, it’s impossible to engage students at scale. That’s where Behavioral Intelligence platforms come in.

“From a technological standpoint, Behavioral Intelligence really starts with intent,” says Toby Jackson, Mainstay’s Chief Technology Officer. “By capturing how students engage in specific events, we have a better chance of understanding their intent — the question they need answered, or the challenge they need to solve. Then the question becomes, ‘how can we use that information to help them take the best next step in their journey?’”

An effective platform for Behavioral Intelligence relies on three essential elements:

• Automated knowledge base You can think of a knowledge base as a chatbot’s brain. All of the information a chatbot is able to provide to students is stored there. Behavioral Intelligence platforms analyze millions of student interactions spanning a massive range of topics — from financial aid to alumni events, and much more. When a chatbot pulls from an automated, behaviorally intelligent knowledge base, it’s able to respond to nearly any question in real time with relevant information. “That information creates a feedback loop that helps the chatbot learn and improve over time,” says Toby. “Building on the information we get from one interaction, we’re able to provide even better and more accurate support through follow-up interactions and engagements.”

• Real-time communication The humble text message has emerged as the most effective tool for reaching students immediately and motivating them to take action. At least nine out of 10 text messages get read, and almost all are read

within seconds of being received. No other communication channel comes close in terms of immediacy and access. Mainstay’s behaviorally intelligent chatbots respond to students in a matter of seconds, ensuring that students never have to wait for answers to their time-sensitive questions. It’s not just about response time, though: Text messaging is also the most intimate form of electronic communication. That’s why Behavioral Intelligence takes EQ and CQ so seriously. The messenger and the message both matter equally on a medium as personal as texting.

• Advanced analytics The real value of technology comes in its ability to process enormous amounts of information quickly. It’s essential for institutions serving anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of students to have tools that can sort through messages at scale, identify frequently mentioned topics, analyze overall sentiment to take the pulse of the student body, and provide personalized responses in real time. Insights from these interactions enable institutions to combine automation with conversations that feel authentically human — which leads to stronger relationships with students and a sense of belonging that drives engagement and, in turn, positive outcomes.

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CQ: Among their favorite characteristics, students noted that they appreciated Pounce’s personalized messages, as well as the bot’s timeliness — which was carefully planned to align with key deadlines throughout the enrollment process. One student says, “It was the easiest part of enrollment.”

The overall impact of that initial partnership was that Georgia State University saw a 3.3% increase in enrollment and a 21.4% reduction in summer melt. Since then, we’ve worked together with the university to implement Behavioral Intelligence in other contexts, as well. A more recent study at GSU proved that a behaviorally intelligent chatbot boosted rates of FAFSA filing and registration by 6% for the subsequent fall semester. Scaled to the entire Georgia State undergraduate student body, that translates to more than 1,300 students taking the next step in their college journey who otherwise might have stopped out or been stuck in place.

Georgia State University was the first of hundreds of institutions that have used Behavioral Intelligence to boost engagement, persistence, and retention. The results speak for themselves.

That’s when Georgia State became a laboratory for Behavioral Intelligence through their launch of Pounce — a custom virtual assistant for prospective students who had been admitted to GSU. Based on the personality of the institution’s panther mascot, Pounce would become the first-ever test of Behavioral Intelligence in action — though no one knew it at the time.

Mainstay and Georgia State University designed Pounce to help students succeed by sending them timely reminders and relevant information about enrollment tasks, collecting key survey data, and instantly answering students’ questions around the clock. Even more than half a decade ago, the building blocks of Behavioral Intelligence were clear in the results of this pilot:

IQ: Pounce provided accurate and timely information to students — and over the course of our research study, the treatment group (students who had access to Pounce via SMS text messaging) had significantly higher completion rates of key enrollment steps than the control group (students who didn’t have access to Pounce).

EQ: In our focus groups with students who engaged with Pounce, we learned some common themes: These students didn’t feel judged for asking what they thought might seem like a “stupid” question. They also appreciated the casual language, ease of accessibility, and instantaneous responses, especially when they asked questions at all hours of the night.

Behavioral Intelligence in practice: Georgia State University’s story

In late 2015, Georgia State University was grappling with runaway summer melt that had increased from 12% to nearly 19% in a few short years. Institutional leaders, led by then-Vice Provost Dr. Tim Renick, knew that text messaging that utilized IQ, EQ, and CQ was the best way to engage the current generation of students — but they didn’t know how to scale personalized conversations to every admitted student.

Conclusion: Asking the right questions

The beauty of Behavioral Intelligence is that it isn’t actually a brand-new idea — rather, it’s a stitching together of proven concepts that are intuitive, backed by research, and supported by practical experience.

Because Behavioral Intelligence is so broadly applicable, it easily adapts to meet the needs of any institution.

At its core, Behavioral Intelligence must be about helping a student achieve a specific outcome. “Messages will be most successful if you can be really clear about what that action is, and the consequences of that action (or inaction),” says Brown University’s Lindsay Page. “For any one message that you’re sending to a student, what is the behavior that you’re hoping to elicit?”

For colleges seeking to employ Behavioral Intelligence to support their enrollment and retention goals, asking a few key questions can help to determine the best way to go from idea to execution:

• What would be the primary goals of Behavioral Intelligence at my institution? Any new strategy is only as effective as the plans that guide its implementation. So, identifying your objectives — like reducing summer melt, boosting FAFSA completion, or building commu-nity on campus, for example — will help to ensure that you can make the most of Behavioral Intelli-gence on campus. For a quick, actionable resource to identify the most meaningful student engagement goals for your school, download our short guide, “How to define student engagement at your college.”

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• How should my institution implement Behavioral Intelligence in ways that suit our unique needs? It’s obvious that every institution is different. It’s not always as obvious that those differences should have a material impact on the tools and strategies you use to engage students. Depending on the maturity of your institution’s student engagement strategy and your team’s relationship with technology, some approaches to Behavioral Intelligence will likely be more effective than others. To identify where your school currently stands within Mainstay’s proven student engagement maturity model, read our white paper, “The road to inspiring student engagement.”

• What are the potential risks of using Behavioral Intelligence, and how should my institution anticipate and manage those risks? As Mainstay’s Morgan Lee puts it, “ If you have the power to shape behavior, you have to always do it in the way that best serves the learner. For paradigms like Behavioral Intelligence that include huge amounts of data, that responsibility is heightened.” Managing student data can pose potential technological risks related to confidentiality and privacy. There are more complex issues, as well, like communicating information to students that might be technically accurate but ultimately ends up discouraging action and progress. The more powerful a predictive tool is, the more critical it is to use that tool carefully, and to communicate its findings responsibly. That

All about Behavioral Intelligence:How technology and people are shaping the future of student engagement

requires prioritizing both empathy and privacy to the highest degree. As Alejandra Acosta’s research demonstrates, not doing so can undermine the entire goal of the project. To learn more, read her article, “How You Say It Matters.”

• What should I look for when choosing a Behavioral Intelligence solution? Anyone can claim to offer a Behavioral Intelligence solution, but the true measure of any platform is proven outcomes. Before you choose any technology partner, investigate their case studies and success stories. The gold standard of outcomes measurement to look for is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with published results. To select the right Behavioral Intelligence Platform for your institution, you also need an understanding of how that tool actually works and its capabilities. Mainstay’s CTO Toby Jackson recommends developing a technical understanding for any Behavioral Intelligence solution you’re considering across three primary categories — artificial intelligence, integrations, and privacy and security. To do so, ask these critical questions about each area:

• Artificial intelligence: What type of AI powers the chatbot? Is it driven by decision trees where the user answers a series of questions to get to the information they want? Or does it use machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) which enable more organic conversations that lead to helpful responses?

• Integrations: Does the tech partner offer APIs that enable deep integration with your institution’s existing systems? Can the platform become part of the technological fabric of your institution, rather than serving simply as a point solution?

• Privacy and security: How is the platform’s data protected? What are the measures the

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tech partner takes to address important data security and privacy aspects? Be sure to ask specifically about data residency, data encryption, data retention, handling of personally identifiable information, and compliance with local regulations.

• What does the future hold for Behavioral Intelligence? “Empathy is still an emerging field in technology,” Toby explains. In the years to come, Behavioral Intelligence will continue to evolve to a point where humans may only need to review scripts and conversations, rather than write them. “We’re already in the early stages of generative models that can actually write the text and develop even more tailored responses to students,” says Toby. “Today, we might not have the ability to automatically generate a piece of text that’s empathetic. But the more the technology learns, the more that type of interaction becomes possible.”

All about Behavioral Intelligence:How technology and people are shaping the future of student engagement

“ Today, we might not have the ability to automatically generate a piece of text that’s empathetic. But the more the technology learns, the more that type of interaction becomes possible.”

Toby JacksonCTO

Mainstay

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