Case study for Penn Foster. Penn Foster came to 7Summits with a requirement for a powerful community to help support and unite their prospective and current students, parents, and alumni. 7Summits designed and built the new community using Jive Software. It features highly personalized areas for each of Penn Foster’s different audiences.

1. 7Summits Creates A Virtual
Online Campus For Penn Foster
7SUMMITS CASE STUDY: PENN FOSTER ONLINE CAMPUS
Situation
Founded in 1890,Penn Foster is the nation’s leader in distance education,offering more
than 105 accredited and career-focused degree,diploma and certificate programs.
Offering affordable online access to higher education programs,the school prides itself
on creating a positive,empowering experience that fits into the busy lives of its students.
Penn Foster built a student forum using a legacy platform that was hosted internally,
but they wanted to enhance the social collaboration features of their site.The Penn
Foster team analyzed their existing platform’s infrastructure and realized that its basic
features would not allow for the enhancements they desired.The team also wanted to
transition hosting and maintenance to an external provider,to free up internal resources
for other project work.
Penn Foster also faced challenges that come from the lack of a physical campus.
Their existing web site’s configuration made it challenging for users to find content and
connect with other users,and did not align with the school’s branding.“As an online
school,people can’t visit our campus to touch and feel it.Our Community is completely
open by design,so that prospective students see the different groups and understand
how learning happens,”said Dara Warn,Chief Marketing Officer for Penn Foster.
“This helps them realize that there are real people behind Penn Foster–and that we
are just like them.”
Penn Foster defined their requirements for the new community according to the features
that were missing from their current application.They still wanted to be able to perform
basic updates and revisions themselves through a simple administrative interface even
after hosting was moved off-site.They also needed to comply with specific privacy
requirements,and sought security features to protect students’personal data.The ability
to assign specific permissions to different employee groups was important,along with
the ability to link spaces and groups and transfer content between different areas of
the community.
Armed with this list of must-haves,7Summits recommended Jive as the ideal platform for
Penn Foster’s community hosting,and the team began to collaborate to define a
comprehensive strategy and bring their vision to life.“We went forward with this project
with the goal of helping our students stay longer,be more successful and get more of the
support they need to stay connected,”said Warn.
AT A GLANCE
Challenges
One-way communication through
traditional web content discouraged
active participation of students
and faculty
Valuable time and resources were
wasted fielding frequently asked
questions from prospective and
current students
Basic data collected through profiles
limited Penn Foster’s insights when
creating student messaging
Results
Community fosters real-time interaction
and relationship building, with a 200%
increase in user adoption
Customer service team anticipates a
30% reduction in email interactions for
2013, and the cost per interaction has
decreased by 45%
Marketing team has increased
engagement with students and
unprecedented access to personal
insights that help tailor communications
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DARA WARN
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER FOR PENN FOSTER
INDUSTRY: Higher Education
Online community drives improved student experience
and academic insights
1-866-Studies
HigherEd@7SummitsAgency.com
Client Success:
“The Community has been transformational for
our school. It has given us a better understanding
of our students’ motivations and drivers, so that
we can help them get the most out of their
education at Penn Foster.”

2. Solution
The 7Summits team facilitated an on-site strategic workshop at
Penn Foster to analyze the organization’s key business drivers and
specific use cases for the community.Through this process,
the team mapped these objectives to specific features in the
community and developed a comprehensive information
architecture and user experience design that would address the
school’s needs,align with branding guidelines and provide easy
access to content and resources.The home page is customized for
users based on their user type and academic program,and offers a
sophisticated and sleek design that has helped drive engagement.
One of the key features of the Penn Foster community is a
Student Map,which places markers across the globe to represent
student locations.The map can be filtered by academic group to
help narrow the results.This feature enables Penn Foster students
to locate others in their geographic region,for meet-ups and study
groups.This helps support in-person networking and interactions,
which has proven beneficial for many students of online schools.
The community also includes a Blog Network,which allows
members to create individual blogs to share their Penn Foster
experience.These blogs allow students,instructors and
administrators to share their perspectives while encouraging
additional dialogue on relevant topics for the Penn Foster
community.Community Managers can promote Penn Foster and
student blogs on the customized home pages to drive users to
relevant content. The Academic Help area hosts answers to
commonly-asked questions,which are easily searchable.Penn
Foster’s support staff has now shifted their workflows to focus on
answering thousands of queries online,and the answers are
visible to other students who have the same questions.This
has significantly reduced the amount of time they spend
answering questions overall,allowing them to focus on other
important tasks.
Penn Foster’s Community also features an advanced gamification
module,powered by Bunchball,which motivates students and
employees to actively contribute in meaningful ways.Students
can earn points and badges for answering fellow students’
questions,posting a status or writing a blog post.Each activity has
a different point level assigned to it,and these accumulated
points can be redeemed for bookstore prizes.As on other social
networks,users can interact with each other and discuss their
outside interests,which helps build bonds that extend beyond the
virtual classroom.
The implementation process involved mapping existing web
content to the new information architecture and user experience.
The data from the legacy platform was scrubbed and transferred
to the appropriate areas of the new community.Naming and
tagging conventions were defined to optimize the user
experience.This also helped improve search effectiveness and
overall usability of the community.Different terminology between
the two platforms led to some additional complexity,but the
overall implementation process was smooth and the teams were
able to efficiently complete the migration.
User accounts were also migrated to the Jive platform,allowing
students and faculty to immediately access the new community.
Because the new accounts required additional user account
information,users were prompted to reset their passwords and
complete their profiles upon first login,which enhanced the
amount of data that was gathered for each community member.
These profiles were set up to align with specific privacy
requirements,and each user was given access rights based on
their role within the school.Single sign-on functionality allows
users to access the community and the student portal with one
set of credentials,and their account is automatically linked to
relevant groups based on their academic information.
“We’ve been able to encourage the development of an actual community of
students that used to be completely separate. It’s really important for our students
to have a place to connect. Tools like Jive and the work that 7Summits did to build
our community allowed us to create a true online campus.”
1-866-Studies
HigherEd@7SummitsAgency.com
DARA WARN, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, PENN FOSTER

3. Copyright © 2013 7Summits
1-866-Studies • HigherEd@7SummitsAgency.com • www.7SummitsAgency.com
Milwaukee: 1110 Old World Third St, Suite 500, Milwaukee, WI 53203
Chicago: 1300 E Woodfield Road, Suite 650, Schaumburg, IL 60173
Results
The Penn Foster Community has become an integral part of the
school’s culture,helping students and faculty create deeper bonds.
Because the school is entirely online and there is no physical
space to visit,the community has become a “campus tour,”and
open access to the online forums allows prospective students to
get a glimpse into the school’s culture and collaborative features.
The administrative team developed an initial set of groups to
encourage participation,but users have begun to form their own
groups based on shared interests.This has helped create a true
virtual campus for the school.Over 800 blogs have been created
and nearly 1,800 posts have been generated–surpassing Penn
Foster’s initial engagement goals.Since the community’s launch in
July 2012,Penn Foster has continually added licenses to keep up
with the influx of users who want to join the discussion–
adoption has risen over 200%,with nearly 11,000 active members
in September 2013.The community averages over 30,000 daily
page views and has strong user participation,with high numbers
of responses and likes per post.With close to 75,000 pieces of
content available in the community,users are able to access the
information that applies to them and interact with others who
share the same interests.
Instructors provide course content within the community,and,by
reviewing user activity,Penn Foster’s staff has discovered that
students who are active in the community are more engaged
overall.They take more tests,complete more courses and
participate in more student groups than those who have little
presence in the Community
Through a monthly Community Manager report,the Penn Foster
team can review new post counts,student participation statistics
and new registrations,which helps measure the performance of
each space.This helps the team develop ongoing strategies for
improvement.The community has helped the administrative staff
address areas of inefficiency and has alleviated some of the strain
on internal resources as students increasingly use it to help each
other with academic and personal issues.The customer service
team anticipates a 30% reduction in email interactions for 2013,
and the cost per interaction has decreased by 45%.The school has
been able to operate at a lower employee-to-student ratio while
maintaining high quality service levels.Individuals are now able
to locate the appropriate resources online and help each other
navigate the common concerns that all students face.“Because
our course structure doesn’t have a set start date like traditional
semester-oriented colleges,new students are joining Penn Foster
every day.This made it difficult for students to connect with each
other,get help and work on projects together,”said Warn.
“The Community has created a way for our program students to
follow a consistent path,even when they are on different timelines.”
The community also helped Penn Foster’s marketing team
develop deeper insights into the demographics of their student
body.The school’s previous platform collected only basic
information about each user and engagement levels were low,
making it difficult to fully understand the audience.The new
community profiles collect more detailed information,which
makes segmentation easy.Engagement levels are also much
higher,and as administrative staff interacts with the students
more regularly through the forum,they are able to truly
understand the student perspective and develop personal
relationships.Greater visibility has enabled the marketing team to
tailor their messaging to the student body,allowing for more
effective communications regarding student programs and
educational opportunities.“Often,a school is just guessing at what
they think students like–what their interests are and who they’re
friends with.That data is hard to come by–and you often have to
pay for it,”said Warn.“Our Community provides full visibility into
things that we ordinarily wouldn’t see on the marketing side,and
we can see issues that need to be addressed.It’s a great source of
student data that helps us with everything we do–particularly
developing creative pieces.”The ongoing addition of content and
increased traffic to the community has also helped improve Penn
Foster’s search engine rankings.Organic traffic from online search
has nearly doubled since launch,and social media referrals are
up 92%.The next phase of the project will integrate single
sign-on functionality with the school’s course management
application to allow faculty to monitor community engagement
for grading purposes.
As a result of its work with 7Summits to rebuild the Community,
Penn Foster has been honored as a finalist for two Social Media
Leadership Awards–Customer Service,which focuses on
customer care for social users,and Voice of the Future,which
honors communications and marketing departments that have
leveraged social media to achieve key business strategies.
“With focused effort from our team,we’ve been able to encourage
the development of an actual community of students that used to
be completely separate,”said Warn.“It’s really important for our
students to have a place to connect and feel a sense of belonging
–that they are part of something bigger.Tools like Jive and the
work that 7Summits did to build our community allowed us to
create a true online campus.”