“Historically, we haven’t had access to student contact data even though every student was an MSA member,” explains Marc Iturriaga, MSA Executive Director. Our communications relied strictly on the college and their email communications infrastructure.

Even with the college’s cooperation, the MSA had difficulty efficiently meeting its communication goals. A primary pain point was the convoluted process association members had to undertake to send an email and their lack of control over when their communications would actually be sent.

“For every email, we prepared our key elements like the text, graphics, and subject line and submitted a ticket through the college’s queue system, where we specified our preferred release date and the message priority,” says Paige Petrovsky, MSA Communications Specialist. “Unfortunately the college marketing team frequently had a lot on their plates and that would sometimes delay our emails. It had a significant impact on how we put our messages together.”

In addition to this inconvenient and unpredictable process, other limitations affected the MSA’s ability to communicate effectively with its student members. One major concern was a lack of clarity regarding the source of the Student Association’s emails.

“We weren’t meeting our communication goals. Using the college system, we weren’t able to personalize our messages beyond including small graphic elements connected to the Association,” says Petrovsky. “The messages we sent contained the college’s footer and website links and the conflicting branding added to the confusion over the distinction between college and the MSA.”