Austin, Texas, April 22, 2025—TrueDialog, a leading provider of enterprise-grade SMS texting solutions, today announced that Bryant & Stratton College is partnering with TrueDialog to use SMS messaging to modernize its high-touch student experience and drive significant results.
The college offers 45 career-focused degree programs and has over 20,000 students across its online and 17 brick-and-mortar campuses. Bryant & Stratton College is committed to providing a high-touch educational experience. From the moment a student applies until graduation, Bryant & Stratton College representatives maintain proactive communication. This includes reaching out to students who miss classes to offer support and ensure they stay on track. While this high-touch approach has historically yielded strong retention rates, the college recognized the need to adapt to changing communication preferences.
The Challenge: Reaching Students Directly and Streamlining the SMS Channel
Until recently, Bryant & Stratton College primarily relied on phone calls and emails to communicate with students. However, this strategy presented challenges as younger generations increasingly prefer to avoid phone calls and are less likely to engage with emails.
“Making phone calls and sending emails are great ways to communicate with your students’ parents,” goes the common refrain in higher education. “But they’re horrible ways to talk to students.”
Recognizing this shift, the college sought a more effective channel for delivering crucial communications, such as time-sensitive weather alerts. Additionally, student services and financial aid offices frequently needed to reach students with important information, often resulting in frustrating games of phone tag.
In addition, before TrueDialog, departments within the university did not have a unified platform to send and receive texts to potential students, current students, and alumni. They needed everything to be run from a central location, and a solution that provided easy collaboration, and streamlined automation. With the school fielding about 16,000 phone calls daily, the admissions office in particular struggled to keep up with the demand.
The Solution: Leveraging the Power of TrueDialog for SMS Communication
Bryant & Stratton College implemented TrueDialog’s platform to create a unified system that was easy for the Unified Communications Administrator to deploy across the college system to allow easy connection with prospective students, current students, and alumni via SMS. This integration allows seamless communication across various departments, enhancing efficiency and improving outreach. The Administrator can create subaccounts, leverage user-level access controls, use the drag-and-drop account trees for when users transfer departments, quickly offboard exiting users and onboard new users, and leverage reporting to manage the system.
SMS offers students a convenient way to handle routine tasks directly from their mobile devices, such as uploading transcripts and submitting financial aid documents. Furthermore, TrueDialog facilitates crucial one-on-one messaging, particularly for the student services and admissions teams, where personalized communication is paramount. A quick text message is an effective prompt when phone conversations are necessary, ensuring students are ready and available to speak with the appropriate representative.
The Result: Enhanced Engagement and Significant Enrollment Growth
The adoption of SMS messaging has yielded significant benefits for Bryant & Stratton College, most notably a consistent year-over-year growth in online enrollment, with an impressive 18% increase for the upcoming semester.
“Implementing SMS is one of the things that we attribute to meeting and exceeding our enrollment goals,” says Jay Steele, Unified Communications Administrator at Bryant & Stratton College. “The reason is that’s what students want to use nowadays. They’re not necessarily interested in taking phone calls or even emails.”
The college now sends approximately 100,000 messages per month, utilizing both short and long codes through the TrueDialog platform. This streamlined approach has significantly reduced administrative time and increased productivity, allowing representatives to manage multiple personalized conversations simultaneously.
Crucially, students are experiencing more immediate responses and an overall improved communication experience. SMS has proven to be a highly effective tool for keeping students engaged with less effort.
By leveraging TrueDialog’s integrated tracking tools, Bryant & Stratton College can monitor the performance of its SMS communications, track key performance indicators such as enrollment and retention rates, and utilize data analytics to continuously improve the student experience and refine its outreach strategies. The positive results include a steady increase in opt-ins and minimal opt-outs, demonstrating the value students place on this communication channel.
Through the strategic implementation of SMS, Bryant & Stratton College ensures that it continues to provide personalized education experiences that resonate with today’s students, one message at a time.
About TrueDialog
TrueDialog is the enterprise SMS platform transforming how organizations connect with customers through text messaging—today’s most engaging and responsive channel. Through superior features, industry-leading security, and direct carrier connections, the platform delivers enterprise-grade reliability while reducing messaging costs by up to 75%. TrueDialog is trusted by thousands of brands, including Coca-Cola, Girl Scouts, Hilton, Kansas City Chiefs, Northern Tool, SubjectWell, and Tulane University. TrueDialog combines powerful capabilities with simplified implementation. Based in Austin, Texas, TrueDialog helps organizations build stronger relationships through reliable, cost-efficient messaging. To learn more, visit www.truedialog.com.
Contact (For Media Only):
Jodi Bart Holzband
Classic Bart PR & Communications
