By SUSAN JONES
When Pitt EDGE (Center for Excellence in Digital Education) was created in 2024, its mission was to increase Pitt’s footprint in the online and hybrid learning spaces.
But in the past several months, its portfolio has increased to include a centralized portal for graduate and professional school recruitment and enrollment for both online and residential programs across the University. This has raised questions about how the roles of the vice provost for graduate studies, Pitt EDGE, and the various schools work together.
Anthony Delitto, associate provost of digital education and head of Pitt EDGE, said the University recognized that it had “this extremely well-oiled machine in the undergraduate space called OAFA (Office of Admissions and Financial Aid), that really does a state-of-the-art job of marketing and recruiting for our undergraduate residential space.
“And as good as we are in that area, we were lacking in a centralized operation to do the same in the masters and professional space, and in the online space.”
Pitt EDGE’s job is to fill “the top of the funnel,” Provost Joe McCarthy said, by providing leads and names of people to actively recruit to graduate programs. This is a function that’s never been done centrally at Pitt, he said. Once Pitt EDGE identifies those leads, then they are handed off to subject experts in the schools to articulate the benefits of each individual program.
Amanda Godley, vice provost for graduate studies, and her team got the ball rolling on enrollment and recruiting, McCarthy said, but the scope of her work was continuing to grow.
“Her program really has been focused on programmatic excellence, assessment and refinement of existing programs, as well as creation and launching of new programs,” he said. “She has had her team branch into professional development for graduate students, particularly PhD students that were looking for a different career path from going into academia.”
Pitt EDGE is designed to compliment that work, as it focuses on “that fledgling work that (Godley) had started in supporting recruiting, but then integrate that into the marketing and and enrollment activities that they had created in the online space over at SHRS.”
The School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), where Delitto served as dean from 2015 to 2024, had worked with the external company Noodle to develop online graduate and professional programs in the school. Natalie Baney, who was head of communications for SHRS and now is executive director of marketing and communications for Pitt EDGE, and her team were tasked with taking what Noodle was doing and developing an in-house version to do the same work at a lot less expense.
Chancellor Joan Gabel then asked Delitto to expand the program institution-wide, and Pitt EDGE was born.
But once Pitt EDGE started working to recruit online students, they realized “there was quite a lot of overlap in that infrastructure with what we would have to do in the residential masters and professional space,” Delitto said.
Now the Pitt EDGE team and the vice provost of graduate education are working together.
“We didn’t want to be in our silo, so we are sort of connected to the hip with Amanda’s group because they’re still handling admissions and everything,” Delitto said. “As you know when you recruit, sooner or later these recruits, if they’re interested, have to get admitted, so there has to be a smooth transition to that.”
McCarthy echoed those comments. “Obviously, you can’t do the admissions and appointment without some of the recruiting and marketing and enrollment, but they work really closely together, and so far I’ve been really pleased with the outcome.”
The big job now, the provost said, is getting everyone under a single, shared customer relations management (CRM) system, which will allow Pitt EDGE to cleanly hand off the leads it gathers to the experts within the disciplines.
“I don’t know that it’s the optimal structure going forward, but it certainly is a workable structure right now for us to go forward and improve our effort in enrollment in both the online as well as residential space in the masters and professional area,” Delitto said.
Coordinated marketing and recruiting
Baney and her team, along with Pitt Digital, worked on bringing together marketing, communications, recruiting and enrollment. These were all combined on a new website, Pitt Online, which launched in June.
The system uses Slate CRM, which has been utilized by Pitt’s undergraduate programs and the School of Medicine.
Right now, it only features online and hybrid programs in several of Pitt’s schools, but Baney said, “our goal is to make sure that what we’re building is going to impact not only the online programs but the graduate residential programs.”
The Slate implementation actually started two years ago, Delitto said, “when we brought the associate deans together and the schools together to talk about the student journey and talk about what was missing in the student journey … and got consensus on what was needed for something like a CRM implementation.” After a competitive bidding process, “we brought everybody together to see and Slate was the best choice for everybody.”
Baney said one of the key components of the Pitt Online website is that it’s a “one-stop shop” for people looking for online and hybrid programs — “really helping to elevate and build up the reputation of online programs in our portfolio here at the University, and it’s going to help us become more discoverable to those students.”
In addition, Pitt Online is a lead-generating website, she said. “So it really helps and guides students to take action to fill out a request for information form or directly apply to a program. That is not necessarily the goal of most higher education websites. They’re mostly informational.”
For instance, when the School of Nursing announced in June that its online masters of family nurse practitioner program had been approved by the state board for this fall, the Pitt EDGE team was able to reach out to leads it had already generated and start to move them through the application and enrollment process quickly.
“We partnered with the nursing school to set up the infrastructure to do that, and it’s still evolving because we’re still building up our team,” Baney said. “We have a lot of new hires coming on board right now, so we’re really excited to be able to provide these services to more schools, especially as we build up the CRM.”
Pitt EDGE also will work on enrollment nurturing. Previously when a student expressed interested in a program, the response they got from the schools could be fragmented — some getting a phone call, some an email or text, some nothing. “We are going to bring that all together, and the enrollment nurturing process will be happening at the top of the funnel through EDGE, so we’ll be providing those services, making sure that no students fall through the cracks when they reach out and ask about a program.”
The other area that EDGE will coordinate is digital advertising and marketing. Some schools are doing this work in house or through an agency, “and it really fragments what we’re doing in the marketplace,” Baney said. “So we could be competing against each other, and we might not know it. … We’re trying to be efficient, streamline those marketing operations, so that our dollars work harder for us.”
While developing this site for online programs, Pitt EDGE is also looking ahead to building something similar for graduate and professional residential programs.
“I think all of that’s going to come out with a lot of input from a lot of different people, like it should, so that it becomes a Pitt solution and not a school-by-school solution,” Delitto said, noting that this has led to some confusion about what’s happening now, but coming up with the answer takes time. “I think in a year we’re going to have really solid answers to this. … Maybe it’ll be a Pitt Online-like website that has nothing but the graduate and professional programs in it.”
Provost McCarthy said in an August memo that, “Schools will continue to own program design, academic substance, and admissions; EDGE will build and maintain the shared infrastructure that would be difficult for any one school to build alone.
“One piece of that infrastructure is Slate, our new CRM platform. As implementation moves forward, the expectation is that schools will adopt Slate as our shared enrollment system, so that we are all working from the same data and the same playbook.
“Admissions and application review, led by Graduate Studies, will also move through Slate, giving one consistent system from a student’s first inquiry through the admissions decision.”
New website and date collection
The Pitt EDGE team is particularly excited about the new Pitt Online website.
“One of the things that the Pitt Online website does well is it brings together and streamlines the way inquiries are coming in and directing students to school websites if they want more information,” Baney said.
The site includes an AI chatbot for prospects to get more information easily and a streamlined way for staff to update content. It is built for discoverability, optimized for search engines and AI-driven search, which will bring prospective students to Pitt first.
One of the key aspects of the new website is its connection to the new Pitt Attribution Model (PAM). This data attribution model “is going to help us get greater insight into what activities are working, where it’s bringing the ROI (return on investment),” Baney said. “I would say that it’s probably going to be our secret weapon, and it’s going to be a game changer for the University.”
Megan Sulerud, director of digital operations for Pitt EDGE, led the design and development of the new website and is overseeing the data collection. She had piloted PAM while working at SHRS.
“What attribution means is we’re looking at where our students come from when they first engage with Pitt. So we are connecting that first click on an ad to the first day of their class,” she said.
When students click on an ad or a link, Sulerud and her team can track that to make sure marketing dollars are spent efficiently. “If you were served an ad that was for a specific program and you filled out a form for a different one, well, there might be something we need to change,” she said.
“We can attribute every dollar and actually engage with students in a meaningful manner, but also make sure we’re connecting the right students to the right programs. At the end of the day, I think that’s the the most exciting part.” Sulerud said.
When she started on this project in SHRS, Sulerud said no one was even tracking how many people filled out a request for information form on the website.
Now Slate is “giving us the chance to make sure every data point is intentional. We know what we’re collecting. We know where we’re collecting it. We’re not adding burden to the students, as we’re asking them for information, we’re not asking for the same information two, three times. It’s giving us a chance to ensure that we’re being very mindful and intentional with our data collection.”
Currently, the Pitt Attribution Model is active only in SHRS, but they’re reviewing a project charter to move it out to the entire University, starting with the grad schools. Because PAM is an internal system to Pitt, Sulerud said it assures that the University will own its data, which she thinks is very important.
“We can tweak it. We can expand it. We can do whatever we want with this data because we own it, and we can start to do modeling and forecasting and advanced analytics to not just be reactive but proactive to what’s happening,” she said. “That’s powerful.”
Sulerud’s team, which will include around eight people by the end of the year, also will have a digital analyst, so they will not only be collecting the data, but also translating that data into actionable insights for the teams at the schools to act on.
The schools have been “great collaborators,” Baney said. “They’ve been responsive and helping to make sure the the website is accurate and updated. And so far, it seems like there’s a lot of excitement and enthusiasm because … this is something new. We haven’t had a lead generating website for the University in a central way.”
Delitto said all of the work on the Pitt Online website and PAM “is informing us on how we’re going to structure Slate for everybody. I think it’s going to include what we actually have to do in the residential space too.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times until Sept. 30, when she is retiring. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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