How the University of San Francisco Streamlines Prospective Student Marketing with Hive + Slate

The Challenge

The undergraduate marketing team at the University of San Francisco (USF) — part of Strategic Enrollment Management — needed a more efficient way to coordinate outreach to prospective students, families, and counselors. Their team manages campaigns across multiple audience segments (e.g., Fall 2024 deposits, inquiries) and channels, but traditional project management tools like Asana and Trello couldn’t meet their evolving needs.

Key gaps included:

Inability to toggle between spreadsheet-style planning and calendar execution
No seamless way to track marketing analytics with Slate, USF’s CRM
Manual, time-consuming duplication of campaigns year over year

Why Hive

Hive stood out for its flexible views (Calendar + Table), robust tracking capabilities, and intuitive UX — even interns could jump right in. The team uses Hive to:

Map marketing efforts to audience-specific labels and custom fields
Track campaigns using statuses and due dates across the full enrollment funnel
Organize content sends, direct mail, and events from one centralized hub

Integrating with Slate

While Slate handles the delivery and analytics of campaigns, Hive is the planning and production engine. Together, they form a unified workflow where:

Hive manages the campaign calendar and content creation
Slate executes the outbound communication (email, print, tracking)
Updates are shared internally via Slack templates and externally via Hive public views

This setup allows USF’s small but mighty team to operate like a much larger department.

Results

– Centralized planning for segmented marketing
– Improved coordination across stakeholders
– Greater visibility and fewer errors in campaign scheduling
– Faster onboarding for new team members

What’s Next

Looking ahead, USF hopes to:

Further streamline the duplication of recurring campaigns
Standardize action card formats for consistency and easier approvals
Create clearer read-only views for cross-departmental visibility

For Other Universities

USF’s use of Hive shows how higher-ed teams can bridge the gap between strategic enrollment planning and day-to-day execution. By pairing Hive with Slate, they’ve built a marketing engine that is agile, audience-aware, and built to scale.