Showing up
Last Thursday we held our first Parchment Summit. If you missed it, I wanted to share a quick recap of the online event: 13 sessions across a main stage, a Higher Ed track, and a K-12 track, with 17 customer organizations on the agenda. In addition, the summit also had Parchment product and customer success folks who stayed around for six rounds of office hours and live demos, so you could talk to a real person about your real setup and ask real questions. And, it was inspiring to see engaging conversations across the sessions, with so many of you asking tough and valuable questions. Attendees came with specifics. They asked how their peers handled the same mess sitting on their own desks, and the peers answered.
A moment from our first session, Powering Learner Success from the Registrar's Office, shows what I mean. As our panelists outlined the challenges their offices face and the examples of how they've worked through them, the chat filled with attendees validating what they heard. People recognized their own offices in those stories, and they said so in real time.
Here are just a few of the takeaways from my experience during the summit.
A full day of real examples from our customers
When we talk about records, districts start from very different places. Some are buried in a request backlog, some have paper files nobody can search, and some run a different process in every school. Indianapolis Public Schools talked about rethinking its process. While they mentioned their use of Parchment to chip away at a big backlog, the story of their challenge and approach, I think, resonated with so many attendees who may be experiencing similar challenges.
Harnett County Schools and Epic Charter Schools gave great visibility into how they view transfer requests. Both use them to see where students are going and why they leave, which turns a processing task into a retention conversation. While Jones College serves learners in rural communities who need visible, portable proof of what they can do. And, Florida Gulf Coast University built its badge strategy around what employers say they need. Two institutions with two different starting points, and both made me think more about the value of what a badge can represent.
The registrar panel with Texas Christian University, Middle Tennessee State University, and Northeastern University took on a hard question: how do you lead on learner and career success when you have to quickly adapt policy pressures, learner needs, are adapting, but you have to differentiate yourself as an institution? I don't think there's a tidy answer. That's why it helped to hear from three institutions that each come at it differently.
We also spoke with customers about how dual enrollment brings counselors, families, and administrators together. Course sharing works with administrators, program coordinators, and admissions teams to support learners, even when those learners aren't taking courses from the teaching institution. The insight from both teams is that this kind of collaboration will be a necessity in the coming years, especially in higher education.
This is just a smattering of the insightful conversations held throughout the day. While I could go on and on about each session, and its story, you can watch them for yourself at our recap page.
What's coming
On the main stage, our product team covered what's recently shipped, including Collaborative Programs for Course Sharing, Expanded Analytics for Parchment Digital Badges, Audit Log & Reporting for Doc Management, as well as a look into our new Parchment Community. In addition, the team gave a first look at what's next, including Identity Verification and new Dual Enrollment workflows.
Our session on strengthening the credentialing platform is the one I’d suggest not to miss, since fraud reduction remains a central topic for all of our customers. Identity Verification, a new Stripe-powered checkout, and email multi-factor authentication each protect a different step in the process. Together they cover who is applying, how they pay, and who can log in.
Several sessions ended with an invitation to tell us what you'd like to see next. If you didn't get your say, please reach out to your account team. We're taking what we heard back to our product and customer success teams, and it will shape what we build.
Thank you
I want to take a second to share a heartfelt thank you to every customer who spoke. You gave up time to prepare and share what you’ve learned along the way. To everyone who attended and engaged with our programming, whether you asked a question or shared an idea, thank you. I’d also like to give a word of appreciation to our product, customer success, and solutions teams who staffed office hours and demos.
Everything we build comes straight from these conversations with you. We want to make sure every new feature truly makes your day-to-day easier, so please keep the feedback coming and make sure to join our Parchment Community; we’re always listening!
