Aug 21 2025
How Montcalm Community College Gets Higher-Than-Average Reply Rates With Coach-Led Texting
How Onondaga Community College Built a Campus-Wide Communication Model with Mongoose
TL;DR
Onondaga Community College has spent eight years building a campus-wide texting model with Mongoose: about 50 staff across enrollment, financial aid, career services, and four academic-school hubs, each texting students as a real, named person. Ryan Nellenback, who led the build, explains how the model kept its personal touch as it grew, how smart messaging surfaces the replies that need a person, and why he keeps AI in a supporting role.
- 8 years, ~50 staff texting students
- Four school hubs run their own texting
- Smart messaging flags the 10% who need a person
- AI supports staff and never replaces their voice
Download the Full Case Study
Onondaga Community College (OCC), a two-year public institution in Syracuse, New York, didn’t set out to build the most-used communication tool on campus. It set out to solve a much smaller problem: giving every student a person to text, in a college where staff couldn’t possibly meet everyone face to face. Eight years later, that solution runs across enrollment, financial aid, career services, and four academic divisions, and it’s still growing.
The Challenge
Giving Every Student a Home, with a Team That Couldn’t Scale to Meet Them One-on-One
When OCC first adopted Mongoose through a Title III grant, the college had no shared inboxes, no established workflows, and about 50 staff across campus who needed to feel like an approachable point of contact for a cohort of students, not a faceless office. As Ryan Nellenback, Director of International Student Services, who led the build, put it:
“We wanted to build something where every student had a home.”
The hard part wasn’t picking a channel. It was designing something manual enough to feel personal and structured enough to scale.
The Solution
One Person, One Number, One Real Conversation
OCC’s answer, later nicknamed OneTeam OCC, put Ryan behind the scenes writing texts on behalf of roughly 50 “onboarding contacts”: staff whose day jobs were in the library, financial aid, and elsewhere, who also served as a student’s one point of contact.
“I would write the text and send it on behalf of fifty different people, using each student’s first name and each employee’s first name, so it felt like a personal message from someone they knew — even though I was the one sending it to a thousand students at once.”
– Ryan Nellenback, Director of International Student Services, Onondaga Community College
Students only saw one name. Behind that name was an admissions expert Ryan could loop in whenever a real question came up. As Ryan put it, “the employee looks like they know everything about anything,” while the expertise itself stayed centralized and manageable.
Key Outcomes
From One Hub to Four, and a System Built to Catch Students Before They Fall Through
Four school hubs, each running their own show
As OCC’s structure matured, so did the model. What began as a single enrollment-run hub split into four academic-school hubs, each with its own shared inbox, trained navigators and advisors, and department secretaries with individual numbers. Ryan now stays largely hands-off once a student registers and moves into a school. Admissions kept a smaller workflow of its own, and OCC recently added Slate, with deeper integration planned.
“They’re in charge of their own department’s communications now. They’ve all been trained on the language, and the standard is that every student should know who’s texting them and feel like that person knows their name.”
– Ryan Nellenback
Smart messaging that filters for the 10% who need a person
Ryan uses smart messaging as a first pass on registration outreach, then checks the replies that actually need a human response.
“With every text we send, about ten percent of replies have real questions we need to answer. Smart messaging clears out all the quick ones — the yes-or-no replies, the ‘here’s the link’ responses — so we can focus on the ones that actually need a person. That’s where the efficiency gains come from.”
– Ryan Nellenback
That logic also shapes OCC’s weekly registration cadence: a Tuesday afternoon text to new students, a Wednesday follow-up to the previous week’s group, and a Thursday check-in for anyone who asked for the registration link but hasn’t used it. Ryan built the rhythm three years ago and it’s still running.
A drop-class report that kept a student enrolled
OCC built a report that flags students who drop classes mid-cycle, so staff can check in by text rather than assume the drop was intentional. In one case, a student told Ryan by text they’d dropped because they couldn’t afford it. Ryan checked with financial aid and learned the student had dropped before their aid posted. He texted that explanation back, and the student, an adult learner, re-registered and stayed enrolled.
The same approach shows up in FAFSA outreach and in OCC’s financial aid service center, where students get a text when a specialist is ready for them instead of sitting in a physical queue.
Pro Tip: A drop-class or melt report paired with a same-day text can be the difference between losing a student and just clearing up a misunderstanding.
Keeping a person in the loop, even as AI use grows
Ryan is deliberate about where AI belongs in his team’s texting. He encourages staff to use it, but never to let it replace their own voice.
“I encourage people to use AI, but I also encourage them to keep using their own voice. Don’t just copy and paste what it gives you — put your own twist on it.”
– Ryan Nellenback
He extends the same thinking to what texting is for in the first place:
“AI can do a lot, but it should support our work, not take it over. You can search a website with AI, but you can’t use it to appeal a tuition charge or explain that your car broke down on the way to class. Sometimes you just need to text a real person who can reach out to your professor for you.”
That principle showed up in a real moment. When a student had to miss class after a personal emergency, Ryan texted the professor just enough to get the absence excused, without sharing what had happened. The student never had to explain themselves, and the professor never formed a skewed impression of them.
“Texting removes some of that in-person bias, because you’re reaching out to a number, not reacting to how someone looks or presents in person. There’s no title attached — they’re just texting somebody who helps them.”
A new chapter: WhatsApp for international students
Ryan recently moved from directing OCC’s onboarding team into International Student Services, a shift he credits partly to Mongoose’s WhatsApp solution, which lets him keep building relationships with a population he couldn’t reach effectively by email alone. He now supports OCC’s roughly 40 international students, and when one dropped below full-time status over the summer, a text conversation caught it in time to stay in compliance.
Working with Mongoose
Ask Ryan whether he’d recommend Mongoose to another school in a similar position, and the answer is immediate:
“If I were at another school in a similar position, I’d absolutely recommend Mongoose.”
– Ryan Nellenback
A big part of that is the team behind the product:
“Responses are always quick. Customer success has been great — I get people who are like-minded, who’ve done the work themselves, and who are willing to say, ‘that’s a good idea, let’s share it with other schools.'”
That relationship has gone both ways. At a SUNY conference session on Slate and texting, Ryan made the case for two-way texting over one-way outreach, then pushed for SUNY-wide Mongoose pricing to help smaller SUNY schools afford the platform. That pricing tier eventually happened, a change Ryan says has made Mongoose more accessible to community colleges that would otherwise be priced out.
He’s also seen the platform’s depth land with a new hire. A staff member who’d used Mongoose at a previous job joined OCC and, after being trained, told Ryan she was surprised by how much more built out OCC’s setup was compared to what she’d had access to before.
The Mongoose Difference
A model that scales without losing the personal touch
Fifty-plus staff and four school hubs, all texting as themselves, not as a shared, faceless office.
Smart messaging as a filter, not a shortcut
Automation clears the routine replies so staff time goes where it’s actually needed.
An early-warning system, not just an outreach channel
Drop-class reports, financial aid nudges, and compliance check-ins mean OCC hears about problems while there’s still time to fix them.
Room for judgment calls that automation can’t make
Two-way texting gives OCC’s staff the discretion to handle sensitive situations, like an excused absence that doesn’t require a full explanation, in a way a broadcast message never could.
What’s Next for OCC
Ryan is carrying OCC’s texting playbook into International Student Services and expanding WhatsApp as that population grows. He’s also watching closely as the admissions communications he helped build continue without him in his old role.
“I’ll be interested to see if they keep the same approach or evolve it. If response rates ever dip, my instinct won’t be to just change things back — it’ll be to figure out what each new class of students actually needs and adapt to that.”
– Ryan Nellenback
He added, “It’s like MySpace versus Facebook: you adapt, or you get left behind. It’s a lot easier to adapt early than to come from behind.”
Eight years after a single grant-funded pilot, Mongoose has become the backbone of how Onondaga Community College talks to students, across admissions, financial aid, career services, and now international services. Ryan’s advice for anyone building the same kind of system:
“Text these students like you’re on your own phone, not like you’re writing an email. None of us are that old — we’ve worked with students for years, and we were students ourselves once. I would have loved getting a text instead of an email or having to sit through a meeting.”
Download the Full Case Study
Frequently Asked Questions
How many staff at Onondaga Community College use Mongoose?
How does OCC use texting for financial aid?
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Would OCC recommend Mongoose to other schools?
