Camaraderie, Enthusiasm, Innovation: Looking Back at Slate Summit 2024

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the sold-out Slate Summit 2024 at Chicago’s Navy Pier with my colleague and friend, Capture Data Analyst and Slate Specialist Megan Gabbard. The wealth of knowledge we received and the buzz of excitement present at the summit are still reverberating with me.

Slate Summit

Mariah Ward and Megan Gabbard at Slate

This was the least traditional higher education conference either of us had ever attended! The camaraderie and enthusiasm were evident among the users and employees of Slate. The cheers as new features were announced during the Opening Session rivaled a sporting event and the founder, Alexander Clark, was the star of the team.

People flooded into the numerous sessions, which were often at capacity and had to turn people away. Since some of the sessions were on boats, this required throwing stowaways overboard! (Just kidding. They didn’t throw anyone into Lake Michigan. At least, I don’t think they did.)

A Platinum Member
Slate Summit

Capture: A Slate Preferred Partner

Megan and I both work on the Data Services team at Capture, which recently became a platinum member of Slate’s Preferred Partner Program. But we’re not a primary user at a higher education institution. So, we first needed to understand our goal at the conference. What should be the intent of a Capture data analyst attending Slate Summit?

That answer lies in the fact that Capture is truly partneredwith the institutions that work with us, so we need to be just as familiar with their core product, Slate, as they are. Our team continuously strives to be well versed in the vocabulary and the inner workings of Slate, which is used by more than 60 percent of our partner universities and is considered the leading CRM for higher education recruitment marketing and enrollment management.

Even before we departed Navy Pier, Megan and I started planning to implement the updates, improvements and freshly announced features rolled out and, in some cases, generated during the conference. We also started very much looking forward to Slate Summit 2025.

By Mariah Ward, Manager of Data Services, Capture Higher Ed