Today we released two significant improvements to Messages.

If you're not familiar with Messages, it's a secure and private way for students and providers to communicate through StudyStays. It's an important tool for deterring and detecting scams, giving you greater ability to protect and assist students. You can read more about Messages here.

The improvements are

1. Support for email attachments
2. Admin alerts when messages contains words or phrases that may indicate a scam

Support for email attachments

Attachments sent via email are now collected by StudyStays and securely forwarded to the intended recipient. We had noticed sometimes students and landlords would exchange their real email addresses in order to send documents like lease agreements. That's still allowed, but it was an annoyance for users and it makes it harder for admins to investigate if issues arise later.

Admin alerts on message contents

StudyStays can now watch for problematic phrases used in messages and alert you when they occur. This can give you early warning of scams or abuse, without needing to look at every message that goes through the system.

You can configure the phrases through Admin > Settings > Messages (if you have Super Admin permissions).

When a phrase is detected, an alert will be added to the Admin overview page. You can review these alerts to see if any further investigation is needed, and dismiss the alert once the issue has been resolved.

In late 2018, StudyStays began running automatic scam detection on all messages, looking for common scam phrases and unusual activity. So even if you don't use this feature there is still a base layer of protection. You can however, get more control and insight by configuring custom alert phrases for your own StudyStays database.

Over the last month we've been working hard on tracking and measuring outcomes for students and listings. We're pleased to announce a new collection of tools that proactively seek feedback from students and providers about their outcomes from using StudyStays.

Student outcomes

Because students don't directly book accommodation through StudyStays (at least not yet), it's been hard to tell what kind of outcomes they've had using the website. To know whether a student had found accommodation, was still looking for a place, or had given up was not information that was readily available. So we decided to improve this situation.

One approach to collecting this information up until now has been to send out a follow-up email some time after the student has registered asking for feedback. Another approach is to have a survey form on the website to solicit feedback that way. And some universities were using a combination of these techniques.

The problem with sending a follow-up email a set duration after registration is that we don't really know when to send it. Send it too soon and the student may still be looking for accommodation, and send it too late and they might have lost interest.

The problem with posting a link to a feedback form on the website is that many students might not see it.

Both approaches suffer from the problem that the feedback forms weren't really integrated into the website, and so their experience didn't adapt depending on their answers. They just fill out the form and that's it.

The new approach is to wait until the student has stopped using the website for a while (they've "disengaged") and then send them a very quick email survey which can be filled out without even needing to log in.

If students have found accommodation or have given up, we won't ask them again. If they haven't found a place yet, we'll wait a while until they haven't actively used the website for a couple of weeks (yes there's a setting for that), and then prompt them again.This will continue until they either find a place, give up, or unsubscribe from these emails. There's an unsubscribe link on each follow-up email to make it easy to opt-out.

And for students that tell us they've given up, if they do log in again later, we'll treat them as having re-engaged in their search for accommodation and begin following up with them when it looks like they have disengaged again.

This allows us to track things like:

• Approximately how long it takes students to find accommodation
• What kind of accommodation they choose (shared, rental or commercial student accommodation)
• Where they end up (address, suburb and postcode)
• Price, move in date and length of stay
• If they found accommodation through your StudyStays site, which is the listing that best matches
  

As an administrator, you can see details about student outcomes directly on a student's record (when they have responded). You can also view a history of all student outcome responses by clicking Student outcomes on the right hand side of the "Students" tab in Admin.

The Student Outcomes page in admin lets you filter outcomes, and export the raw data as a spreadsheet if you need to do further analysis, send emails to certain segments etc.

You can edit the email template for the follow-up email that gets sent to student by going to Admin > Settings > Email templates and looking under "Students" for "Outcome follow-up".

You can adjust when the follow-up is sent (or disable it altogether) under Admin > Settings > Students: "Email students to ask about their accommodation outcomes".

Listing outcomes

Summary

Email templates for StudyStays now support more formatting options, like bold, italic, links, lists and buttons.

These templates now use the same editor used for content pages, which you may already be familiar with.

What do I need to do?

Nothing! All your emails have been converted for you, and any customisations you have already made will be retained. We may have replaced some default links with action buttons in places (as in the screenshot above).

You might like to check your templates (Admin > Settings > Email templates) to add some formatting flair (if you fancy).

And as always, if you run into any problems please get in touch at support@studystays.com.au.

One last thing

Here's a tip: when you're editing email templates, pressing Enter or Return will add a new paragraph with a blank line in between. If you don't want that extra blank line, you can hold Shift-Enter to end the line and keep typing on the next line.

We've added a new feature to allow accommodation providers to upload supporting documents, such as ID and rooming house registration papers.

This feature is similar to Supporting Documents for Students. But instead of requiring documents to be uploaded during registration, providers can optionally add their supporting documents at any time. This lets you request documents for certain accommodation (like Rooming/Boarding Houses) if you choose, possibly in response to a new listing approval.

You can enable supporting documents for providers from Admin > Settings > Providers:

When you have enabled Provider Documents, providers will see a new option to upload their documents from their dashboard (and there's also a link in the user menu at top-right).

You can customise the name of the documents and the "form hint" to make it clear which providers need to upload documents, and what sort of documents you require.

Provider documents can be seen in admin by clicking on the provider's record, so you can refer to their documents during listing approval if you need to.

You might also like to update "form hints" for the listing categories that identify the type of providers that need to upload documents, to let them know what your requirements are. If you're not familiar with category hints, they can be modified while editing a category (Admin > Settings > Categories, under Additional Categories). When editing a category, there is a link to "Edit form hint" on the right hand side.

StudyStays now lets you offer work placement accommodation as a service to students.

This feature could be especially useful for clinical placements, or in other cases where students need to find accommodation in remote regions. For these students, the standard option to search for accommodation near a campus might not be particularly helpful.

The Work Placement Accommodation feature gives your StudyStays website a new tab, where students can search by any town or city in Australia.

Using this feature is optional and available free to all universities on the "Big" plan. To enable the "Work Placements" tab on your website, you simply need to go to Admin > Settings > Work placement accommodation and tick the box. You can also customise a short amount of content (including links to useful resources) to be displayed above the location search box on the "Work Placements" tab. If you have lots of content related to placements you might like to break this out into separate pages (under Admin > Content > Pages) and just provide a few links from the Work Placements tab so as not to bury the search box too far down the page.

If you'd like to help students find placement accommodation, of course it will be necessary to promote the idea to accommodation providers in the areas placements might be made. We will leave it to you to decide the best ways to get the word out!

We hope you find this feature useful. And if you do make use of it, we'd be interested in hearing your ideas about how it could be improved or extended to offer even better service to your students.