Managing orientation across five colleges, each with its own degree programs, student populations, and scheduling needs, is no easy feat.

Add in rolling admissions, undeclared students, and the pressure to drive engagement that moves the needle on retention…and you're looking at a coordination challenge that most single-tool solutions simply weren't built for.

That's exactly where Deric Ford, Associate Director of Orientation and Transition Experience at The New School, found himself. 

He needed a college orientation app that could deliver a personalized, equitable experience to every incoming student — across five distinct institutions — without a dedicated technical team to build it.

In this article we’ll take a deeper dive into the challenges Deric faced and how he addressed them. By the end you'll learn:

• How The New School built 30–40 custom orientation schedules for a single fall launch
• Why their personalization strategy created unexpected friction and what they're reconsidering
• How gated content became a tool for identity affirmation, not just information delivery
• What drove students to actually download and use the app
• The technical lesson from Fall 2024 that every orientation team should know before going live
• Why Deric recommends soft-launching in spring before your high-stakes fall event

Note: this article is based on a Guidebook Meets session we did with Deric Ford and the full conversation for you to watch below:

The New School's Orientation Challenge: Five Colleges, One Experience

The New School is a progressive, interdisciplinary liberal arts institution in New York City. Five institutions operate under its umbrella, three of which enroll first-year students, each with distinct degree programs, academic cultures, and student populations.

Deric's job is to design an orientation experience that feels cohesive and equitable across all of them, while still being genuinely relevant to each individual student.

That's a harder problem than it sounds. 

A nursing student, a fashion design student, a graduate student in social research, and an undeclared undergraduate all have different sessions to attend, different offices to connect with, and different information they need on day one. 

Before Guidebook, The New School used Splash to manage orientation scheduling. Splash worked reasonably well for one or two events, but it couldn't scale to the complexity Deric was managing. 

In addition, it couldn't create a consistent aesthetic across five colleges, couldn't assign personalized schedules to individual students, and couldn't handle the volume and variety of 30–40 distinct schedule types.

The switch to Guidebook — and the app Deric built within it — changed what was possible.

Building 30–40 Custom Schedules Without a Technical Team

The centerpiece of The New School's Fall 2024 orientation strategy was personalization at a scale most institutions don't attempt: 30 to 40 distinct custom schedules, each assigned to a specific student segment.

Deric built these schedules himself; no dedicated developer, no technical support team.

To make it work, he tagged every student uploaded into Guidebook with multiple attributes:

• College
• Degree level (undergraduate or graduate)
• Affinity group status (first-generation, international, transfer, veteran)
• Enrollment status. 

That tagging investment (done once at upload) became the engine that powered everything else: custom schedules, gated content, targeted push notifications, and in-app messaging throughout the entire orientation experience.

He also met individually with offices across the institution to understand which sessions were required for which student types, and which were optional. 

That relationship-building work (sitting down with financial aid, student health, sustainability, student support, and others) was the most time-intensive part of the build.

The result was a schedule architecture where a first-generation undergraduate at one college saw a completely different orientation timeline than a graduate student at another. And both felt like the experience was designed specifically for them.

The Unexpected Friction: When Personalization Meets Community

Here's something Deric didn't anticipate: students who received highly personalized schedules still wanted to know what everyone else was doing.

The New School attracts deeply community-oriented students. When they opened their custom schedule and saw something different from their peers, many didn't trust it. They wanted confirmation that their schedule was correct.

As Deric put it:

"Even though they had a custom schedule, they in essence wanted to understand what everyone else was doing before they could accept what they should be doing. They wanted a confirmation from us that their schedule was correct because their peer had something different."

This friction didn't break the experience, but it did create unexpected support questions and a layer of anxiety that Deric hadn't designed for. 

He's now evaluating whether a middle-ground approach that offers some visibility into the broader orientation program while still surfacing each student's personalized schedule, would better serve this particular student population.

The broader lesson applies to any institution considering deep personalization: the right level of customization depends on how your students relate to each other and to shared experiences. High trust in individualized information is not universal, and it's worth asking the question before you build the architecture.

Gated Content as Identity Affirmation

Beyond scheduling, Deric used Guidebook's gated list feature in a way that goes beyond logistics: to deliver personalized welcome messages from deans and targeted resources to specific student populations.

First-generation students received a message acknowledging their identity and connecting them to relevant support. International students saw content specific to their transition. 

Transfer students and veterans received the same intentional treatment: content visible only to them, delivered through the app before they ever set foot on campus.

Deric described the intent clearly:

"It shows intentional effort and intentional contact that we as an institution are making with that student — to honor and celebrate some of the special populations that they are part of, and connecting them to the resources that are available to them day one, even before they arrive at the institution."

This approach reframes gated content from a technical feature into a student experience strategy. It's not just about restricting what people see; it's about making students feel seen from the very first interaction with your institution.

What Actually Got Students to Download the App

App adoption is one of the most common pain points in higher education technology. You can build the most thoughtful orientation app in the world, but if students don't download it, none of it matters.

Deric's most effective adoption driver was elegantly simple: students could only access their personalized orientation schedule by downloading and logging into the app.

"Without downloading the app, a student cannot access their schedule. That was enough motivator for most to download it."

This is what's sometimes called a "functional dependency": giving students something they genuinely cannot get anywhere else. When the schedule lives exclusively in the app, the download decision makes itself.

Deric also flagged Guidebook's Leaderboard feature — a gamification tool that rewards students for in-app engagement — as a promising alternative mechanism for driving adoption when personalized schedules aren't the primary hook. 

For institutions that publish schedules publicly or through other channels, building a gamified engagement layer may be the more effective lever.

How Orientation Connects to Retention

Deric's orientation design isn't built on intuition alone; it's grounded in research.

Data shows that if a student attends one, two, or three events in the first 50 days of enrollment, they are statistically more likely to feel connected to the institution and less likely to withdraw.

That single data point shapes everything: the design of the initial orientation days, the structure of the six-week extended program called Narwhal Discovers, and the way Deric uses push notifications to drive attendance to low-enrollment sessions in real time.

When a college flagged that a particular session had lower-than-expected attendance, Deric could send a targeted push notification to the relevant student segment, immediately, from the app, to move the needle before the session ended.

This is where orientation technology stops being a logistics tool and starts being a retention strategy. The goal isn't just to get students to the right room on day one — it's to build the habit of showing up.

The Conference-Style Session Block

One of the more creative structural decisions in The New School's orientation was a dedicated 2–5pm session block where students could self-select which campus offices to hear from.

Financial aid, student accounts, sustainability, student health, student support: each ran a session during this window, and students could browse the options and add sessions to their personal schedules directly within Guidebook using the Tracks feature.

This approach gave students agency over their own orientation experience while still ensuring every office had an audience. It also modeled the kind of self-directed engagement The New School hopes students will carry into their academic careers.

The Technical Lesson From Fall 2024

The Fall 2024 launch went well by most measures, but it didn't go perfectly. And Deric is candid about what went wrong.

During the first 30 minutes of orientation, every time a new schedule was published and assigned to a late-arriving student, the entire app refreshed, causing all students' schedules to temporarily disappear. 

This happened repeatedly, roughly every five minutes, until the team identified the cause.

It created a stressful opening window. Students who had downloaded the app and were relying on it to know where to go suddenly saw blank screens.

The fix is straightforward in hindsight: complete all schedule assignments before the event goes live, and avoid batch-publishing during high-traffic windows. But it's the kind of lesson that's only obvious after you've lived through it — which is exactly why Deric shares it.

The Case for Settling Into Your Strategy

After Fall 2024, Deric's instinct was to start iterating immediately. His supervisor offered different advice: settle into the strategy first, then make changes based on what the data actually shows, not just early impressions:

"My leader said: let us settle into this strategy and then determine how we move forward. I think it's having that balance between understanding when to make the change, but also understanding what are some of the small low-hanging fruit that could change in order to solve some little problems in that process."

This is a useful frame for any team in their first or second year with a new platform. 

Early friction doesn't always mean the strategy is wrong; sometimes it means you need more data before you know what to fix.

The Results: A Different Kind of Question

The clearest signal that the app changed the orientation experience wasn't a metric; it was a shift in the questions students were asking.

Before Guidebook, the dominant student question was some version of: I don't know where I need to be and I don't know what's going on.

After the Fall 2024 launch, that changed.

"Students have only asked one question as it relates to their expectations for orientation: 'I'm supposed to be at my welcome session in Room 301. Where is Room 301?' To me, that is a great departure from 'I don't know where I need to be and I don't know what's going on.'"

— Deric Ford, Associate Director of Orientation and Transition Experience, The New School

Students arrived informed. They knew what was expected of them. They took ownership of their schedule rather than waiting to be told what to do. Colleagues across the institution noticed the difference.

By the Numbers

Here's a quick look at the scale and scope of The New School's orientation program:

• 5 colleges under The New School's umbrella: 3 enrolling first-year students, all requiring orientation programming
• 30–40 custom schedules built for Fall 2024 to reflect different student types, colleges, and degree programs
• Multiple user attributes tagged per student at upload (college, degree level, first-gen, international, transfer, veteran status)
• First 50 days: the research-backed window during which attending 1–3 events correlates with improved connection and reduced attrition
• 6-week extended orientation: "Narwhal Discovers" runs beyond the initial orientation days to sustain early engagement
• 2–5pm conference-style block: a self-selection session window organized as Tracks in Guidebook
• ~30 minutes: duration of the schedule-refresh disruption on day one of Fall 2024 before the cause was identified
• 1 spring soft-launch: a bare-bones app build tested before the high-volume fall orientation

Takeaways: What Your Team Can Apply

These are the decisions from The New School's experience that other new student programs can apply directly:

• Soft-launch in a lower-stakes semester. Build a bare-bones version of your app in the spring and test it before fall enrollment peaks. You'll surface issues without the pressure of a live, high-volume event.
• Tag users thoroughly at upload. Assigning multiple attributes to each student at the point of upload unlocks targeted notifications, gated content, and personalized schedules, without additional segmentation work later.
• Create a functional dependency to drive adoption. Put something students genuinely need (their schedule, exclusive resources, time-sensitive information) exclusively in the app. The download decision becomes much easier when there's a real reason to make it.
• Use gated content for identity affirmation, not just logistics. Deliver personalized welcome messages from deans or department heads to specific student populations before they arrive on campus. It signals institutional intentionality and builds belonging from day one.
• Freeze your schedule assignments before going live. Avoid publishing new schedule assignments during peak event moments. The resulting refresh can cause schedules to disappear for all users simultaneously.
• Know your students' community norms before choosing your personalization depth. High personalization works best when students trust individualized experiences. If your population is highly community-oriented, consider a hybrid approach that shows some shared context alongside personalized content.

Comparison: Splash vs. Guidebook for Multi-Institution Orientation

Build the Orientation Experience Your Students Deserve

If you're looking to deliver a personalized, scalable orientation experience across a complex student population, without a dedicated technical team, we'd love to help. You can start building your app or book a demo with one of our product experts.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Q: How do you personalize orientation schedules for hundreds of students across multiple colleges?

A: The most scalable approach is to tag students with multiple attributes at upload (such as college, degree level, affinity group status) and then build schedule types that map to those tag combinations. At The New School, this produced 30–40 distinct custom schedules for Fall 2024, all managed by one person using Guidebook.

Q: What's the best app for college student orientation?A: The right app depends on your institution's complexity. For multi-college or multi-program environments where personalized scheduling, gated content, and targeted communication matter, Guidebook is purpose-built for that level of nuance. 

Q: How do you get college students to download an orientation app?The most effective strategy is to put something students genuinely need exclusively inside the app. When students can't access their schedule any other way, the download decision makes itself. Gamification features like Guidebook's Leaderboard offer an alternative hook when schedules are available through other channels.

Q: How does student orientation affect retention?A: Research shows that students who attend one, two, or three events in the first 50 days of enrollment are statistically more likely to feel connected to their institution and less likely to withdraw. That data point makes orientation technology a retention strategy, not just a logistics tool.

Q: What should you do differently when running orientation for multiple schools or colleges within one university?A: Start by meeting with each school individually to understand which sessions are required versus optional for each student type. Build your user tagging system before you build your schedule architecture. Tthe attributes you assign at upload determine what personalization is possible throughout the entire experience.

Q: How do you use gated content in a student orientation app?A: Gated content in Guidebook is controlled through lists tied to user attributes. Students tagged as first-generation, international, transfer, or veteran only see content that's been designated for their group. This makes it possible to deliver dean welcome messages, affinity-specific resources, and targeted information to the right students, without surfacing it to everyone.

Q: When should you launch an orientation app and how do you test it before the fall?A: If you're planning a fall orientation, start building in January or February. Launch a bare-bones version of the app in the spring (even for a smaller event) so you can test the structure, identify issues, and make enhancements before your high-volume fall launch. Trying to build and launch simultaneously during fall enrollment is a much harder path.

Q: What's the biggest technical mistake to avoid when running a live orientation app?A: Avoid publishing new schedule assignments during peak live-event moments. At The New School, assigning a new schedule to a late-arriving student triggered a system-wide refresh, causing all students' schedules to disappear temporarily. Complete all schedule assignments before the event goes live, or at minimum, batch your updates outside of high-traffic windows.

[/faq]

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