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Implementation Process

Get Oriented

Review This Guide

This guide is designed to walk you through everything you need to know to implement SOSSI effectively, from understanding the tool’s framework to configuring your instance and planning your rollout. Start by reading through this Implementation Process section and familiarizing yourself with the material – particularly the decisions you’ll need to make before your campus goes live. The SOSSI team is available to support you throughout the planning process, but the more familiar you are with the content, the more productive those conversations will be.

Pay particular attention to the Make Decisions section, where you’ll work through placement, stakeholder identification, and your institutional response plan. Those are the areas where campuses most often benefit from talking through their thinking with the team.

Talk with the Team

Before you move into planning, schedule a one-on-one consultation with the SUNY SOSSI team. These conversations are designed to answer your questions, clarify how the tool works in your specific context, and help you think through what implementation might look like before you’ve committed to an approach.

To schedule a virtual meeting, email Susan Warner at susan.warner@suny.edu.

Make Decisions

The decisions you make in this section will determine how well SOSSI works at your institution.

Evidence from campuses using SOSSI points consistently to the same conditions that separate effective implementation from underperforming ones. Completion is higher when SOSSI is embedded in an existing required workflow rather than positioned as a separate ask. Results reach advisors when someone specific is responsible for reviewing them. Students get support when follow-up ownership is defined before deployment, not after. And impact is broader when SOSSI connects to the systems your campus already uses rather than running parallel to them.

The guideposts that follow will walk you through each of those decisions.

Who Needs to Be at the Table

SOSSI works best when the right people are involved from the start, the people who will own different pieces of the work once it’s running.

That list looks different at every campus. At some institutions, a single unit handles everything from setup to follow-up. At others, implementation touches advising, online learning, IT, faculty, student affairs, and the Dean of Students office simultaneously.

As you begin planning, consider who in your institution is responsible for:

  • Student onboarding and orientation: Where does SOSSI fit in the process, and who owns that process?
  • Advising and student support: Who will receive results and be responsible for follow-up?
  • Technology and systems: Who handles tool configuration, access, and troubleshooting?
  • Academic affairs and/or online learning leadership: Who needs to authorize or support adoption?
  • Student affairs and Dean of Students: Who is responsible for students in crisis or needing intensive support?
  • Communications: Who will reach out to students about SOSSI, and through what channels?
  • Student population scope: Who will be asked to complete SOSSI – all incoming online students, a specific program or cohort, or students identified by advisors?

Some campuses have found it useful to include a student representative in early planning conversations; students can reveal previously unknown friction points before rollout.

Before implementation begins, Decisions on where to start and how to scale are covered in Get Set Up: Starting with a Pilot, The Full Rollout, and Planning Your Timeline.

When in the Student Journey

Timing is one of the most consequential decisions you’ll make. SOSSI generates its most actionable insight when it’s completed early enough that someone can do something with the results, before a student hits a barrier they could have been prepared for.

That means thinking carefully about where in the student lifecycle SOSSI fits best for your population. Post-acceptance, post-registration, during orientation, as part of a first-year experience course … each of these moments carries different implications for who completes it, who sees the results, and what can realistically be done in response.

Consider:

  • When are students most likely to complete something that isn’t required?
  • When do your advisors and support staff have the capacity to act on what SOSSI surfaces?
  • What is the latest point in the semester when a response could still make a difference?
  • Will SOSSI be required, recommended, or optional – and how will that affect completion?

Your timing decision should be intentional and connected to your response capacity.

Learning from Other Implementations

Before finalizing your workflow placement, it’s worth looking at how other campuses have approached this decision. The case studies in Appendix 2 illustrate four different implementation models, ranging from required program intake to optional orientation placement, and the conditions that shaped how well each one worked.

As you read, pay less attention to which campus resembles yours structurally and more attention to the questions each case raises: Who owns follow-up? Where does SOSSI fit in an existing workflow? What happens when participation is optional versus required?

Your answers to those questions will shape your implementation more than institutional type will.

Where Will You Deploy It?

SOSSI is delivered through an intake Qualtrics link specific to your institution or program. The question to think through is where that Qualtrics link lives in the student’s experience.

Your options will likely include some combination of:

  • Orientation platform: if your orientation is hosted in a dedicated system
  • LMS (Brightspace, Canvas, or equivalent): embedded in a course shell or orientation module
  • Email outreach: a direct link sent by an advisor, coach, or automated communication
  • Advising intake workflow: shared by an advisor at the start of a first meeting or appointment
  • Acceptance or deposit communications: included in early welcome materials

Before you decide, two practical constraints are worth keeping in mind.

First, SOSSI results are identified by student email address, specifically the institutional email your campus assigns. That means the earliest you can deploy is after that email has been issued. For many campuses, that rules out placement in pre-admission or pre-deposit communications.

Second, consider when students have access to the channel you’re considering. LMS access, for example, is often granted later in the onboarding process than it might seem. Your When decision will often restrict your Where options.

The case studies in Appendix 2 illustrate how four campuses navigated this, with notably different results depending on where SOSSI was placed and whether that placement was within an existing required workflow.

How Will You Respond?

SOSSI generates insight, but insight only becomes support when someone knows what to do with it. Before your first student completes the inventory, your campus needs a plan for what happens next.

There are two distinct response tracks to plan for: the automated email students receive immediately after completing SOSSI, and the campus outreach your team initiates based on what responses reveal. Both require decisions before deployment, not after.

A working template to guide your planning is available in Appendix 3.

Automated Student Email

When a student submits the inventory, they receive an email report that includes their scores for each construct along with support resources. The SOSSI team provides templated responses that your campus can customize.

As you plan your automated email, consider:

  • What resources are you directing students to for each construct: Digital Resilience, Technical Access & Reliability, Help-Seeking Behavior, Self-Regulation, and Online Learning Expectations?
  • Are those resources specific to each construct, or are you defaulting to the same general referral across all of them? Specific resources are more useful and reduce the risk of overwhelming a single office with inquiries that could go elsewhere.
  • Are all resources ADA/Title II compliant and accessible to students at the time they’ll receive them? If you’re linking to a Brightspace page, will students have Brightspace access yet?
  • Is the email timely, relative to where the student is in their journey? What they need at orientation is different from what they need mid-semester.
  • Are you inadvertently duplicating resources students are already receiving through other campus communications?

The goal is a response that feels relevant and actionable, not a wall of links.

Campus Outreach

The automated email handles the first layer. Campus outreach handles the students whose responses signal a need for direct, personal attention.

As you plan your outreach process, consider:

  • Which responses, across which constructs, are your red flags? Which answers indicate a student needs immediate contact rather than a resource link?
  • Who is responsible for that contact? Be specific: which office, which role, which person in what circumstance? Ambiguity here is where students fall through the cracks.
  • How does this integrate with your existing early alert system or advising model? SOSSI works best when it flows into a process that already exists, not around it.
  • What type of outreach is appropriate – email, phone, early alert notification? Does your answer change depending on the construct or the severity of the response?
  • How will you scale? If 80 students flag technology access issues, a one-on-one call with each isn’t feasible. Is a workshop the right response? A targeted email campaign? Plan for volume before you need to manage it.
  • What is your timeline for follow-up? Define it now, before the semester starts.
  • Where will responses and follow-up actions be recorded? If you’re using an early alert system, outreach notes should live there.

Once you’ve assembled your resources and outreach plan, prioritize. You won’t be able to respond to everything at once. Decide in advance what gets automated delivery, what gets personal outreach, and what gets monitored over time.

The Response Plan Template in Appendix 3 will walk you through this planning construct by construct.

Get Set Up

A full implementation might look like this: every incoming online student – or every student in a defined program, school, degree level, or cohort – completes the SOSSI inventory before their first advising meeting. Individual or grouped results flow automatically to designated advisors and/or success coaches. Students with high-need responses receive direct outreach within a defined window. Data integrates into your existing early alert system, and your response plan, built around your campus’s specific resources, is already in place before the first student submits.

Every campus implementing SOSSI v2.0 faces the same early decision: start with a defined pilot or roll out broadly from the start. A pilot limits your reach in exchange for lower risk. A full rollout maximizes equity but requires ready-made infrastructure. The right choice depends on what your campus has already built; but by the time you’ve worked through the Make Decisions section, that answer is largely in front of you.

Starting with a Pilot

A pilot is a structured, intentional rollout to a defined subset of your intended population. Choose a specific program, a first-year cohort, or a single term. It is not a soft launch or a trial run. It is a full implementation with a smaller population, designed to test your response workflow before you scale it.

A pilot makes sense when follow-up ownership isn’t fully established across your whole population, when staffing capacity is limited, or when you want cleaner data before committing to a broader process change. The risk is inequity; students outside the pilot don’t benefit from early identification and support. Cover that tradeoff explicitly with your stakeholders before you proceed.

If you pilot, choose your cohort deliberately, build in a feedback mechanism from both students and staff, and set a clear timeline for assessing readiness to expand.

The Full Rollout

A full rollout deploys SOSSI to your entire intended population from the start. It maximizes reach and avoids the equity concerns a pilot introduces. But it requires that your response infrastructure be ready before the first student completes the inventory. Follow-up ownership needs to be assigned, resources need to be in place, and your outreach process needs to be defined and staffed.

A full rollout makes sense when your Make Decisions results produced clear, confident answers across all five planning areas.

Planning Your Timeline

By the time you’ve identified your stakeholders, determined your timing and placement, and completed your response plan, the pilot versus full rollout question has largely answered itself. If you can name who owns follow-up for your entire intended population and your staff can support the response at scale, you’re ready for a full rollout. If either of those questions produced uncertainty, a pilot is the right starting point.

Check on the campuses in Appendix 2 for pilot and full rollout options.

The Configuration Experience

SOSSI is configured through a separate Qualtrics survey called the Configuration Survey. When you submit it, the SOSSI team uses your responses to build your institution’s SOSSI v2.0 instance.

Before you sit down with the Configuration Survey, have the following ready:

  • Your campus logo URL: a publicly accessible link to your logo image file
  • Your institution or program name: as you want it to appear in the SOSSI interface
  • Your preferred SOSSI branding: if your campus would like to add a title in addition to SOSSI v2.0
  • Your email preference: whether you want individual student completion notifications sent to a designated campus contact
  • Campus contact email: the email address to which the above-referenced individual student notifications will be sent
  • Your name as the administrator of your SOSSI v2.0 instance
  • Your email address: for sending updates, changes, issues, and questions; this should also match the SUNY Federated login that will be used to download individual data files.
  • Five response sets: one for each construct, written in student-friendly language, describing the resources available to students who flag a need in that area

The response sets are the most time-intensive piece of the Configuration Survey. The SOSSI team provides templates for each construct as a starting point. Your job is to adapt them to reflect your campus’s specific resources, contacts, and language. Sample templates are available in Appendix 4.

Complete your Institutional Response Plan in Appendix 3 before you begin the Configuration Survey. The response sets you choose for the Configuration Survey should flow directly from that planning work.