Kurt Meyer: Hi everybody. Welcome. Thank you for joining in today. I'm here with Keith Kress from Veracross, and we're going to talk about our partnership with Veracross and go into a little bit more detail to our integration that we have.

We've been working with Veracross for a number of years now. Yeah, we're looking forward to showing everyone how we've developed our partnership. In that time so I'll give a little bit of a overview of how we see the partnership and integration and also dive into a demo to show how it all works. But before that, I'll let Keith introduce himself and tell us a little bit more about Veracross for those of you who aren't as familiar.

Keith Krass: Excellent. Thank you, Kurt. And I'm delighted to be here. As Kurt mentioned, we've been working with the fine team at Orah now for a number of years.

I think predating when I joined Veracross, which was about nine years ago. So really grateful for this opportunity to share with you all. Excited to show you some of the integration items that we're working on. And we think it offers a lot of value to schools.

We know many of you on the call are with Veracross. Kurt. Probably using Veracross and are very familiar with what Veracross is and does, but for those of you that might not be, I would love to just take a couple minutes, and I promise it won't be long, just to give a quick introduction or overview to Veracross. So who we are.

So first and foremost, we are a a global company 12 schools. And so we've been doing this for over 20 years. The only type of organizations that we work with are K 12 private schools. We work across 580 schools in 30, 39 different countries.

And I think the number that is most important or meaningful to us is we have over 99 percent retention over that 20 year span. So what that means is we partner with schools and we work really hard to serve schools and meet their needs. We do work, as I mentioned, we work with schools all over the world. These are just a few of the schools that we work with.

But quite literally just about every continent not every continent, but just about every continent, there is a school using Veracross. So what does Veracross do? To put it simply, Veracross is a school management or data management platform. Many schools, you might be looking at this graphic, and you recognize the challenges of moving data and information from one Siloed system to another.

The vision for Veracross is we want you to spend less time worrying about is your data accurate and right, less time moving data from this place to that place, and more time educating your kids. Investing in your communities and families, doing the work that you all intend to do as part of your school's mission. How do we do that? The unique aspect of Veracross is there is one central database underpinning all functional departments or functional areas at your school.

So that means if a person exists one time at your school, one time in your school software, We believe this should only exist one time in your offering, in your student information system or whatever platform you're using. So what we do is we have a centralized database, which then powers the different departments, but everyone is using shared data, which ensures that every, all information is up to date and usable by each of the departments. Practically what this looks like is, when one department updates information on the family, all families get access to that information, or all staff and faculty get access to that information.

It's always up to date, always in real time. Spend more time doing the things that matter at your school, less time shuffling data around. Lastly, really quickly, and again, I intend this to be quite fast because I know many of you are familiar with Veracross. We do work with over 200 different vendors.

Orah is a strategic partner of ours, and as I mentioned, we've been working with them for a number of years and are excited to show you some of the things that we've been working on, but we do work with a number of different providers in a number of different areas, including LMSs and visitor management software and a number of other vendors. If you have any questions about Veracross, feel free to use the chat throughout our webinar today. Otherwise, I think Kurt will have a little bit of time at the end. All right I'll pass things back to you, Kurt.

Kurt Meyer: Awesome. Thanks for that, Keith. All right, so I'm just going to share my screen as well to jump into what I've prepared on my side. Alright, so yeah, thanks so much for that overview of Veracross.

Those of you that aren't familiar with Orah and what Orah does, Orah is a leading duty of care platform and there's three core tenets that we focus on to answer some fundamental questions about upholding your duty of care for your students, and that's where are they, how are they, and how are we communicating with them. So We define duty of care as being able to account for students both physically and emotionally. And we believe that's one of the most important problems that schools need to face each and every day. And we have three core products that address those needs.

areas. And yep, as we've mentioned, we've been working with Veracross for a number of years, and I just want to talk a little bit about how Orah and Veracross interact with each other, at least from my perspective. So one of the models that we've, mental models that we've come up with is the school's hierarchy of needs. And this sort of outlays the main sort of problems or Domains within the school and how they stack up with each other.

So right at the bottom, you had the core operations and system of record. And that's where Veracross sits. So as Keith mentioned, having that central database with one student profile that sort of underpins all the other systems that Veracross plugs into, so you've got a central database and you don't have. Data being duplicated in different areas.

And that's typically the SIS and student management system. So that's what Veracross does. And without that system, then it'd be very difficult for schools to operate in the first place. So the core operations and system of record, that's the fund, the foundational piece we believe.

And once that's. There and available and you're open for business and schools are coming. Students are coming to school. The next layer is your duty of care.

So before education, before teaching your number one priority as soon as students are, on school grounds or within your care is to make sure that they are accountable physically and emotionally and that they're safe. And especially with private schools that's the number one thing that parents and, teachers want to focus on before getting into the education piece is that we're sending our kids to a a school that's going to prioritize their well being and safety first and foremost. And that's not all always for crisis sort of situations. That's just.

On a day to day basis, just knowing how someone's doing, knowing having a good idea of where they actually are on campus, and, how they've been engaging attendance wise how the communications are going so similar to if you're, to ask a parent how their children are going a school has to do that, but at scale and helping them answer those questions. Those fundamental questions around duty of care. And that's where Orah sits in, and we believe that's the next layer. And then above that, you have your education, which is covered by the LMS.

Guidance, which is more around reporting BI tools and analytics. And then finally, you have the legacy, which is donor management software and things like that, where your community can get back to the school. So that's how we see how these different tools work with each other and support schools and their needs. And yeah, specifically how Veracross and Orah work together as well, so hopefully that makes sense.

So in terms of the integration we have a deep integration with Veracross. So we're syncing students. Contacts, staff, dorms, groups and schedules, excuses, passes, attendance records, and attendance history records for the attendance analytics, which I'll show what that looks like. As I mentioned, Veracross is the system of records, so most of these integrations of pulling from Veracross, especially the student's profile type of information.

But we do have a couple of objects that are native to Orah that we send back to Veracross as well. And I'll talk through those details a little bit. All right. So I'm just going to get straight into the demo now and yeah, we'll go through how those different pieces work.

So I'm just switching over to my demo account here. Okay. So if you have a Orah account. Under app directory integrations is where you'll be able to manage your integration with Veracross.

So if you're not already connected then you will have to send us your API keys or actually you would have to enable Orah from the Veracross partners portal and from there we'll be able to log in and grab your API keys. We do have some document, documentation on how that works, so just let us know and we'll send that through. But once you're connected under the integration management page you'll be able to see all the different types of information that we're syncing with Veracross and how we push and pull that information. So starting off with students so we can pull in.

The core information here, which is set by default. But you can also create some custom mappings as well. So if you set up a custom field within Orah you can map that to any student field within Veracross

Tiago Penteado: and they'll pull over or out different types of

Kurt Meyer: students. So say if you only want boarding students, then you can just select boarding students. And you can also filter by grade levels as well, if you only want specific grade levels to be pulled over from Verifrost. And this is an automatic sync, so if you turn that on, it's going to update every five hours.

We also have a debugger for any duplicate students that might exist. Say if you created a student in Orah. But then they were synced over from Veracross this will just show you that there's a possible duplicate and you can merge those students if you want. And moving forward, it would just be updated from Veracross.

You'll notice that we also have a sync button here. For most of these integration objects, you can run a manual sync as well. So moving on to contacts. So contacts are fixed to these fields.

You've got your basic information first name, last name, phone numbers address. And title, and that's being pulled over from these fields in Veracross. And, yep, that's pretty straightforward. You'll also notice that you have the ability to specify if you want to create, update, or delete based on Veracross.

Say if you didn't want to delete information, that means that if something was deleted in Veracross, it wouldn't be deleted in Orah. But generally you'd have all of these turned on so that you stay in sync with with what's happening in Veracross. Next we have the house field. So these are dorms.

Dorms are houses depending on which part of the world you're in. So these would pull over from Veracross and your boarding students will be automatically assigned to those rooms. And then in Orah, we have a a concept of houses but that's the same thing as Dorms, so within Orah, you'll be able to organize your students within their houses and filter by houses as well. And one of the more recent additions is being able to sync over your staff as well.

So this syncs over any staff users that you had set up in Veracross and will pull them into Orah. And once they're synced over, I'll actually jump over to that. You can see here within the stock database in Orah, we have 327 stock that's been imported. And they've been imported directly from Veracross, and you can see here, That they've already been connected to their corresponding user within Veracross.

Um, once they've been imported, you can go ahead and send them an invite. If you have SSO set up, then they won't have to create a new username and password. You would just go ahead and configure them, which means just assigning their appropriate user roles and permissions. And once that's been done they'll receive an email with the link to Orah's login page.

And when they go to that login page, they'll just have to put in their current email address. Username and password SSO has been set up. So that's a really smooth onboarding process for your staff as well, and it ensures that, any new staff added into Veracross will automatically sync over to Orah, and then you can onboard them easily from there. So that was a new addition.

We're super excited with that and we think it is going to help a lot with onboarding your day staff and day students because typically there's a lot more than just on the boarding side. The other integration is sending passes from Orah to Veracross. So this is one of the objects that are going in the other direction. So within Orah, one of the core things that you can do is create a pass for a student, which is essentially a permission, um, giving them permission to be outside of class or away from the boarding house.

And that can be synced over to Veracross as a absence record. So I have a couple of passes here, early departure, late arrival. Set up an Orah, and then that's going, when those are created, that's going to map over to Veracross as absent excused or tidy unexcused. And you'd have a list of all the available absence types in Veracross as well to choose from.

And you can add any other passes that you have set up in Orah and to another absence type within Veracross. So this is especially powerful. If you're using Orah to manage your excuses or if in the boarding school context there's certain reasons why students wouldn't be expected at class for that day and this would automatically update the attendance record within Veracross so that you don't have to call or email the day school to let them know that a student isn't going to be arriving. It just happened automatically.

And the next one is groups. So when we say group, we call these types of groups SIS groups because they're being pulled over from the SIS and they typically relate to classes and athletic groups and advisory groups and things like that. And they also have a timetable associated with them. So within the admin console.

You'll be able to see your groups here. And it's going to show you the groups that's connected, that's pulling in from the SIS that you connected. So in this case through Veracross, we're pulling in your academic and athletic groups. So you can see all of these here you can see how many staff are assigned to them and also how many, um, students as well.

Currently you're seeing zero staff, but once those staff that have been synced over from Veracross, once they've been sent their invite and their account has been configured then these numbers will start increasing. Yeah, and as a staff, when you log into Orah once these groups are set up, you'll automatically be able to filter your students by the groups that you have in Veracross. As a teacher or as a coach, you'll be able to filter down to your own classes or athletic groups. Alright, so those are some of the main objects.

If you want to add a new object, so if you don't see all of these here and you wanted to add one of them, then you would hit this new sync object button here, and it would show all the objects that are available but haven't been enabled yet. And currently we've got the role record and attendance history record that have been set up for this account. But the role record is essentially attendance records that have been created in Orah or Veracross. And we're able to pull in attendance records from Veracross.

And that only gets saved within the student profile. And we can also push attendance records to Veracross as well that's been created within Orah. And for the attendance history sync that pulls over all the attendance data within Veracross to generate a dashboard. And I'll show you what that looks like as well.

So that's an overview of the integration capabilities that we have. As you can see, it's quite comprehensive. And I'll just show you a couple of downstream examples of how this data is being surfaced. Just gonna switch to our other account.

So firstly, as a staff member you can filter by the groups that you have available. And on the, my schedule view, you'll be able to see all the other staff members who have been connected and should be able to see the schedule pull in. I think I actually need to run the the group sync for this account, but I'll just jump to a different one just for a moment. Sorry.

Okay, so on the schedule view, you'll be able to see all the classes that are being pulled in for each day. So these are specific to me as a teacher, so I can see that I've got U. S. Advisory and it shows which students are in that class, and from here, I can mark attendance.

And these items are being pulled in directly from Verifrost. And you can also search other classes. Staff members who have been connected and you'll be able to see their schedules as well if you want to mark attendance on their behalf. And the other ability is being able to sync filter by your own groups.

So these are my own classes or athletic groups. And I can filter my Orah students by those any time I want. The other thing that I mentioned is the Attendance Insights Dashboard. So this is plugging into Veracross information and it's using that to generate a dashboard to give you some key attendance insights.

Thanks. So once you have, just jump back to that settings page, once you have the attendance history integration enabled, which is this one here. Once this is turned on then you'll be able to pull in all the data that you need to generate this dashboard. And so this dashboard gives you a view of your tenants rights over time for any cohort of students so you can filter by your different classes or analytic groups or your different year levels or dorms or houses and things like that, and you can save a dashboard for each of those cohorts Can also filter by a different time period, but essentially it will surface some key information regarding attendance.

Specifically what the attendance rate is, and you can see a trend line as well. There'll be a heat map that you can see on a per class or per year level, just showing any hotspots of low attendance. So that could be a. An area of concern that you might want to follow up on.

And it will also show unexcused students with the most unexcused absences most light most tardies or late, most excused absences. And also on a per student basis, you'll be able to see those key data points in a table format and filter by those data points. So if you want to see students who had, more than one mate. Then it will filter down to those students.

It looks like there's none in this case, but yeah, it makes it really easy just to answer some of those high level questions about, where attendance where attendance is at for each student and which students warrants a little bit more of a follow up. All right, that that covers the attendance insights piece. That's what it's going to look like once you've set up the integration. And I think I've covered all the key elements here.

So I'm going to jump back to my slides for a minute. And yeah, if you need any help with getting your integration set up, if you're interested in trialing Orah, or if you just want us to review your current setup, just to make sure that everything's working as expected, yeah, then yeah, feel free to get in touch. You can email our support team at support@Orah.com and we'll reach out to you did you have any comments that you wanted to add, Keith, before we

Keith Krass: I'll just mention quickly. It was really neat. I was actually the first time I've seen in the weeds that the integration works between the platforms. And it's really great.

It's actually one of the probably more sophisticated integrations I've seen built by our partners in terms of that end user interface. So that was really cool. Very cool to see.

Kurt Meyer: Oh, thank you. And yeah, Veracross definitely has one of the best APIs to work with that we've come across with the different partners as well. So it's yeah, it's been great. Great to work with you all.

And yeah, there's definitely support on your end to helping partners like us being successful with these sorts of integrations. All I think we'll just leave it there for today, but thank you all so much for joining in. And yeah, please do get in touch. If you have any questions or need any help with your Veracross integration and we'd love to be in touch.

Cheers. Thanks Keith.

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