Bursar Bulletin: How to engage students on unpaid balances

We gathered the best tips and tricks from all our conference discussions and thought it might be helpful to share! Plus, TouchNet's parent company makes a big acquisition.

Apr 22, 2025

Good morning!

A number of us Backpackers (yes, we call ourselves that) were on the road last week attending conferences and meeting universities across the country.

One theme kept coming up: how to best engage students. It seemed a universal challenge regardless of what you were trying to get done - get payment on an unpaid balance, obtain SSNs at end of year, finalize enrollment, get clarification on a scholarship, find a contact email (and the list goes on).

We thought it might be helpful if we took everything we learned in these conversations last week, paired with what we have learned as a fintech company, and shared our framework for how to best engage students. With Fall just around the corner (I know, how is it nearly here already), I hope this is helpful!

Engaging Students - A Framework

The part that really struck me about student engagement was how similar it is to strategies that private companies employ to sell to customers/clients, or re-engage existing ones that have gone dark. I spent many years at SoFi, one of the largest fintech lenders in the country, and so much of our time was spent on ways to engage our member base because engaged members paid back their loans!

Having said that, we loved hearing all the creative ways that student accounts professionals were finding and deploying to engage students (and families) specifically for paying bills. So this is our best go at combining the two and coming up with a little framework to wrap around it - and I will provide our favorite tricks we learned from you all in detail for each section. Keep in mind, this is not supposed to be a catch-all, but rather my hope is the framing might help stir some creativity on your end or lead to viewing a current process in a way you hadn’t before!

#1 Automate Outbound

A lot of institutions (universities or otherwise) automate the initial ‘thing’ - for example, the bill email itself, and then don’t automate much further from there. Every university should ideally have a full list of automated communications that track to certain events and statuses. Reminder emails at certain intervals are a good example, but also things triggered off of events - ideally if you saw a log in to view a bill with no action, you know to trigger a “continue where you left off” email, or something like that.

If you don’t have that kind of list somewhere, it is a great thing to have handy. Even if you start small, you can add to it over time whenever you think of or are alerted to an event or timing that would be beneficial to have an automated communication sent. What is really helpful is setting up ‘drip’ campaigns, which are automated outbound communications that send based on a timeline and/or events. For example, on a third automated email you could introduce the idea of a payment plan as a focus point to try and engage students/student families that way.

#2 Gauge Intent

Nowhere does the old adage “time is money” ring truer than in a university student accounts office. Unfortunately we also know that resources are not endless (and maybe that’s putting it nicely) so making sure that we know where to focus effort is extremely important. This is where analytics comes in!

The idea here is that you are able to pinpoint a small number of intent signals that correlate very highly to bills getting paid. Some examples that we heard are really strong event triggers (know that intent signals can be very specific to University, so trial and error goes a long way!):

Opened billing / outbound emails
Started (or better yet, completed) orientation
Added an authorized user (this is a biggie!)
Either clicked on or started a payment plan application
Registered for classes

It is really helpful to build a list of 4 - 8 events that are relevant for your university, and then make sure you have the appropriate analytics and technology to support tracking them. That is often the hardest part!

#3 Prioritize

Hopefully, what you can end up with after #1 and #2 is a prioritized/tiered list of students that allows you to focus your efforts on the students with the highest likelihood of payment. Let’s play this out in an example where you had 100 minutes to reach out to 100 students. You could spend one minute with each, with a generic chance of maybe getting 5% to end up paying, or 5 students. Alternatively, if you knew which 20 were most likely to pay - lets give them an 80% chance - you could spend 5 minutes with each and get 16 students to pay!

Prioritizing or tiering also helps you automate outbound (coming full circle already) to those with a lower likelihood of payment. For example, perhaps you would move this cohort over to your collections agency earlier for them to take over (and earlier always helps). Or perhaps you run a text or call campaign with these to try and engage in that way (versus just email). This could even potentially be something that works with Enrollment Services - where they can try and engage more on a “let me help you register for classes” basis.

#4 Engage

This was where the creativity really came through from y’all! This is all about finding creative and new ways to get in front of those students that signaled well (positive event triggers) but a quick phone call didn’t convert - here are some favorites:

Automated Appointments: We met a University that sends students with an outstanding balance an appointment for next day with a reminder, which causes a stir! The point isn’t necessarily to even have the appointment, but elicit a response - even if the response is “I didn’t book this”, you have ‘em!
Lectures: Some professors are open to having the team from the Bursar’ office present at the beginning of a lecture. They get the students to login and open up their bill then and there to check everything is as it should be!
Pop-Up Tables: Some folks took to the streets and set up tables during rush or outside the mess hall, asking students as they walked by if their tuition is all paid up.
Orientation: Being part of the orientation sessions seemed to help a ton - particularly when you can get into any sessions where students are also with parents.

#5 Pay

There is nothing worse than doing all the hard work to get someone on the phone and not be able to take payment. We spoke a couple of weeks ago about using payment links to empower Bursar’s to take payment more easily, but this is a broader point - make sure your systems are set up so that you can help guide them through to payment completion while on the phone.

Actually, when Bursars were asked in a live poll what has the biggest impact on payment outcomes, variety of payment options came in at number 2. We believe this in a big way at Backpack, and as much as we can act as an aggregator of payment options to make sure student families at choice without Bursars needing to sacrifice standardization/centralization.

Hopefully this was helpful! I’d love to hear from any of you that have some other interesting tactics to share! Send them through to callum@backpackpay.com.

Some quick FinTech Stuff…

You didn’t think I was going to go a week without talking about FinTech, did you?

Global Payments (owner of TouchNet) just executed a complex transaction with FIS, selling its Issuer Solutions business for $13.5BN and acquiring World Pay for $22.7BN. The move simplifies Global Payments’ business by doubling down on merchant partnerships, with World Pay powering payments for 1M+ merchants across 246 countries.

“Issuer Solutions” was a different side of the business, which provided technology services to financial services companies and brands to issue products like cards. The rationale here (reading between the lines) is that trying to be everything to everyone was hard, and this deal means they can focus entirely on merchants - Universities are one of those merchant categories that is serviced by TouchNet.