To engage students throughout the year, Handshake is partnering with school teams to send timely and relevant email messages to unactivated undergraduate and community college students. Our goal is to continue supporting school teams in providing a "ready to send" resource while increasing overall student engagement in Handshake. To build on the success of our 2020 campaigns, which activated hundreds of thousands of students at over 800 participating schools, we are continuing into 2021 with refreshed content.

Timeline

As we did in the fall fall, we'll be adding unactivated undergraduate and community college students to the activation campaign on a rolling basis. The campaign itself is comprised of five emails sent over five weeks and will kick off the week of January 18th. At that time, any unactivated students at participating schools will get emails on the following cadence:

• Week of January 18th
• Week of January 25th
• Week of February 1st
• Week of February 8th
• Week of February 15th

If a student activates their Handshake account during the campaign, they will stop receiving activation emails.

If you upload new unactivated students to Handshake after January 18th, those students will kick off the same five week campaign the following week. For example, if you upload new unactivated students the week of January 25th, they'll receive the campaign on the following cadence:

• Week of February 1st
• Week of February 8th
• Week of February 15th
• Week of February 22nd
• Week of March 1st

In this way, newly uploaded (unactivated) students will be added to the activation campaign for the duration of the fall. This new structure ensures that new students always receive the activation campaign in a timely manner.

A few more details about the cadence:

• Emails will be sent over the course of Tuesday - Thursday of each send week.
• We will no longer be sending a heads up notification to participating school teams a week before each email is sent, but we are committed to maintaining the schedule described above.

Participation

• To manage your opt-in preferences for the campaign, navigate to your feature preferences tab to indicate whether your institution would like to participate. You can opt in or out of these emails at any time.
  • Please note! Only individuals who have the “Manage Feature Preferences” permission can opt into these campaigns. To learn more about this permission level, please refer to this help center article.

• Any schools opted into our Fall 2020 campaign will be automatically added to the Spring 2021 campaign. You can opt out at any time.

Audience & Content

• We will target undergraduate students—freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors—who have not yet logged into Handshake.
• As we did in the fall, we will be sending students curated content, like job recommendations, employers to follow, and tips on navigating a virtual job search to encourage them to log into Handshake for the first time.
• The from field will be populated using the Default from name field for your school, which can be found on the Targeted Emails tab on the School settings page. If the field is blank the emails will list Handshake as the sender.
• Check out examples of each week's email below. Note that these are templates and that content will change depending on the major and school year of the student—some language may also change: