Education IT Reporter

Modern Campus announces the acquisition of Presence, a campus engagement and learning platform for higher education institutions. The acquisition extends Modern Campus’s learning partners to more than 1,400 colleges and universities across North America and enables each to serve their students with a massively personalized experience throughout the “learner to earner” journey.

With a practical approach to impacting student engagement, Presence helps higher education institutions increase student engagement to power retention, graduation rates and workforce readiness. A data-focused student engagement, learning and retention platform for student affairs divisions, Presence enables higher education institutions to:

Manage and automate processes: Simplify complicated and inconsistent practices by standardizing how involvement opportunities are structured and advertised. Integrated in one platform, users can improve both operational workflows and student accessibility.

Engage more students: Meet students where they are and simplify how they find involvement opportunities to ensure effective advertisement, quick access and more direct engagement. Remove barriers to involvement, including every student with automatic profiles.

Track and collect engagement data: Measure participation both qualitatively and quantitatively. Utilize scalable data collection through mobile devices and collect survey and assessment data in a single tool.
Assess behaviors and trends: Make data-driven decisions to increase engagement, ensure retention and boost graduation rates. Synced live with student information system data, users can identify trends, compare effectiveness and identify under-involved students.

Encourage and measure experiential learning and co-curricular opportunities: Structure every opportunity across campus to empower students to determine which learning pathways they want to follow and visualize their completion. Automate and assess earning through essential skill development to ensure workforce readiness.

“Learner engagement means everything to modern higher education institutions – because highly engaged learners graduate on time and are far more likely to view their post-secondary education as a lifelong partnership versus merely a two- or four-year transactional relationship,” said Brian Kibby, chief executive officer of Modern Campus. “Not only does Presence offer the best student engagement platform, they’re also equally obsessed with customer success (they call it ‘happiness’), which makes them both a perfect product and cultural fit for Modern Campus.”

This transaction marks the third acquisition by Modern Campus in 2021; the company acquired academic catalog and curriculum management provider DIGARC on June 10th and acquired interactive campus map and virtual tour provider nuCloud in March.

Presence is highly complementary with Modern Campus Omni CMS, Modern Campus Destiny One and newly acquired DIGARC products. The integration of the Modern Campus platform with Presence will enable colleges and universities to deliver massively personalized student experiences to attract, enroll, engage and retain learners with high effectiveness and efficiency.

“We’ve grown quickly because of our product innovation and focus on customer happiness; partnering with Modern Campus now affords us the opportunity to fuel both, while also deepening our campus relationships,” said Reuben Pressman, founder and chief executive officer of Presence. “More than that, we’re excited to be part of a broader platform that aligns with our focus on highly personalized student experiences and enables student success in their ‘learner to earner’ lifecycle.”

“This acquisition is yet another example of how Modern Campus is investing in innovation to help its customers fulfill their mission, and we’re proud to add fuel for Modern Campus’s customer obsession,” said Stephen Rice, principal at The Riverside Company, the equity partner for Modern Campus. “When we began researching potential campus engagement solutions, Presence quickly emerged as the clear leader in the segment. Adding Presence to the Modern Campus modern learner engagement platform is a perfect match.”

Presence employees will join Modern Campus with founder and chief executive officer Reuben Pressman joining the company’s executive team. Brian Kibby will remain CEO of Modern Campus.