Hear from your peer, Jonathan

It’s been overwhelmingly positive. Every time I bring up a question—big or small—I feel heard. I ask a lot of what-if questions like, “Can the system do this?” and the team never brushes me off. They’re supportive, responsive, and genuinely invested in helping me succeed.

Compared to our previous systems, Watermark makes data easier to access and share. Everything lives in one place, which increases transparency and encourages collaboration. Making data more accessible doesn’t just make our jobs easier, it makes it easier to tell our institution’s story in a meaningful way.

Transparency is a major one. Everyone can see the same information, which fosters accountability and trust.

Consolidation is another. Instead of scattered systems and siloed data, everything we need is in one place. 

Finally, I’d say partnership. When we make changes, whether to administrative workflows or to our academic assessment review process, we’re not doing it alone. We have Watermark’s support behind us. That kind of collaboration makes a big difference.

Course evaluations are a great example. Before Watermark, they were more of an afterthought, something we had to do. Now, they’re taken seriously.

Faculty understand how important course evaluations are to their reviews. Students recognize that their feedback matters. And because we made the process easier and more accessible, our response rates increased dramatically, up nearly 20% in a single year.

With our old system, reports had to be pulled manually and shared by email. It was incredibly time-consuming and not particularly effective. With Watermark, reports are automatically delivered the day final grades are submitted.

We configured a few things to get survey results front and center, right where faculty are every day, and suddenly they were reaching out to thank us. I had people asking, “Is this standard now?” They were shocked by how seamless the process had become.

When we implemented Planning & Self-Study, it inspired us to raise the bar on our internal processes. We took a hard look at how we were doing things and realized we could do better. That led to an “assessment tour” where we met with every academic and administrative program to roll out a new template and resources.

Watermark gave us the structure, and we rose to meet it. It wasn’t just a tech implementation, it was a cultural shift.

We’re excited to modernize our adjunct review process, which used to be incredibly manual. We started with our review, promotion and tenure process, and now that it runs  through Watermark, people are energized. By eliminating administrative burden, we can focus on what really matters: supporting our faculty. I’m excited to extend that to adjunct faculty.

I genuinely feel like Watermark wants Radford to succeed. They understand that every institution is different, but no matter what, they’ve got our back. That kind of support is rare, and it means a lot.