Outcome: measurement
Your LMS tells you who logged in. Your SIS tells you who dropped out. First Six measures the four to six weeks in between, where the leading indicators live and where support still changes the outcome.
The challenge
Universities are rich in lagging data and starved of leading signal. Census attrition, end-of-semester surveys, and GPA all arrive after the window where intervention works. By the time a student shows up in the SIS as withdrawn, the moment to help them passed weeks earlier.
The signal that matters, how a cohort is settling, where help demand is building, who has gone quiet, moves first and is scattered across systems that were never built to measure it.
Outcomes
What changes when First Six is running for your team.
Signal weeks earlier than census or surveys
You see a cohort slipping in week two, not in a report twelve months later.
A read on service quality, not just IT tickets
Response times and resolution rates for student welfare, measured the way you already measure IT.
Equity gaps you can see and act on
Disaggregated engagement by audience tag, without commissioning a separate piece of research.
The quiet students made visible
Students who never check in or raise a request, the segment most at risk, surfaced as a group instead of missed.
Related Stakeholders
How First Six helps
The same six-week method, pointed at what your team needs.
01
Sentiment across the six weeks
The slope of cohort wellbeing week by week, by audience tag, long before an end-of-semester survey would show it.
02
Pre-census risk signal
Check-in and help-request patterns surface students who are slipping before census date, while you can still reach them.
03
Service quality you can measure
First-touch response time on help requests and resolution by category.
04
Equity, disaggregated and live
Engagement and belonging by audience tag, including first-in-family, regional, and low-SES, sliced live rather than waiting on a separate study.
What you get with First Six
Three things this gives your team from the first week.
Leading, not lagging
Signals that move weeks before census attrition or an end-of-semester survey would notice.
Aggregate, not individual
Cohort and audience trends with small groups suppressed, never predictions about named students.
Built to act on
Every signal connects to a way to respond, so what you can see, you can do something about.
Outbound webhooks
Subscribe your own systems to signed First Six events (request created, crisis, updated, resolved), delivered over HTTPS with an HMAC signature you verify.
Help desk & CRM (email-to-ticket)
When a student asks for help, open a ticket in the help desk your staff already watch (ServiceNow, Salesforce, Jira Service Management, Zendesk), via email-to-case.
Calendar (ICS)
Add events to the calendar students already use.
Student information system
Sync enrolment and audience groups from your student information system. CSV roster import is available today; the direct push endpoint is in early access.
SAML 2.0
Single sign-on via SAML 2.0. In progress.
OpenID Connect (OIDC)
Standards-based single sign-on via OpenID Connect.
Microsoft Entra ID
Single sign-on via Microsoft Entra ID using OIDC.
See the signal your other tools miss
Book a walkthrough and we'll show the telemetry between login and withdrawal, mapped to your cohort.
Frequently asked questions
What teams ask us most.
No, and we won't. There's no prediction or risk-scoring of named students. First Six measures cohort and audience trends with small groups suppressed; and when a student signals they're struggling, support staff can see who and reach out, with that access audit-logged.
Your LMS measures logins and your SIS records withdrawals. Neither measures the weeks in between, where wellbeing sentiment, help demand, and engagement move first. That gap is what First Six measures.
We report leading indicators and let you compare cohorts over time. We don't put a causal attrition percentage on it without a controlled study, and we show you the signal instead of quoting a number we can't stand behind.
In Australia (AWS Sydney), isolated per tenant by row-level security. See the Trust Centre for the full detail.