Campus Tour Program
A Product Portfolio Study: From Crisis to National Recognition
8 min read
UC Santa Barbara's campus tour program was in an active institutional crisis when I took on its leadership. Tour guides were threatening to strike, the campus was recovering from tragedy, and despite its status as a top-10 public university with an extraordinary academic record, UCSB was broadly perceived as a party school. The brand did not match the product, and the people on the front lines of closing that gap didn't trust the institution asking them to do it.
As a student leader and later as professional staff, I diagnosed the root causes of dysfunction within the program, then built four interconnected fixes to address them: a homegrown applicant tracking system, internal communications and operations infrastructure, a redesigned training program, and a complete tour experience redesign. The result was a nationally recognized program serving over 50,000 visitors annually, with measurable improvements in quality, efficiency, and institutional trust.
Problem
In spring 2014, three things were simultaneously true about UC Santa Barbara:
It was a top-10 public university nationally, with more Nobel laureates than any other public institution in the preceding fifteen years. It had just experienced the Isla Vista mass shooting and a separate riot — both with sustained national media coverage — at the precise moment when prospective students and families were forming impressions of the campus. And it was broadly, persistently perceived as a party school. The campus had to earn prospective families’ trust in the midst of one of the hardest moments in its history.
Inside the campus tour program, things were no better. The Gaucho Tour Association, the group of student guides employed by the Admissions office, was in open conflict with Admissions leadership. Guides were threatening to strike. The tension had calcified into an us-versus-them culture. Guides loved UCSB. They identified fiercely with the campus, but they were completely alienated from the department employing them. That gap was a huge problem for Admissions to solve because visitors saw their tour guide as the most genuine representation of the campus, and alienated tour guides, while having the best of intentions, often went rogue. Sometimes it was a guide leading a 3-hour tour in a 90 minute slot, ignoring Admissions’ constraints to the detriment of the overall visitor experience. Other times a guide made a comment about the selectivity of a certain major that undercut a message Admissions had worked hard to convey.
The Office of Admissions tasked me with turning the program around, first as a student leader (2014-2015) and then as professional staff (2016-2019).
Research
Before taking on any leadership role, I studied the tour program as part of an organizational communication course.
I conducted a formal cultural analysis of the campus tour program, with structured interviews across every level of the hierarchy: rank-and-file guides, student leaders, and admissions professional staff. I analyzed written artifacts: a shadow Facebook group guides built specifically to exclude Admissions, a petition about dress code, the job application guides had designed themselves. I studied the language people used to describe the organization and each other. As it turned out, the tour guides and Admissions shared a vision but were missing a shared culture.
Insights
Guides didn't feel like they were part of Admissions. They felt like contractors hired to perform inauthentic versions of themselves. The resentment wasn't irrational. It was a byproduct of guides’ deep love for their campus and a feeling that their contributions to UCSB were not appreciated by Admissions. The guides needed to retain a level of autonomy to interpret the university’s story through their own experience.
Meanwhile Admissions’ professional staff felt like the inner workings of the tour program were opaque and disorganized. They knew the tour guides were an important part of their recruitment funnel, but they weren’t sure if the tour program’s goals were aligned with the larger department. Admissions needed to see evidence that the tour program’s efforts were supporting the department’s strategic priorities.
These diagnoses changed everything that followed. The products and processes I eventually built weren't just program improvements. They were trust infrastructure designed to close the gap between the tour guides and Admissions, and in doing so, close the gap between what UCSB was and how it was perceived by campus visitors. As I wrote in my final year as a student leader, the tour guides “walk backwards to move UCSB forward.”
Solution
The Portfolio
What followed wasn't a single project. It was four interconnected products and processes serving two distinct user groups: the prospective students and their families visiting campus, along with the 40–90 student guides. All while building trust with a third group: Admissions and campus leadership. All of it had to work together. I couldn't fix the external experience without fixing the internal one first.
01 — Applicant Tracking System (Homegrown, Airtable)
Fixing the pipeline to perform at scale
The guide recruitment process was paper-based, physically distributed, and informal. Pickup was required in person. Personal referral was the dominant sourcing channel. Applications were read by a large committee with no real mechanism for norming. Many applicants never received an update on their application because of the large volume of applications. A microwave fire in the building housing 400+ paper applications made the fragility of the existing system impossible to ignore.
The result: significant access barriers for students without existing connections to the program, undetectable scoring drift between applications, and a filing system dependent on a single location.
I designed and built a custom ATS in Airtable with parallel multi-reviewer workflows, demographic data collection and diversity reporting to campus leadership, scoring normalization to detect reviewer drift, and applicant notification automation.
Outcome: 502 applications received, a program record, and 100% were reviewed on time for a critical hiring timeline. First formalized demographic tracking in program history. Scoring normalization led to more fair review, increasing the quality of new cohorts. 100% of applicants received timely updates on their application status.
02 — Internal Communications (Slack + Digital Scheduling)
Instrumenting operations to scale capacity
The shadow Facebook group that had intentionally bypassed Admissions was a symptom of fragmented internal communication across 40-90 guides. Scheduling failures, inconsistent tour quality, and institutional distrust all traced back to the same root: guides had built their own system because the official one didn't work.
The fix was a combination of Slack and When to Work, a digital scheduling platform.
First, I selected, implemented, and drove adoption of Slack across the entire guide staff. This replaced the informal shadow channel with something that actually served their needs by allowing for both formal and informal communication to take place on the same platform.
Second, I digitized the scheduling system, moving from manual, analog coordination to a platform that gave us real data for the first time: who was showing up, how often, how tour loads were distributed, and where patterns of inconsistency were concentrated. The digital scheduling system also allowed us to schedule more school group tours by unlocking scheduling in atypical timeslots, increasing the tour program’s service capacity.
Together, these weren't just communication improvements. They were the foundation for a culture of accountability that didn't exist before; one grounded in shared visibility rather than top-down enforcement. For the first time, norms around attendance and performance had data behind them.
Outcome: The shadow Facebook group became inactive within months. Scheduling data enabled the first systematic tracking of guide performance and tour quality across the program. Visitor capacity was increased by more accurate availability forecasts, enabling more dynamic scheduling to meet demand and leading to 40% YoY visitor growth in the first year. The average group size dropped from 19.2 to 15.7 people per tour.
03 — Training Program Redesign
Formalizing how to be a trusted ambassador
The training program I inherited poorly reflected the approach and skills needed to deliver the type of tour we offered. The tour manual given to guides each year contained a list of facts and figures, many of which weren’t actually important to our visitors. The onboarding process relied heavily on informal mentorship to pass along the nuances, narrative structures, and rhetorical strategies that actually made the tours engaging.
I rewrote the tour manual to capture this knowledge and better reflect the tours we strove for on the new route (see the following item). I redesigned the onboarding structure, instituted biannual training retreats, and built a continual training calendar embedded with campus partners. The new training regimen didn’t just teach UCSB facts to recite; rather, it shaped guides to become genuinely knowledgeable and conversant representatives of the institution.
Outcome: The training program and the connected new tour route led to tour quality ratings improving from 4.2 to 4.7 (out of 5), and my training efforts were rated Exceeds Expectations by my supervisor. Admissions trusted the guides as ambassadors of the campus, as evidenced by their recruitment of graduating guides to full-time roles.
04 — Campus Tour Experience Redesign
Standardize the container, preserve the soul
Every other product was in service of this one. The tour itself, the live experience where a prospective student's impression of UCSB was formed, was the core product. And it had a serious problem.
Guides had always been given significant interpretive freedom. That freedom was a feature; personality was what made tours work. But without structure, variance had become untenable. Some guides ran 90-minute tours in 90 minutes. Others ran 3-hour tours in the same slot. Visitors were returning to their cars to find parking tickets. It was unprofessional, and it was actively harming the experience the program existed to create.
Meanwhile, campus leadership had requested that the route be redesigned to highlight institutional priorities. Three stakeholders with competing needs: leadership wanted the route to serve strategy, guides needed their personality preserved, and visitors needed a predictable, punctual experience.
The redesign standardized the container without scripting the content. I established a defined route with clear time allocations per segment. Within those segments, guides retained full interpretive freedom about how to present umbrella topics and core arguments. The manual was rewritten to reflect this structure, and every guide was trained on both the new route and the principle behind it: consistent structure is what makes personality possible at scale.
Outcome: The tours retained their engaging quality but now ended on time. In coordination with the new training program to support the new routes, the average tour quality rating jumped from 4.2 to 4.7 out of 5. Critically, the new route was also better for the tour program budget: $20K reduction in overhead costs in the year after implementation as hours-per-tour were controlled.
Outcome
The strike threat was resolved. The shadow Facebook group became inactive. The guides and Admissions relationship improved dramatically. The students got to protect their autonomy, while the new instrumentation helped Admissions see that the tour program as efficiently supporting their goals.
The program received national recognition in its industry, as I was invited two years in a row to present at the national college visitor services convention (yes, that’s a real thing). And prospective student interest in UCSB increased, which the tours played a role in driving. The campus saw a 32.5% increase in annual applicants from 2015-2019, 19 points higher than the national average during the same period.