Empire State University’s April Simmons Launches Text Campaign, Workshops to Motivate Students

As a student, staying motivated can be hard. Just ask April Simmons: The three-time Empire State University alum and longtime employee says she experienced this firsthand while working toward her master’s degree at Brooklyn College. 

“I actually ended up getting very sick and that took away a lot of my motivation,” says Simmons, who ultimately finished her degree at SUNY Empire. “It really threw me off my feet…and it took a lot of people around me and a lot of deep processing to really feel confident enough to pursue school again.”  

Now, as a student success coordinator in the Office of Student Support and Outreach, it’s an experience she aims to help others avoid. Enter MOTIVATE, an initiative Simmons “developed from the understanding that student success and persistence are deeply connected to intrinsic motivation,” she says. One component? An inspirational text-messaging campaign. Designed for SUNY Empire’s first-term undergraduates, the program strives to keep spirits high through targeted weekly texts. The “short and sweet” messages, thoughtfully penned by Simmons, are deployed on Fridays to students who sign up. And they are, in droves: After the texts were introduced during the summer 2024 term, engagement grew 202.8% by the fall. It increased again, this time by 159.3%, entering fall 2025, Simmons says. 

The reviews she has received on the program are just as positive. 

“A student [told me] that she was sitting in her office one day and [feeling like] she wanted to give up. Then a [message] came in on her phone and she called her brother with tears in her eyes, saying she felt my message was just for her,” says Simmons, who is also an adjunct instructor. “She encouraged me to just keep going with it because so many students need that.” 

Recognizing this need, Simmons has expanded her self-described “motivation movement” with three student workshops offered at various times throughout the semester. The “Mindset Matters” workshop kicks off the term with affirmations for student success and “really speaks to those experiences of nontraditional students coming in from all different walks of life,” Simmons says. Offered with support from the Office of Health and Wellness, the “Refresh and Reset” workshop, meanwhile, targets midterm challenges by encouraging students to “recognize the relationship between self-care and their academic success,” she explains. Rounding out the trio of offerings is the end-of-term “Pause and Reflect” workshop—Simmons’ latest brainchild, which she hopes to begin offering in the spring.  

“I’m very big on just bringing people out of darkness—out of their intrinsic fears and doubts. I just feel like that is part of why I was put on this Earth, so it’s a bit larger than me,” says Simmons, who is also working on an inspiration-centric channel for students on SUNY Empire Connects. “I know what it feels like to lose motivation and not know where it’s going to come from next…I feel like I went through that experience to be able to recognize some of those things in students and pull them out as best as I can.”