Your agent should look and sound like it comes from your institution. Branding controls sit in a few different places in the platform, and two of them (your email sending address and branded caller ID) need setup with your CollegeVine team. This article covers all of them in one place.
Where each branding setting lives
What you're branding | Where to set it | Self-serve |
Name, avatar, personality, voice | Agent → Agent Settings → Persona | Yes |
Brand colors and logos | Agent → Agent Settings → Persona → Brand | Yes |
Contact details and social links | Agent → Agent Settings → Persona | Yes |
Email design (banner, header, fonts, CTAs) | Workflow configuration → email_constituent → Customize design | Yes |
Webchat appearance | Settings → Webchat → Appearance | Yes |
Email sending address (custom subdomain) | Set up with CollegeVine and your IT team | No |
Institution name on outbound calls | Set up with CollegeVine and carriers | No |
Agent identity
The Persona tab controls how your agent introduces itself. To get there, select your agent in the left sidebar, click Agent Settings, then click Persona.
Name: what your agent calls itself with students. Most partners use a first name (for example, "Finny" or "Alex") rather than a generic label.
Avatar: the profile image that appears next to the agent's name in conversations.
Personality: a style tag (for example, Informal or Professional) that shapes tone across every channel. Pick the one that matches how your team already writes to students.
Voice: applies to phone calls only. This is what students hear when they call in or receive a call.
For the full list of voice options, see Agent persona.
Brand colors and logos
Also under Persona, the Brand section holds the assets the platform reuses in marketing emails and other branded materials:
Primary brand color (hex code)
Secondary brand color for accents
Logo for light backgrounds
Logo for dark backgrounds
Upload both logo variants. The platform picks the right one based on where it's being placed.
💡 Setting these once saves work later. Email design and webchat both default to pulling from your brand colors.
Contact details and social links
Students ask how to reach your team directly, and the agent answers from what you set here. Fill in your address, website, main phone number, and best contact email. Add links for Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Leave blank anything that doesn't apply, and it won't be shown.
Email branding
Email has two separate branding layers: the address the email comes from, and how the email looks.
Your sending address: a custom subdomain
By default your agent sends from a CollegeVine-owned domain. You can instead send from a subdomain you own, like agent.yourschool.edu or admissions.yourschool.edu. This is the single highest-impact branding change you can make to email.
Why it's worth doing
Students see your institution's domain in the from line, which lifts trust and open rates.
A subdomain inherits part of your root domain's reputation, so it warms faster than a brand-new domain.
It keeps agent send volume separate from your institutional mail.
Choosing the subdomain
Work with your IT team to pick one. Common choices are agent.yourschool.edu, admissions.yourschool.edu, and connect.yourschool.edu. Multi-level subdomains are supported, so a second agent or a graduate instance can use something like grad.outreach.yourschool.edu and stay visually consistent with the first.
Two constraints:
The subdomain must be used exclusively for CollegeVine agent communications. Sending other mail from it confuses inbound routing and muddies deliverability tracking.
Changing it later means restarting the warming process, so choose carefully.
Setup steps
Confirm your subdomain choice with your CollegeVine contact.
CollegeVine creates the domain and generates four DNS records for you.
Your IT team adds all four records to your DNS provider: a CNAME for domain verification, a CNAME for link tracking, a TXT record for SPF and DKIM authentication, and an MX record for inbound email routing.
Your IT team confirms DNS propagation, which usually takes 15 to 60 minutes.
Notify your CollegeVine contact, who verifies and completes the setup.
Expect 1 to 3 business days end to end, mostly dependent on DNS propagation.
After setup
Once the subdomain is authenticated, any address on it can be used as a sending address. If you add an advancement agent later, [email protected] works without new DNS work.
You can run your existing domain and the new subdomain in parallel while the new one ramps, so there's no disruption to active workflows.
💡 A new subdomain still needs to warm, even with a healthy parent domain. Sending first to your most engaged audiences (admitted and deposited students are good candidates) builds capacity fastest. See Understanding email: sending, cadence, and metrics for how send allowance is calculated.
If emails land in spam
For recipients at your own institution, your IT team may need to allowlist the subdomain in your email security settings.
For external recipients, this is usually a warming issue where volume is ramping faster than engagement supports.
Some providers, Microsoft in particular, may ask for additional sender verification.
Your CollegeVine team monitors deliverability and will flag issues proactively.
Email design
Styling is set per workflow, inside the email_constituent action.
Select the workflow, then click Configuration.
Click Edit in the top right.
Scroll to Actions and click the gear next to
email_constituent.Select Styled, then click Customize design.
From there:
Theme: banner style and logo placement.
Style: header color, button color, heading font, and light and dark logo uploads.
Calls to action: reusable links and buttons you configure once and apply across sends.
Media: your image library for email headers. Horizontal images only, minimum 600 pixels wide, 600 to 800 recommended, aspect ratio between 1:1 and 10:1.
Contact: the phone, website, email, and social links shown in the email footer.
💡 If you're creating a new workflow rather than editing an existing one, toggle Detailed view on before step 3.
For step-by-step screenshots, see Customizing email design.
Phone branding
Branded calling
Branded calling puts your institution's name on the recipient's screen when your agent places an outbound call, instead of an unfamiliar city and state. A recognizable name improves answer rates.
How to request it
Branded calling is not self-serve. Contact your CollegeVine representative to start, and be ready to provide a letter of authorization from your institution. Approval typically takes 1 to 2 weeks, and CollegeVine will confirm once it's active.
Name length
Some devices cut the branded caller name to 15 characters. If your institution's full name is longer, you may need to supply a shortened version alongside the full one. Your CollegeVine contact can tell you whether that applies.
What it can't guarantee
Whether the name displays depends on factors outside CollegeVine's control:
Carrier: not all carriers support branded calling. AT&T is not currently supported.
Device type: behavior varies across iPhones, Android devices, and other handsets.
OS version: the recipient's operating system may affect whether the name appears.
Branded calling cannot be guaranteed to display on every call.
Voice
The voice your agent uses on calls is part of how it sounds to students. It's set on the Persona tab, covered above.
Webchat branding
Open Settings → Webchat, select your channel, and use the Appearance section:
Button color: the chatbot launch button on your site.
Header color: the chat header bar.
Desktop positioning: side and bottom margins controlling where the chatbot floats.
Z-index: how the chatbot layers over other page elements. Raise it if the chatbot appears hidden behind something.
Conversation starters also shape first impressions. The Ask [Agent Name] starter uses whatever name you set on the Persona tab, so naming your agent well pays off here. See Setting up your agent's website recruiter.
Disclosure
The Disclosure info field on the Persona tab holds an optional legal disclosure that appears in your email footers. It supports Markdown, so you can include links and basic formatting.
By default, your emails carry CollegeVine's standard AI disclaimer. Text you enter here appears in the footer alongside it.
If your institution has its own approved AI disclosure language, check Replace default AI disclaimer. Your text is then used in place of the standard disclaimer rather than in addition to it.
Leave the field blank and unchecked to keep the default disclaimer on its own.
Next steps
Start with the Persona tab, since colors, logos, and contact details flow into email and webchat. Then style your email workflows and webchat channel. If you want your agent sending from your own domain or showing your name on calls, contact your CollegeVine representative to begin either process.