What is Education CRM?

CRM stands for Client (or Customer) Relationship Management and refers to a system that keeps track of interactions with and information about a group of people. Education CRM, specifically, helps schools manage their recruitment and enrollment by creating a simple way to store and search the massive amount of information generated by student prospecting. Effective education CRM, however, goes beyond just storing and retrieving data, it helps improve the entire enrollment management process.

Success with university enrollment management boils down to two things: can you do the right thing and can you do it correctly for your school. The universal concepts of enrollment mangement - understanding your audience, consistant communication, goal tracking - are the best practices, the ones that work for everyone. There are also considerations based on the type or location of your school - branding message, competing schools, student socioeconomic status - which are strategic practices. Effective education CRM helps you take into account both best and strategic practices to attract students that fit your school.

Enrollment Management Best practices

Enrollment management best practices are the techniques that work for everyone, the standards that come into play for every action. Education CRM should help you implement these best practices as resources rather than another obstacle to overcome. By building enrollment management best practices into the workflow, CRM makes your work smarter, your recruiting better, and your department more effective.

A few enrollment management best practices that education CRM should help you with:

• Multi-dimensional and personalized approach to communication: Successful enrollment management involves more than just student contacts. A multi-dimensional approach to enrollment management takes into account student relationships and communication timelines. Good education CRM helps admission departments understand this holistic view and act intelligently based on all factors.
• Reporting on existing data and trends: Student record data without a method of visualization is just a collection of entries in a database. Displaying the data visually helps admissions staff discover connections and make associations that would be missed normally.
• Segmenting student data and finding what you need: A critical part of enrollment management is connecting with students on a level beyond just knowing their name. Strong education CRM is about taking your student data and creating intutive groups and segments that let you communicate with them on their terms. Segmenting students based on interests, majors, or regions lets individual departments work autonomously while bringing the results together in one place.

Strategic Enrollment Management Practices

Enrollment management strategic practices take into account the location, market, and character of each individual institution. The right education CRM helps each school individually by supporting customization and allowing for an indefinite number of configurations. The enrollment management software should also work well with a broad range of student information systems (SIS) to allow each school to create their own data flow.

An education CRM should address these stratgic enrollment management practices:

• Vernacular and geography: effective strategic enrollment management uses the location of the school and the prospecting base to make decisions on events, notifications, and invitations. Geographic distance plays a major role in school choice, both negatively and positively depending on the student. Enrollment management software should allow location considerations to influence colloquial references and vocabulary in communications.
• Understanding and Proper Usage of school resources: Every school, large and small, has their own array of resource strengths and weaknesses. Effective enrollment management takes these constraints into consideration when making making student recruitment decisions. An effective education CRM makes these constraints transparent and promotes confidence in the subsequent decisions.
• Competition: Just like resources, every school has a set of schools they compete with based on curriculum, location, or price point. A strategic education CRM must accomodate this competitor information but, more than that, it should help make sense of that information and provide the tools needed to respond. Through outreach, quick response, and a consistent message, the competition's challenge can effectively be met.

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