Implementing a Student Recruitment CRM
After spending 4 years at University of Leicester in CRM and Change Management roles, I was looking for a new challenge, which Loughborough University provided.
They were embarking on a new project to invest in a CRM system that integrated all of the Student Recruitment cycle:
- School visits and career fairs
- Prospectus requests
- Prospect communications
- Student Union tours
- Open Day visits
- Applicant communications
- Departmental Visit Days
- Confirmation/Enrolment communications
Prior to implementation many different processes and system were adopted across central and departmental functions, with few correlating and requiring manual intervention for execution and reporting.
The 2-year project involved:
- project management, leading weekly meetings with senior stakeholder groups and system suppliers
- scoping out development needs with User groups and translate this for the suppliers to deliver for everyone’s needs
- developing multi-channel communication plans for all stages of the recruitment cycle and segmented by subject areas
- automating the prospectus request process which manually meant requests took up to 2 weeks to execute, compared to next day execution
- developing data capture processes that cut down the time to complete a form and gathered more meaningful information to segment and provide more bespoke content during the journey
- meeting all the users to map out the required security levels and access restrictions, then grouping according to carry out training and develop user guides
- creating a Open Day booking system that allowed for real-time registration via QR scanning, giving real-time attendance reports segmented by any demographic, again reducing report time by 2 weeks
These significant changes enabled higher engagement with prospective students, more Open Day bookings with record (and more accurate) attendance rates and a unified picture of recruitment as prospects were linked to applicants, showing the Return on Investment of campaigns and providing better analysis for year-on-year comparisons.
During the 2nd year saw the effects of CRM on recruitment and the reputation of Loughborough University, hitting the top 10 UK Universities, then continuously improving to now being top 5.