Align Admissions & Marketing Teams through Shared Reporting Dashboards

Never underestimate the power of reporting and analytics. Whilst HubSpot CRM’s reporting tools are perfect for improving your overall education marketing and admissions efforts, the value of using these tools for your internal team's processes and functionality is often overlooked. 

This isn’t necessarily a one size fits all job - the alignment between Marketing and Admissions teams within schools, colleges and universities vary. Our team here at HubGem have experienced this first-hand, coming from independent school marketing and admissions backgrounds ourselves, and working with many different schools daily, it is fair to say, every school is completely different. Some may have separate school marketing and admissions teams, whilst others may work closely in one office overseen by one communications director.  

No matter the internal structures, inbound marketing and the flywheel methodology should always be kept in mind as they support the alignment between departments. Inbound marketing starts within any business and smooth internal communication is absolutely key to seeing growth. 

Considering all of the above, internal reporting is not only a tool that provides you with a clear view of the success of your marketing but also with an insight into your internal processes and productivity across multiple teams and individuals, within your school or college. You can then compare and correlate any patterns in your marketing data with your internal processes, adjusting as you go to create the best result.  

When it comes to educational organisations, no two schools, colleges or universities are the same, which is where the ability to personalise your dashboards and reports really comes in handy.  

Personalisation begins right from the initial setup of your HubSpot CRM education account. You can use the ‘Teams Tool’ to create your own separate groups of users, such as your Marketing team, Admissions team and even one for your Senior Leadership Team. This all really helps when pulling together data for your reporting and can be used to pull separate data for each of our teams.  

Personalise your team CRM reporting dashboards considering the main objectives 

You can make your very own internal dashboard that displays an overview of your marketing and admissions team’s reports in one place, or as two separate dashboards. HubSpot also offers a whole collection of report suggestions in the report library if you’re having trouble getting started, based on filtered report content. It also allows you to build any custom reports completely from scratch. 

So, let’s begin with establishing and understanding school marketing and admissions main department goals whilst using a CRM system and look at a few report ideas to get you started... 

Reporting: Admissions Team

Your admissions teams' main goals are to successfully support and oversee the application process of prospects to convert applicants to students within your school or college. 

You could build reports for your admissions team dashboard that show:

• The time it takes for an applicant to be accepted and offered a place from initial application submission 
• The time it takes your admissions department to contact after the marketing lead becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL) following the submission of an enquiry form 
• Comparison between the admissions team response times  
• The number of calls made to prospective enquiring families 
• The number of applications, following each open event throughout the academic year 
• Patterns in reporting the number of applicants situated in certain locations  
• Activity leader boards, comparing team calls, emails and meetings.  

Reporting: Marketing Team 

Your marketing team’s main goal is to ensure your target customers are made aware of your school through effective marketing content. Once engaged, Marketing qualified leads will then become Sales Qualified Leads, and be passed onto the admissions team ready to begin an application. 

You could build reports for your marketing team that show:

• Conversions from marketing lead to sales qualified leads  
• The number of emails sent, or calls made by each team member  
• Tasks set internally for the admissions team to pass over enquiry from marketing to application 
• The number of emails opened by contacts per each team member  
• Activity level reports – showing the activity level of emails, calls, meetings, downloads as a result of each individual marketing member’s efforts 
• Comparative reports across both departments 
•  Contacts created through social media ads  
• Email/call outreach to new lead capture contacts through social ads  

These detailed, individual department reports are really insightful for managers and directors as well as your senior leadership teams. They provide a clear indication of the productivity of both teams whilst also identifying any specific areas that may need improving. 

 It is also a great way to encourage the smooth, continuous level of internal communication as a customer moves through their journey, from marketing right through to the admissions department... gotta love that flywheel model! 

Create one comparative board 

Rather than just two separate dashboards, you can create one master version that clearly compares the data between admissions and marketing teams. The benefits of this are it can really highlight any patterns in your data and show how effective communications are flowing between the two departments, easily identifying any particular internal sticking points such as a point in the customer journey where leads are lost.  

This joint dashboard could include reports such as:  

• Number of tasks set by marketing for admissions on pass over of an MQL – SQL 
• Number of calls made to contact before the application process begins 
• Social media ad conversions from contact to applicant 
• Notes made by the marketing team for admissions to utilise when they pick up the contact enquiry 

• Marketing email response time comparison to admissions 
• Admissions call compared to marketing 
  

Inbound marketing all centres around an efficient team built on strong, aligned communications and processes – so let the reports do the talking and happy marketing!  

Our CEO Gemma was formerly Director of Admissions and Marketing in a UK Independent School using HubSpot CRM to better manage the school's marketing and admissions processes. 

Having seen the impact the software had at the school Gemma set up HubGem Marketing and now helps education settings from around the globe implement HubSpot CRM for Education. 

Join her on a free Education demo using the button below: