How can educational establishments utilise HubSpot and the iSAMS integration in preparation for welcoming new students?

As schools prepare to welcome new students, it is important to find time to consider whether your admissions processes could be streamlined, to ensure a more efficient and smooth joining experience, with swift oversight of potential family applicants.

Two market-leading systems that can significantly help institutions are HubSpot, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform and iSAMS, a school management system. By integrating these two platforms, educational settings can enhance ‘customer’ relationships, streamline processes improve service and enhance the overall joining process for new students and their families.

Here we explore how schools can support this HubSpot and iSAMS integration to effectively prepare for, and welcome, incoming students at the start of the new academic year.

Key areas to consider are set out below, and I will show how the two systems can work together to allow for a seamless transfer of data.

1. Personalised communication and engagement
Effective, timely and relevant communication is at the heart of a positive joining experience for new students and their families. The integration of HubSpot's CRM capabilities with iSAMS allows schools and other educational institutions to deliver personalised communication at scale, using HubSpot's automation features, targeted emails, SMS and notifications.

HubSpot's lead-nurturing workflows enable schools to create tailored content and automate follow-up sequences. For example, schools can set up a series of personalised emails to engage new students and families prior to their start, with an introduction to the school campus, key staff and specific sports/activities. Such personalised communication creates a sense of belonging, anticipation and excitement as it prepares students for their new educational adventure. This is also then included on the family’s record.

2. Managing events and new student orientation days
New student orientation days are widely used to create an initial sense of community and provide essential information to new students and their families. HubSpot, streamlines the management of these events, simplifying registration processes, improving co-ordination and shared knowledge between staff and departments about diverse aspects of the days.

Schools can also use HubSpot's event management tools to create customised registration forms through ‘Eventbrite or Simple Events’ and through the creation of their own landing pages.

These tools can also automate event reminders and notifications, ensuring families receive timely updates, for example about the orientation day programme and schedule and any advance preparations.

Integration allows institutions to capture valuable data including event attendance and feedback which can be used to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of the joining process.

You can check out our Recent webinar on “Managing your Open Events in HubSpot” hosted by Gemma W

3. Alumni relationships
In addition to new student admissions processes, nurturing relationships with alumni is increasingly important. Educational establishments can use HubSpot and data from iSAMS to develop, improve and maintain a detailed alumni database.

This seamless integration of alumni relations can use tracking engagement to encourage long-term connections, help establish strong and relevant former student networks and run targeted campaigns, which can benefit institutions and future generations of students.

4. Tracking and analysing onboarding success
To keep improving the joining experience, it is essential to track and analyse key metrics and data. The use of HubSpot, before it transfers data to iSAMS, provides educational settings with powerful analytics and reporting capabilities.

HubSpot's reporting dashboards offer insights into engagement statistics, email ‘open rates’, event attendance and feedback and a great deal more. By adding this HubSpot data to iSAMS student records, educational establishments can gain a comprehensive understanding of, for example, the effectiveness of the joining process. Analysing this information helps identify areas for improvement and refinement of strategies and processes, to provide an improved experience for future students.

5. Implement effective student surveys
Gathering feedback from new students and families is valuable for understanding the perception and success of the joining process and any improvements that could be made. Using HubSpot, educational settings can create and distribute surveys seamlessly and, by automating survey distribution and analysing responses, it is possible to identify areas of improvement and make data-informed decisions to enhance student experiences.

This data can remain on individual records to allow for a clear history of the joining experience journey before the iSAMS transfer takes place.

6. Simplify administrative tasks
One of the major advantages of integrating HubSpot and iSAMS is the automation of administrative tasks. HubSpot's robust features can be used by educational institutions to automate data syncing between iSAMS and HubSpot. This enables an efficient and seamless transfer of student information (such as registration and contact details and academic records) ensuring accuracy and saving valuable administrative time through the moving of a student/deal in HubSpot to a new stage, saving time through an automatic transfer of data. This data from HubSpot to ISAMS will not require any manual data input.

7. Consolidating student data
A consolidated database of all relevant student information is key to a smooth and efficient joining process. With the integration of HubSpot and iSAMS, educational establishments are able to have all student and family records connected in one place ready for transfer to iSAMS. By synchronising this data to iSAMS (for example, personal details, academic records and communication history) the integration eliminates the need for manual data entry and ensures that the most up-to-date information is available to all staff involved in the on-going management process.

By using the integration of data from HubSpot to iSAMS, thanks to our partners at Cursor, educational establishments can significantly improve their preparation, not only by welcoming new students in the days and weeks before the start of term, but by additionally enhancing the process, possibly over many months or years, that has led to students finally joining. From consolidating student and family data to creating personalised and therefore relevant communication, managing events (Open Days and Orientation events) and tracking joining success, these powerful tools enable schools to streamline processes and create a positive, efficient, relevant and engaging experience for incoming students and their families.

As educational settings strive to provide the best possible joining experience, embracing technology solutions such as HubSpot and iSAMS integration has proved to be a highly significant and beneficial asset to help admissions and marketing teams process data, the flexibility of our ‘Sync configuration’ means that your school or setting can choose how you want it to work, where you want the data to go and when.

The capabilities of these platforms allow schools to create a highly effective system to benefit the organisations, the parents and students, ensuring that everyone can embark on their educational journey with greater confidence that they have received the information and support they feel they need in a timely, efficient and appropriate manner. This provides reassurance and confidence in the school establishment at the start of a potentially long and beneficial journey for both families and educational settings.

We are constantly listening to feedback from our clients and monitoring updates to the iSAMS API endpoints, we look forward to sharing new features as they become available.

To learn more about HubSpot and how it can help you or how our iSAMS sync works, please book onto a specific demo where we will demonstrate the best tools for your school or educational setting or check out some other useful information below: