How to measure the success of your school's admissions pipeline

Education marketers, registrars and admissions departments are often required to be monitoring and evidencing their student recruitment efforts, pulling data into reports to communicate enrolment numbers with key stakeholders. Effective data reporting is also going to enable understanding of the student journey through the admissions funnel. Often marketing and admissions data is not always readily available or comes from multiple sources; perhaps marketing email data is in MailChimp, personal emails are in personal inboxes and communications from website forms pull through to the backend of your CMS. This makes it difficult to connect all the data together and formulate insights to illustrate the 'prospect to enrolment' conversion rate for your marketing and admissions efforts. 

The benefit of integrating all your digital software - email service provider, shared inbox, social media, online forms, website etc - into one central space is being able to connect data from all the way through your admissions pipeline. Being able to know what is happening at each stage of the admissions journey will allow for any sticking points to be highlighted and addressed. 

• Admissions pipeline stage analysis
• Identifying and fixing any sticking points in the enrolment journey
• Spot applicant trends to navigate recruitment marketing efforts
• Creating custom dashboards to report on student recruitment

Admissions pipeline stage analysis

Your admissions pipeline will be built in your CRM to match the stages of your school's enrolment process. These stages will be bespoke to your admissions journey but, for most of our clients, looks something like this:

• Enquired - a prospective student/family has been in contact with you. 
• Visited - the prospect has visited the site for an open day or personal tour.
• Application received - they have applied for a place at your school. 
• Interview - they've been invited in and interviewed for a place at your school.
• Place offered - they've been offered a place at your school. 
• No place offered - they've not been offered a place at your school. 
• Offer accepted - You've successfully recruited a new student! 
• Applicant withdrawn - the prospect decided to enrol elsewhere. 

If you are interested in learning more about building an admissions pipeline to visualise and track your prospects, enquiries and applications we've made a whole, 'How to track admissions in HubSpot CRM', video blog which you can find linked here.  

With a clearly defined admissions pipeline - whether this is built and visualised in a CRM system or in another piece of software, (an excel spreadsheet for example),  you'll be able to analyse engagement, communication and progression through each stage of the admissions process. This will help to highlight the places where your marketing and admissions teams are aligned and managing prospective students well, and where in the pipeline things could be improved. 

Identifying and fixing any sticking points in the enrolment journey

When an applicant withdraws or the lead goes cold, it is important to make a note of this. In HubSpot CRM you can utilise the 'closed lost' property to mark the date the application was withdrawn, the stage it was in and also the 'closed lost reason'. 

Which stage the application was in when it was closed is useful to report on to see areas of your admissions pipeline which maybe need to be rethought, e.g. if there are lots of applicants withdrawing after a personal tour, consider revamping the tour format. 

The 'closed lost reason' will capture where things went wrong with each specific applicant; Are the family moving out of the area? Did the family have false expectations about the school? Does the family maybe just need some additional lead nurturing to convert into an enrolment?

Consider creating options for your admissions teams to select as the closed lost reason, for example;

• bad timing
• accepted place at another school
• school fees not viable
• not a good fit for the school

This will allow for better reporting on your lost applicants, and enable marketing teams to know which lost applicants are perhaps worth still engaging with - those marked as 'bad timing' - and those which should be written off - those marked as 'accepted a place at another school'. It will also allow them to create 'negative personas' from the bad fit list of withdrawn applicants.

More on creating marketing personas in education here.

Further information about the reason a family has withdrawn an application can be captured manually in a note on the application record. Alternatively, you could consider creating an automation workflow which sends out a survey to parents once an application is withdrawn, asking them why they didn't choose your school. 

Spot applicant trends to navigate recruitment marketing efforts

Any and all of the information captured about applicants can - and should  - be analysed to draw out trends in your student recruitment efforts. 

Things to report on could include:

• The number of applicants coming from each of your feeder schools.
• The geographical locations applicants are coming from.
• The number of applicants coming from military families.

By associating each application record to the feeder school that the applicant is coming from, you'll be able to highlight which feeder schools are sending the most applicants your way, and determine why this may be. Are you putting a lot of marketing budget and effort towards recruiting students from these schools which is paying off? Have you built up enough goodwill and brand evangelism within that school's community that word-of-mouth is driving application numbers? Do you want to focus marketing efforts on feeder schools that are lacking in applications?

Make a note of the geographical location each applicant comes from using GeoMapper. This is a great way to visualise applications on a map and will enable your school marketing and senior leadership team to highlight where their student recruitment efforts should be focusing on. 

Similarly, creating a bespoke property to capture if an applicant is coming from a military family will help to pinpoint which bases are driving their personnel towards your school and you'll be able to make informed marketing decisions based on these real-time insights. 

Creating custom dashboards to report on student recruitment

Once you are set up capturing all this marketing and admissions data on your prospects and applicants, you can showcase the most relevant data to each department on custom dashboards. 

For example, a dashboard of reports pulling live data on:

• all the key metrics your parent company, board members, school governors and/or SLT require.
• the numbers, application status and SEN information for each applicant in each year group for the Heads of Years.
• boarding house capacity and room allocation for your boarding staff.

If you have set targets - either financial goals or application numbers - these can be set within the CRM via the forecasting tools and then reported against on your admissions dashboards. 

Another added bonus of these HubSpot custom dashboards is the ability to schedule them to be sent to the relevant people at recurring intervals. This means you'd never again have to spend an afternoon collating all the data into an excel spreadsheet and downloading the file to share with the relevant people!

Want to learn how to get the most out of your school CRM? Book a demo!