Admissions management: Enquiry Tracker vs. Digistorm Funnel

At Digistorm, we are often asked to explain the difference between our products and other companies who offer a similar service. Choosing an enrolments solution for your admissions team is a big decision, so we've put together a comparison to help you make your evaluation process easier.

In this comparison post, we look at another admissions management tool, Enquiry Tracker. We compare Enquiry Tracker with Digistorm Funnel across six key areas. You can use these links  to navigate to the areas most relevant to you:

• Company overview
• Lead capture
• Event management
• Lead analytics
• Enrollment forms
• Communications
• Automations
• Pricing

Company overviews

Founded in 2017, Enquiry Tracker is currently located in Melbourne, Australia. The company launched its flagship product at the Educate Plus International Conference in 2018 and currently services 110 schools across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Currently, Enquiry Tracker focuses its efforts on its enrolments tracking product.

Digistorm was founded in 2011 by a small team of developers and designers on the Gold Coast, Australia. After being approached by local schools to create school-specific apps, Digistorm now has a team of over 50 in-house developers, designers, support staff, marketers, sales staff and project managers operating from one of our two offices in Australia and the USA. Digistorm specialises in the education industry, taking on learnings and feedback gained by building websites, apps and enrolment management systems for over 600 schools internationally.

Lead capture

A big function of Pipeline is to capture prospective leads and then 'track' them through the school's admissions pipeline, aiming to convert leads into an enrolment. Pipeline features a web form on a school's website where prospects make an enrolment, request a prospectus, or book a tour.

Here’s an example of the lead capture form from Blackfriars Priory School. There’s some customisation available for the form fields; however, Pipeline doesn’t offer customisation to the look and feel of the form (including colours, fonts or school branding) or the option to remove the Enquiry Tracker logo from the bottom of the form. Nevertheless, these forms are easy to install on your school website with no coding knowledge and resize across multiple devices.

Source: Blackfriars Priory School website

Funnel also offers several lead capture forms, including contact, book a tour forms, request a prospectus, and more. The information captured on these forms is then fed directly into Funnel's CRM functionality, allowing you to perform lead nurturing activities to encourage leads towards enrolment.

These forms can be customised for the school's unique requirements, including the form fields needed and a look and feel that matches the school branding. Funnel lead capture fields do not feature any Digistorm branding. However, because of the custom design work and the responsive nature of the forms (they resize across any device), they’re added to a school's website by a Digistorm developer, overseen by a Digistorm designer. Here's an example from Trinity College's book a tour page on their website.

Event management 

Pipeline offers functionality to manage school tours, personal tours, and open days by providing online registration forms that feed directly into an events management tab within their system. You can then check-in attendees using their tablet-based functionality to get accurate attendance numbers on the day.

Source: Enquiry Tracker website

In Funnel, event registration is managed through a custom-built event form that you can add to your website whenever you have a new upcoming tour, open day or information session. In addition, you can turn the event on and off or limit the number of attendees so that when your event reaches that number, the registration will automatically be removed. 

You can use Funnel's lead nurturing capabilities to send reminder emails leading up to the day and check-in attendees using the Funnel events app (available on iOS or Android). The app not only allows for basic check-in information, but you can also see important lead detail information (such as year level and level of entry) for each lead. 

You can add notes about the lead directly from the app that feeds into the Funnel pipeline to be accessed in the future. The events app also provides contactless check-in for guests, allowing them to register their attendance by scanning a QR code. You can also offer a printable QR code for signage or marketing materials by downloading a copy of the code from within the Funnel events page. 

Lead analytics

Pipeline offers important visibility to monitor your leads' progress. Its analytics functionality is somewhat limited but includes demographics information, geographic data, event performance, and feeder school information.

Funnel has a comprehensive reports feature with customisable dashboards so that you can see data that’s most important to your role. Our dashboards give you a snapshot of how leads are progressing through your enrolment pipeline. Here you’ll find information about demographics, geographics (an overview of where leads live), stage analysis (trends and conversion rates at each step of your processes), and closed lost reports (to help you understand where and why leads are lost).

Enrolment forms

Enquiry Tracker offers online enrolment form functionality through its product Apply. Functionality includes data capture, document uploads, and fee processing. You’re able to customise the form fields and brand to match your school’s needs. Through leveraging existing data from Pipeline, form details are pre-filled. Once complete, applications can be exported and uploaded into your school management system. 

Here’s an example of an Enquiry Tracker enrolment form for St Peter’s College 

Source: St Peter’s College

Digistorm offers schools full enrolment form functionality that feeds all information directly into their CRM system. This form functionality makes it simple for parents to complete, edit and process their child's enrolment application without the need for printing, scanning and uploading a PDF. The beauty of Digistorm's online enrolment forms is that they’re built completely custom to your school's brand and enrolments process. All of the information you need to process an enrolment (including documents, data and even fees!) can be collected directly from the form. All your enrolments team needs to do is process it!

Here's an example of a Digistorm enrolment form for Genazzano FCJ College:

Source: Genezzana FCJ College

Communications

Pipeline allows you to send automated personalised confirmation and reminder emails to support the parent’s journey throughout the enrolment process. The platform also provides an email builder to support regular parent communication. 

Funnel enables you to send targeted email communications to prospective families with its Communications module. Advanced audience segmentation capabilities mean that your team can engage audiences through more relevant and personalised communication experiences. Key features include:

• Drag-and-drop editor
• Email templates
• Personalisation tokens
• Custom email signatures
• Ability to test and schedule emails
• Subscriber management
• Insights on open rates, clicks, and deliverability
• Lead tracking

Automations

Pipeline doesn’t currently offer automation functionality within its CRM system. 

Funnel allows you to scale enrolment growth and streamline repetitive daily tasks while maintaining a highly personalised experience for prospective families. Funnel Automations help admissions and marketing teams improve processes so they can focus on what they do best: engaging and nurturing leads. With Funnel Automations, you can create automated workflows to update enrolment stages, re-engage leads who’ve lost contact with your school, track engagement, and more!

 Source: Digistorm website: Funnel Automations

Price comparison 

Both Digistorm and Enquiry Tracker offer bespoke pricing options based on the school's enrolment numbers. For example, Enquiry Tracker offers a once-off setup fee (with a reduced rate for additional campuses) and an ongoing monthly fee for the product’s lifetime. In addition, they charge a data upload fee to get started with your product and charge an additional cost to access their communications module.

Digistorm charges a once-off setup fee and then an ongoing, annual fee for the lifetime of the product. A once-off data upload to kickstart your Funnel journey is complimentary.

Other features and functionality comparison

*Additional cost for feature

The Digistorm difference 

When comparing admissions management software, it’s important to find the best fit for your school. Digistorm is proud to offer the leading school admissions software for K-12 schools in Australia and the United States. When choosing Funnel, you'll not only be working with a world-class development team to tailor Funnel to your unique enrolment pipeline, but our large in-house support team will also support you to make sure your experience runs as smoothly as possible. You’ll also be joining a community of over 600 like-minded schools across the world, that participate in regular in-person and online events.