It’s not uncommon for school admissions teams to operate as a department of one.
No matter how big (or small) their schools might be, their stories share a common theme: they wear many hats, are often under-resourced, and struggle to build relationships with prospective families while trying to balance administrative ‘busywork.’
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re constantly juggling multiple roles, whether that’s digital marketing, event planning, or administration. But, here’s the good news: you can successfully build relationships and take care of all those extra tasks with a little help.
In this post, we share five ways that small admissions teams can become even more efficient and successful with prospective families without compromising on quality!
1. Do away with manual lead capture
Your leads are arguably your school’s most valuable resource, so it makes sense to ensure that they’re managed in a way that’s safe and secure. It’s also essential that you’re able to track a lead’s progress in your enrolment journey, send timely and targeted communication at key moments, follow up after open houses, and update any data that changes along the way!
As we’ve talked to school’s about their admissions process over the years, here are just some of the most common issues we hear about working with spreadsheets:
- It’s time-consuming
- There’s a lack of data integrity
- Human error is common (and expected)
- Leads can slip through the gaps leading to missed opportunities
- Sharing information between departments can be tricky
- Inconsistent experiences for prospective families arise
With an all-in-one online admissions solution, you can track inquiries, get a quick overview of your admissions activity, collect insightful data, and manage internal tasks. In doing so, you’ll have more time to spend on nurturing prospective families along your enrolment pipeline, rather than getting stuck in daily administrative tasks.
2. Automate tasks whenever possible
When you’re operating as an admissions team of one, time is your most valuable resource. So, how would you like to gain back hours of your day without cutting any corners? With a handy tool called automations, you can do just that. Automations allow you to streamline a number of daily tasks by automating repetitive processes, without compromising on quality or personalization. Let’s take a moment to consider all of the tasks you might perform daily. Some of these tasks might include:
- Sending the same email over and over
- Manually adding new leads into your spreadsheet
- Notifying key staff of upcoming interviews
- Following up with families after your open house
- Changing lead statuses as they move through the enrolment pipeline
Do any of these sound familiar?
These menial tasks can prevent you from having the time to focus on what really matters — building relationships with prospective families. Leverage clever automations to lighten your administrative workload and spend more time doing what you do best.
3. Leverage integrated digital forms
One of the most time-consuming tasks for any admissions team is the manual data entry that comes with scanning and inputting lead data from your website into your school CRM or spreadsheet. Not only can this take up hours of your time per week, but you also run the risk of inputting incorrect or duplicate data.
It’s no secret that dirty data can seriously impact your school’s bottom line. In fact, one review found that dirty data impacts the average business’ revenue by 15-25%! But, when you’re an admissions team of one, keeping up with every single information update is a challenge.
Dirty data can impact your school's revenue by up to 25%
But what if there was a way to simplify this process and guarantee accuracy? Our custom, integrated digital forms remove the need for manual data entry by collecting key information from leads through your school website and sending that data directly into your school CRM. By matching your form fields to the exact lead details you need, we can map this entire process to your school’s unique admissions journey. Now, everything you need to know about your new lead is in one central location, ready to be nurtured toward admission!
4. Simplify reporting for your leader
Reporting for multiple teams every month might feel a little overwhelming — but it doesn’t have to be! The ability to accurately track and monitor your school’s enrolment progress is essential for growth and making more data-driven decisions. Here are just a few of the key reports you should be running every month:
- Enrolment pipeline stage analysis: how many leads do you have in each pipeline stage?
- Geographical data: which areas do the majority of your leads come from?
- Closed Lost information: at which stage in the pipeline are you losing leads?
The good news is that with our all-in-one school admissions system, you’ll have access to advanced analytics that do the work for you. You’ll also be able to create custom dashboards to highlight the data that’s most relevant to you at a glance. Once they’re set up, you can easily share your custom dashboards with your leadership team to streamline the reporting process.
5. Streamline event management
Pulling off a successful school event requires time, effort, and attention to detail. If you’re an admissions team of one, the thought of this can be overwhelming, but there are some tips and tricks you can implement to take the stress off.
To start, leave enough time to plan a high-quality event. Organising your event stakeholders will be more stressful if you only have two weeks to plan, compared to a few months. You can figure out how much lead-time you need for each event by scheduling your events into one central calendar and working backward from each event date. The more time you have to plan, the better!
If you’re struggling to keep on top of event invitations, registrations, and management on the event day, leverage your school CRM to help. Within the Funnel events module, you can:
- Create custom event registration forms
- Send targeted and personalized event invitations using automations
- Track and manage registered attendees
- Check your attendees in with ease using contactless check-in
Once your event is done and dusted, the next step is to continue nurturing your attendees.
With Funnel, you can pull dynamic lists and reports to see who did or didn’t attend your school event. You can then send targeted post-event follow-up emails to encourage their next steps. Managing events can be tricky, but with a little help from useful tools and careful pre-planning, you can create an engaging event, even with a team of one!
Where to from here?
As all admission teams know, there’s much to do with so little time! So, if you've found yourself nodding along to one or more of the common time-consuming tasks we’ve covered in this post, it might be time to consider streamlining your processes with an all-in-one online admissions solution.
If you’re ready to take the leap, getting budget sign-off on new software will be your next step! Check out our step-by-step guide to writing a fail-proof proposal for your leadership team to show that you’ve fully assessed and can justify the costs of taking on a new system.
