For many schools, the processes and tools they use for handling admissions are on the brink of change—the morph from traditional to digital.
This prospect of new technology to assist with mountains of enquiries can bring some relief. But it can also bring about some hesitation and concern. Particularly around how hard the platform will be to use and how tricky the training will be.
This is the situation the team at Flinders Christian Community College found themselves in. Management knew that their small team needed better solutions in order to uphold the school’s impressive reputation and give prospective families the communication they deserve. But the journey from paper forms and Excel spreadsheets to something more modern seemed pretty overwhelming to many of them.
Despite varying technical abilities, they dived right in and they’ve never looked back. The entire team reports finding the change so much easier than they ever expected. With more time to focus on important tasks and a whole lot of positive feedback from prospective families, their jobs have gotten a whole lot easier…
Realising it's time to switch to digital
For the Flinders team, they reached a point a few years back where their systems felt so complicated, they needed to review them and consider starting from scratch. They knew it was important to keep clear and accurate records of all information, and the process of scanning and digitising all the forms they received was getting out of hand.
"Our life before Funnel was quite interesting,” says Monica Wulff, Head of Marketing and Enrolments at Flinders Christian Community College. “It was very manual. We literally had paper-based enrolment forms. We then moved to our own online forms, but it was standalone. It wasn’t integrating to Synergetic.”
Funnel had a great impact on our team. My enrolments manager versus my enrolments coordinator have got very specific roles, but at the end of the day they're still interacting with a new potential family.
Monica Wulff, Head of Marketing and Enrolments at Flinders Christian Community College
The decision to seek out a more modern solution was made for the sake of both their internal teams and their prospective families. “We had to review it and say: we need something where parents can go online, do the application, attach all the documentation. But then for our Enrolments Team, we need it to integrate and move directly into Synergetic,” explains Monica.
Armed with a clear understanding of what was challenging them and what needed updating, as well as what they wanted to achieve, they began the search for a new CRM tool for their school.
What Flinders hoped for in their new CRM
Like many schools, Flinders acknowledged first and foremost that they needed a program that was simple to use behind the scenes. After all, they needed to cater to their team’s varying levels of technical skills and ensure new staff would be able to jump onboard pretty simply.
They also knew that their new tool would need to cover the entire enrolment process, not just specific parts of it, such as management of their events.
“We needed to have all the information at hand and an easy system to use,” says Illana Cornell, Marketing and Enrolments Coordinator at Flinders Christian Community College. “Something that could store everything from the enquiry stage all the way to the application. And have the form as well. Funnel ticked all the boxes.”
What Flinders love most in their new CRM
For Illana, using Funnel on a day-to-day basis to coordinate enrolments has improved her workflow and her relationships with prospective families, particularly when it comes to admissions events.
“We use the events module for both open days and tour bookings,” shares Illana. “Families go to our website and they can select the day that we load in advance. We set an amount of people that can attend and we can go back in and keep adjusting it. If someone was to call and we've got a date that's full, we could manually extend that, which is always a bonus on customer service — we can help them. It's very easy. So we see really good feedback.”
When it comes to more strategic management and reporting, Monica has seen vast improvements now that they use a modern CRM system that’s simple to use.
“Funnel is such an important tool for me from a management point of view,” explains Monica. “It’s so easy to just go into reporting on our latest inquiries, our latest tour numbers, open day attendances or applications.”