CRM

Simmons College Uses Intelliworks for Student Recruitment

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/02/10

Simmons College will be introducing a new constituent relationship management (CRM) service into its operations. The Boston-based college will be adopting Intelliworks to automate tracking of prospective students, manage marketing campaigns, gain better reporting, and improve its recruitment efforts for both undergraduate and graduate programs.

"By using Intelliworks, we now have the tool set necessary to operate more efficiently across the institution," said Jake Berry, assistant vice president of enrollment and online marketing. "We hope this increased efficiency will lead to more students and more tuition revenue."

Formerly, Simmons had been manually tracking and comparing admissions data. With 7,500 applications coming in annually, the college wanted a way to reduce manual data entry and produce reports based on fresh data, Berry said. "We wanted an integrated system to streamline our admissions processes and ultimately allow us to grow and develop new marketing programs," said Berry.

The college considered licensing a CRM module from its student information system vendor; but that would have required upgrading from a heavily customized SIS to the latest version, an expensive approach.

Initially, Simmons will use Intelliworks, available as software-as-a-service, as a front-end recruiting tool for prospect management. Although data on enrolled students will be bulk-loaded into the SIS at Simmons, Intelliworks offers an application programming interface that provides bi-directional data sharing between its CRM and other applications.