Constituent Relationship Management | News

2 Schools Optimize Recruiting with CRM

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/21/10

Colorado Northwestern Community College and the Acton School of Business have both decided to bolster their recruitment efforts with technology. The two schools will be using Intelliworks' constituent relationship management (CRM) software for managing contacts and increasing enrollment.

Intelliworks' application performs multiple functions: contact management, personalized e-mail marketing, inquiry response, event management, and reporting and analytics.

The Colorado college is located in RAngely [sic] and Craig and has service centers in three other locations. "One of our goals in implementing a [relationship management system] is to allow more people on campus to help in our recruiting efforts," said Tresa England, dean of student services and registrar. "Once more programs have access to prospect data; they'll be able to customize their outreach to be specific to that student."

She added that since the college is located in a rural setting, outreach is directed towards recruiting students who are looking for that kind of environment.

The Acton School of Business, founded in 2003 and located in Austin, TX, provides a one-year MBA in entrepreneurship. The school has been experimenting with different venues for reaching its target audience, according to Susie Hall, director of outreach and enrollment. For example, Hall posts a video to the school's blog every week to answer questions she receives from prospects.

"Our main recruitment challenge is to reach out to specific groups of prospective students who will be interested in and excel at Acton MBA. We needed a quantifiable way to identify the most effective tactics," she said. "We selected Intelliworks because we wanted all of our systems to be able to 'talk' to each other. Intelliworks will allow us to better serve our students by providing us with the tools to identify and qualify candidates more easily, respond to student inquiries, and process applications more quickly."

Acton also expects to consolidate its systems for relationship and application management in order to streamline the online admissions processes. The school will be able to accept online applications that are integrated in real time with the new CRM system.