11) Send extra-personalised comms
Want to send out a follow-up email from the person who actually had the conversation with a prospective student at your event? You can! Gecko’s event data capture forms can tie data to the member of staff who captured it, allowing for automatic sending of ‘personalised’ emails and texts from specific course leaders or admissions team members.
12) Capture data without WiFi
Having to rely on WiFi when you’re attending recruitment events is not a good place to be – it also means that you may be missing out on capturing important prospect details. All of Gecko’s event data capture forms can work offline, meaning that you can go on capturing student data, even when you’re dealing with a dodgy WiFi signal.
13) Get your comms out ahead of the competition
If you’ve ever been to a recruitment event you’ll know it’s a race against time to get your follow-up emails out to prospective students when you’re still front of mind. When you use Gecko event capture forms you can sync your data to your CRM in seconds, enabling you to trigger your comms plan and reach students ahead of your competitors.
14) Add waitlists
It’s annoying when popular sessions during your event are at capacity and you know some people will drop out, but you can’t create a waitlist, right? With the Gecko event app, you can! Students can self-serve and add themselves to waiting lists for sessions within the app.
15) Link a bot to answer student questions
What happens when a student has some questions about their itinerary at your event, who do they ask? Is there anyone even available to ask, or are all hands on deck delivering the event itself? Syncing your event itinerary page with a Gecko chatbot means that students can get their questions answered quickly – without having to rely on staff intervention.
16) Track attendance at events AND sessions
Most people running higher ed events will be pretty well-versed with tracking attendees and non-attendees, right? But what about tracking individual sessions? How do you know what’s well-attended? How do you know what you should run more or less of next time? Using Gecko means you can track sessions and make smarter data-led decisions.
17) Trigger multiple workflows
What do you want to happen after your event? Using the Gecko platform, event attendance (or no-shows) can trigger multiple workflows. Want to add an attendee into a call campaign? You can do that. Want to send an alert to a named member of staff to follow up? You can do that too. You can also add specific tags to the student record as well.
18) Automated feedback forms
Feedback forms are another key part of higher education events, but sending them out manually is time-consuming and slow. With Gecko you can automate your feedback forms to be sent out after your event (excluding no-shows) and they also dynamically know which sessions a student attended – making that granular feedback much easier.
19) Map events to enrolments
What events have the biggest impact on applications and enrolments? Where are you seeing the biggest ROI and, on the other hand, which events are costing you more than they’re delivering? Utilising CRM integration you can have much greater visibility of the events lead to student applications and enrolments… and which ones don’t.
20) Create a year’s worth of events
We’ve covered how you can enhance individual events, but we all know universities are running hundreds of events each year. Good news: the Gecko events module is designed for managing a year’s worth of events and enables the smart duplication of events across dates. Create events playbooks with all your emails, texts, and automation!