1) Speed up follow-up comms
“If we’re at a UCAS fair we create an automated workflow for our follow-up comms. If we have Wi-Fi or 4G it goes through straight away and the main benefit is for the student, because they get that almost instantaneous response. I’ve seen people at UCAS fairs fill out the form and it pops up on their phone straight away – while they’re still at the stand. Anything we can do to help reinforce the message that the university is at the cutting edge of technology, like sending them an email quickly, is a really positive thing.”
2) Automate seamless workflows
“We just have to set up a workflow and then we can pretty much walk away, safe in the knowledge that the forms are going to get filled in, the attendees are going to get sent the right email when they fill it in, and that data’s going to find its way into Dynamics.”
3) Send on-the-day reminder comms
“Without Gecko it’s tricky to send out reminder comms for events. It’s hard to do it from ClickDimensions, which is what we use for our bulk mailing. If you want to send an email or text an hour before the event it would take a long time to set up and you’d have to do it for each and every event. In Gecko, we can just set that up and get it away.”
4) Build richer pictures of your prospects
“In Dynamics, if you do an import and that person already exists in the system, it effectively tells you that you don’t need to add them in again. But if you’ve gathered all this rich data on a prospective student, you want to use that. The integration means that you can add details, update them, and use that to build a richer picture of your prospects.”
5) Ask for the right information, at the right time
“In the past, we used really long forms to get all of the information we needed, because we only had one shot to get it right. Now, we can have more of an iterative approach rather than put people off by effectively saying, ‘Please fill in this seven-page-long form.”
6) Create targeted communications
“We gather basic information on those interested in Durham and then build on it with each interaction we have with them to help target our future communications. For example, we can make sure that applicants know about scholarships available for people in their local area – or identify they’re a mature student so we can let them know about specific support. We build up that picture until we know about them to make sure people get information relevant to them.
7) Create complex – but user-friendly – forms
“We prefer how the front end of the forms look in Gecko. Microsoft Forms are improving, but they’re nowhere near the complexity that you can make within Gecko. For our widening participation in summer school programs, the application form can be seven or eight pages as we ask for GCSE subjects, grades, and so on. Having things like parent-child relationships infield options in Gecko massively saves time and makes it much more user-friendly.”
8) Take the pressure off staff
“We send out student ambassadors to multiple recruitment events at a time. However, with accrued TOIL it means they might not be back in the ‘office’ for days at a time. You don’t want to be waiting until then to get the information off their iPad. To just be able to say, ‘It’s all done, all the data is there in the CRM’, this really takes the pressure off our teams in busy times. They have the confidence to know that Gecko’s going to do it for them.”