Using Gecko, Education Partnership North East transformed their student journey from fragmented manual processes into a streamlined experience. With a small team managing outreach to enrolment, EPNE achieved significant gains. They doubled event bookings, increased attendance and acceptances, and reduced withdrawals through automated personalized communications.
Education Partnership North East, or EPNE as it’s known, is one of the UK’s largest further education college groups. It has a student community of over 21,000 people, spread over three campuses: Sunderland College, Hartlepool Sixth Form and Northumberland College. EPNE had largely relied on prospective students seeking it out through recommendations from their secondary schools and word of mouth. But to get the most engaged students, EPNE wanted to move its student recruitment from reactive to proactive.
We sat down with Stephen Welsh, Head of CRM insight & reporting, and Rachel Cook, CRM & systems co-ordinator, at EPNE, to see how Gecko helped them achieve that and so much more.
“When I joined EPNE in February 2022, everything was working off spreadsheets. There were a lot of manual interventions, the data that was being captured was poor and nothing was tagged to a CRM. When it came to events, data had to be downloaded from Eventbrite and then manually typed into the CRM. It was all really disconnected and nothing worked well,” explains Stephen.
Having used Gecko at his old employer, Northumbria University, and seen what a difference it can make, Stephen was keen for EPNE to adopt it, but aware that budgets were tight in further education, he really had to prove that it could deliver a fantastic, flexible service, affordably. “I gave a presentation to the exec around my vision for data capture, campaign automation and creating a much more professional service,” he says. “We then went out to tender and Gecko won and by Christmas 2022 it was up and running.”
The EPNE team began by creating events with Gecko and getting campaigns automated to effectively push people through the different stages of their applicant journey. Next, Rachel used the Gecko email builder to make the email communications look more professional. “The campaigns and pushes were all going very well, but we wanted to spend more time making them visually appealing,” she says. “The Gecko email builder is very fluid and easy to use, so we did some A/B testing with different headers and formats to see which ones were more likely to get clicks, it didn’t take long to set up.”
Gecko’s impact was quickly felt across the board, with applicant experience event numbers and acceptances all up. “We’ve now hit our overall target with almost too much success, to the point where some of our courses are now oversubscribed,” says Stephen. “Our construction department, for example, is now looking to buy more sites in the area to try and accommodate more students, which is a really nice place to be.”
The CRM team’s measurable achievements with the Gecko engagement platform has led to other departments reaching out to them, asking them to use Gecko to help improve their comms. Stephen says: “We’ve used it to professionalize bursary forms, bus time tables and we’ve worked with business-to-business on different aspects of what they do.”
Having previously used Gecko in a university setting, Stephen reiterates that he always knew he was taking a bit of a punt on using it in a further education environment with a smaller budget, but he says his gamble has more than paid off. “I never thought I would be able to run 18 campaigns with just two members of staff, it’s amazing,” he laughs.
Rachael says they pull this off by creating one event cycle that all of their colleges go through. “The main calls-to-action for the main emails in a campaign, say, would be the same, but we make each email individual to each college by changing things like the location, subject areas or the profile of the people that we’re getting in touch with.”
Rachel sets all her Gecko workflows up as broadcast email and SMS campaigns. Once that initial trigger email is sent for an event, for example, segmented by college and learner, a follow up SMS message is then sent for anyone that hasn’t booked on to it. “If they got the first email on a Tuesday, on the Wednesday, if they hadn’t already booked, they would then get an SMS and if that doesn’t get a response to the a call-to-action, after another five days a further email is sent. And it follows on like that. It’s fairly complex,” she says.
This multichannel approach keeps people in the campaign until they have taken the necessary action and then when they meet the conditions they are removed. Once booked onto an event, they are transferred on to another campaign. This might have information about the event, finding your way around the campus or the mental health support available, for instance. “We use Gecko to really drive our campaigns end-to-end,” says Stephen. “We mix CTAs with messages that give people an overall awareness of the whole campus experience. I think that’s where we differ a little bit from what other people are doing.”
Stephen also likes that Gecko gives him a full single view of all the campaigns being run. “With other CRMS, you might have emails that are triggered from two places and you have to look at two different points to try and understand exactly what’s happening,” he says.
What Stephen is seeing is results and a correlation between those results. Event bookings have risen year-on-year, event attendance is up 120% and there has been a 17% increase in student enrolments and a fall in student withdrawals.
Meanwhile, customer service calls have dropped too. This is because EPNE is providing information to students before they ask for it. “People typically ask about bursaries or other aspects of finance, but because we now send out the comms on this in advance the number of people ringing up has gone down massively,” says Stephen.
As well as reducing the staffing needs in customer service, Gecko has also brought down EPNE’s printing costs. Many students apply for financial support and previously all the forms related to this were on paper. “Before Gecko, we would have mountains of paper all over the place and some people wouldn’t get their financial applications looked at until late October, early November. With Gecko, that form has been digitalized, applicants log into fill it in, it gets directed to the relevant team and dealt with much faster,” says Rachel. This new digital-first approach has helped EPNE save over £5,000 in printing costs.
The improved communications have helped EPNE get shortlisted for a national award too. The EPNE marketing CRM team was highly commended for its innovative student recruitment campaign at the 2024 Further Education First Awards.
“We could never replace Gecko now, it’s so entrenched,” sums up Stephen. “It’s improved every aspect of the students’ and the staffs’ journeys. It’s made a colossal difference and has probably saved hundreds, if not thousands of hours across the group by making sure that every process is as efficient as it can be.”
Want to learn more? Watch Stephen’s Gecko Forum session on-demand, as he discusses EPNE’s strategy in more detail.
Ready to supercharge your student engagement strategy with Gecko?
