The Full Story
The University of Manchester is one of the UK’s most popular universities, with more than 44,000 students and a global reputation for teaching and research. Managing the full student journey at this scale, from first enquiry through to graduation, requires systems that can work together seamlessly.
Gecko was first introduced at Manchester in around 2017 as a pilot within the Business School, where it was used for off-campus events and offline lead capture. “It was very much first implemented on a pilot basis for a particular use case,” explains Huw Peters, Student Marketing and Recruitment Officer. As confidence grew, its use expanded across the university, particularly for open days.
Gecko’s role became more significant when the university implemented Microsoft Dynamics as its CRM. At that point, student marketing, recruitment and admissions systems were brought together in an integrated way. “By creating a connection between Gecko and Microsoft Dynamics, our email marketing platform and our admissions system, we could suddenly do so much more,” says Peters.
The integration allows the university to track where students first engage, such as booking an open day, and link that activity to later stages including applications and acceptances. Today, Gecko supports a wide range of activity across recruitment, marketing and admissions, including welcome and induction, interview days, offer-holder events and conversion campaigns.
Although there is some overlap between Gecko and Microsoft Dynamics, Peters explains why both are essential. “There are some things that we can only do in Gecko. In particular, Gecko’s event management functionality is much more flexible and simple to use than Microsoft Dynamics.” Gecko also allows wider teams to manage activity without direct access to the CRM, reducing the burden on IT services while ensuring all data still feeds into a single view in Dynamics.
Manchester’s open days highlight the scale involved. Each event attracts around 20,000 people, and over a four-day open-day weekend up to 90,000 registrants and guests move through the campus. Gecko is used to manage complex form workflows that control session capacity based on subject interest, helping the team adjust availability and avoid overcrowding.
On the day, attendees use Gecko’s self-check-in functionality. Rather than relying on SMS at this scale, the team uses email prompts and in-session reminders to encourage check-in. Gecko is also used extensively for virtual events, including online open days and one-to-one interviews delivered through platforms such as Teams and Zoom.
Beyond its core use cases, Gecko has proven flexible enough to support unexpected demands. During the pandemic, it was used to manage COVID testing at scale, handling complex reporting requirements across thousands of events and locations.
Both Peters and Niall Gorton from the data marketing and analytics team highlight how easy Gecko is for colleagues to adopt. New users can be trained quickly, and once set up, they rarely need ongoing support.
Next, the university plans to roll out Gecko’s AI chatbot to replace multiple fragmented enquiry systems with a single, unified experience. As Niall explains, “When we change something with Gecko the downstream impact can be huge,” helping ensure the student journey continues to improve at every stage.