The University of Manchester uses Gecko in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics to seamlessly manage tens of thousands of students from that initial inquiry through to graduation.
Part of the prestigious Russell Group, the University of Manchester in the north of England is ranked the sixth best university in the UK, which explains why it’s one of the country’s most popular universities, with over 44,000 students. That’s a lot of people to manage, but with the help of Gecko every stage, from booking that first open-day visit to graduation is made as smooth as possible for students and staff.
To find out how this is achieved, we sat down with Huw Peters, student marketing and recruitment officer, who was the digital systems team lead between 2019 and 2023 and oversaw the deployment of Gecko, and Niall Gorton from the data marketing and analytics team, who now oversees Gecko’s implementation. We started by asking Huw to take us right back to the beginning of the uni’s journey with Gecko.
“We first introduced Gecko as a tool in our Business School, particularly for masters marketing, in around 2017. They did a lot of off-campus events and it was great for lead capture offline,” he explains. “So, it was very much first implemented on a pilot basis for a particular use case. Then we expanded that out to the university as a whole and we started using it for open days.”
It was when the university introduced Microsoft Dynamics as its CRM, however, that Gecko really came into its own. “All of the systems that involve student marketing and recruitment were all updated at the same time and brought together in an integrated way,” says Huw.
“We already had this positive relationship with Gecko, but by creating a connection between that and Microsoft Dynamics, our email marketing platform Spotler and our admissions system, we could suddenly do so much more.”
From that point on, Manchester could see and match up where students had made their first contact, perhaps booking on to an open day, and compare that against whether they went on to apply and get accepted and a whole lot of other variables.
Now, Gecko’s use case has widened out further to include welcome, induction and conversion – the process of going from application to choosing to study at Manchester – interview days, mini offer-holder events and much more. “Gecko is now used for very particular purposes by everyone across recruitment, marketing and admissions throughout the whole university,” says Huw.
Some have questioned why Manchester opted to go for Gecko and Microsoft Dynamics because there is some cross-over of functionality between the two, but Huw says that it was Gecko’s flexibility and range that led to them deciding to integrate the two.
“We find that there is a value in having both these separate tools. We can use Microsoft Dynamics for some things and Gecko for others to create different types of integration and 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.,” he says.
Adding that it’s also great that members of the team can use Gecko without having to be given access to the whole CRM, which reduces the load on IT services. “Even updating a course list is much quicker in Gecko than the CRM, this is because of the way the CRM is updated and the number of people who need to be involved in updating it. With Gecko we can, for example, create forms really seamlessly, without having to worry about having a whole load of connected stuff in the background.”
And yet, because Gecko feeds into Microsoft Dynamics, all of the data picked up by Gecko can still be found within the CRM. “The benefits of this,” says Huw, “is that all of that student information goes into the one instance of Dynamics and everyone can read those records, it’s not siloed.”
Every open day at Manchester attracts around 20,000 people and over a four-day open day weekend around 90,000 registrants and other people they bring with them for support pass through the campus. Managing this influx would be tough without Gecko. “We’ve developed quite complicated form workflows that allow us, for example, to adjust the number of people we can accommodate based on the subjects that people have indicated they want to hear about. This means we can shut certain sessions off if we need to or recruit for certain subjects if we need to as well,” says Huw.
Once on site, people use Gecko’s self-check-in facility to check into an event. “As SMS messages would be too expensive for that number of people, we send out email messages during the day and we add a slide to presentations to encourage people to check their emails and check themselves in,” explains Niall.
The team use Gecko for virtual events too. It’s used to create and manage virtual open days, often with multiple sessions running concurrently and they set up one-to-one interview slots with prospective students over Teams or Zoom. “There are lots of things that we’ve been able to do with Gecko that we never had the functionality to do before,” says Huw.
And, as well as all the routine admin stuff, Manchester has got creative with Gecko, using it to do things that it wasn’t specifically designed to do. “I definitely pushed its reporting functionality to its limit when I set up the university’s COVID-testing system during the pandemic,” laughs Huw. “The reporting requirements were ridiculous. I had to know exactly who had come, how many tests had been done and over what period and every event was separate. There were hundreds of them over different locations, so there were tens of thousands of events in there, but I knew that Gecko had the capability.”
Niall echoes Huw’s praise of Gecko’s flexibility and adds that he really likes how intuitive it is too. “When a colleague is new to Gecko, I find I can quickly talk them through it and show them how to create a form and then once they’re set up, I never hear from them again about it, because it’s so easy for them to pick up and use,” he says.
Next, Manchester is set to turn on its Gecko AI bot. “As we don’t have a single inquiries team, we had a few different bots. We had one for registration, one for graduation and I think the international team had one. Those individual bots meant that inquiries were getting forwarded from one inbox to another and the user journey for students wasn’t very good. We just wanted a singular overall bot to better manage all our inquiries,” explains Niall.
Huw and Niall are excited to see where this next incarnation of Gecko will take them, but they know that with each new Gecko application, their students see an improvement in their student journey. “When we change something with Gecko the downstream impact can be huge, says Niall.”Which is amazing for us.”
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Like the University of Manchester, you can seamlessly integrate Gecko with your existing systems to create powerful, automated workflows that scale across your entire institution. Book a demo today to see how Gecko can help you manage everything from open day registrations to student communications more efficiently.
