A few years ago, Manchester Metropolitan University’s student recruitment team were stuffing envelopes to notify people about courses and events, now they have a fully automated event recruitment system thanks to Gecko.
With 43,000 students from over 100 countries and globally recognized awards for its teaching, research and sustainability, Manchester Metropolitan University, in the beating heart of the north of England, has a lot going on. And, working away quietly behind the scenes, helping everything come together, is Gecko.
We spoke to Becky Bloodworth, Deputy Head of Student Recruitment covering undergraduates and postgraduates, and Connor Murray, Student Recruitment Officer (undergraduate), to find out exactly how Gecko has become such a pivotal part of their operations.
“We started by just using Gecko for course enquiries; queries would come in, we would synch these with our CRM and reply via our CRM,” explains Becky. “Then we began using Gecko for more and more things and we stopped using our CRM and began to work purely with Gecko for events.
“Over the last three to four years, we’ve really ramped up how we use Gecko for events and communications. This year is the first year, for example, that we uploaded offer holders into Gecko.
Today, Manchester Met, as it’s known, uses Gecko for all of its events, combining forms, workflows and event functionality with communications tools, such as broadcasts. And, keeping everything within Gecko has saved time and resources.
“Flashback just a few years and we were issuing paper tickets and stuffing envelopes that had to be posted out,” laughs Connor. “It was a very manual process and probably took us days. Now with Gecko, we have QR code tickets and devices to scan people in and everything is so much more streamlined. Instead of worrying about all the admin and logistics on open days, we can focus on speaking to prospective students and easing them into the campus. Gecko makes the day as stress-free as possible for staff and visitors.”
Manchester Met runs large scale open days and visit days throughout the year. Connor says that it’s hard to quantify how much time Gecko has saved them in admin and resources for these events, but in terms of event application and checking people in its days not hours. “Once we’ve done one event, we can clone the next one on Gecko so quickly that we’re probably saving several days a year on a regular basis, which, when you think about it, is quite impressive,” he says.
It did take Manchester Met a while to recognize just how much could be done with Gecko, however. “We were initially pulling off data from Gecko and putting it into another email client,” says Becky. “Then a couple of years ago we thought, why don’t we just do it all with Gecko, so we started using Gecko for a series of emails in the lead-up to open days and then we would use them to follow up to say things like ‘thank you for attending,’ or ‘sorry you couldn’t attend.’”
Emails are now built up in Gecko on workflows and replicated for all undergraduate and postgraduate events and then sent out largely through broadcasts. The university has more than doubled its emails sent through Gecko from 121,000 in 2023 to 359,000 in the first eight months of 2024. The team also use the email templating software Liquid with Gecko emails. Becky says: “This means we can have dynamic content feeding through and can create personalized links so people can only book onto events that are relevant to them and it means that we can schedule surveys to go out to visitor day attendees as soon as they have left the event. Historically we would send these out when we were back in the office, but obviously the sooner you get people to fill in a survey the better as it’s all fresh in the mind and we find we get a lot more positive comments as a result.”
By personalizing emails through Liquid, Manchester Met has also seen there are far fewer booking errors because the personalized link means people are only seeing the events that are relevant to them and they can then book into multiple sessions on the day and check their locations.
The team also uses Gecko’s text messaging facility, using them to publicise events, send out QR codes for events and final reminders to push them to attend. “People seem to find it easier to pull that QR code up from a text message than an email because it’s easier to get to and it helps with that final push to get people on to campus ” says Becky. “We did a text message invite to all offer holders who hadn’t yet attended a visit day, for example, to try and get them to book one and we definitely saw a spike from that text message in terms of bookings.”
Gecko has more and more of the staff at the university engaging with it too. Every member of the undergraduate and postgraduate recruitment team uses it and now other teams are starting to use it too because of its functionality. “Outreach uses Gecko to take people’s details for lead capture and our First Generation team, who organize events for students who are the first generation to go to university, use it to hold hybrid virtual and on-campus events, they send out invites, register people at the events and send out other comms as well,” says Becky.
“I’ve not seen any other software that’s this event specific so all of us can really enhance our booking processes and lead development. Even when you want to do something and you don’t think you can find a solution on Gecko, you can ask the Gecko team and you will find that there is probably a way of doing it, we’ve managed to figure a lot of stuff out that way.”
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