The Full Story
The University of Leeds, part of the Russell Group, is one of the UK’s largest universities, supporting nearly 40,000 students and managing events for tens of thousands of prospective applicants each year. Before 2021, coordinating communications at this scale was a major logistical challenge for the events team.
The team first adopted Gecko to improve how they captured data through online forms. As Kharmen Wilson, Senior Events Executive, explains, “We started out by using Gecko to capture data for online forms. Before that we were sending emails manually via our CRM, which was a massive undertaking.”
They soon expanded their use of Gecko to include email and text campaigns, automating large parts of event communications. This removed a significant operational burden. “In the eight weeks leading up to each event, doing this work manually would be one person’s full-time role. Now, thanks to Gecko, we can run much more complex campaigns,” says Wilson. Using workflows, the team could segment audiences by subject interest and postcode, something that had not been possible before.
As their events programme grew, the team identified further challenges, particularly around large undergraduate Open Days. While Gecko helped automate communications, they still lacked visibility over attendance at individual sessions. “We were still left with having no sense of who was going to come to our Open Day events,” Wilson explains. “It meant we had too many people to manage on the day and there were queues for every single talk.”
By adopting more of Gecko’s event management features, including session-level capacity controls, the team gained accurate registration numbers for each talk and activity. This allowed them to plan more effectively, reduce overcrowding and improve the experience for attendees.
Targeting also became more refined. “We’ve gone from just using Gecko for a particular event, to making our emails a lot more targeted, looking at what we can do to specifically target mature students,” says Jen Pritchard Macdonald, Senior Events Executive. By enhancing their Gecko forms to capture data such as postcodes and schools, the team could build a clearer picture of prospective students and tailor communications more precisely.
The data captured through Gecko also strengthened how the team worked internally. Wilson notes that it plays a key role in allocating rooms across more than 350 Open Day sessions. “I can look back at the data from the last three years and tell them, ‘you are averaging 50 sign ups and a 20% attendance rate.’ Gecko makes capacity management so much more effective.”
More recently, the team has used Gecko broadcasts to communicate with groups whose data sits outside the platform. As Rhianna Burrows, Senior Marketing Executive, explains, “We use broadcasts to send out bookings to people whose data is held outside of Gecko. It’s much easier to send out a broadcast to these groups than to set up a whole new workflow for them.”
Broadcasts have also been used during clearing to reach multiple cohorts with tailored messages. “Clearing was especially busy this year for Russell Group universities, but with Gecko we could get to candidates ahead of time to highlight which courses were likely to be in clearing,” says Pritchard Macdonald.
Today, the events team is encouraging wider adoption of Gecko across the university. “Our little corner of the university, student recruitment, has really seen the benefits of Gecko,” she adds. When asked if they would recommend Gecko to other universities, the response was unanimous: “Definitely. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it!”