Gecko revolutionized event management at the University of Leeds, saving significant staff time and dramatically increasing engagement. The platform facilitated thousands of event sign-ups and communications, leading to widespread adoption across the university.
The University of Leeds, part of the esteemed Russell Group, is one of the largest universities in the UK with nearly 40,000 students on its roll. Managing the tens of thousands of prospective students each year was once a vast logistical nightmare. All that changed when the events team started using Gecko in 2021.
We sat down with the university’s senior events executives Kharmen Wilson and Jen Pritchard Macdonald; and senior marketing executive Rhianna Burrows, to find out just how Gecko has improved how they work.
“We started out by using Gecko to capture data for online forms” reveals Kharmen. “Before that we were sending emails manually via our CRM, which was a massive undertaking.”
The team has since added Gecko text and email campaigns to further automate this process. This has saved it a huge amount of manpower and freed up staff to spend more time on making the events themselves the best they can be.
The events team quickly realized that their old systems were limiting their ability to manage large-scale events effectively. Kharmen explains, “Gecko was a massive help for generating leads for events, it meant that all of our email campaigns related to our events – from booking a place to follow up information – were instantly running to those people who had registered their interest. But we were still left with having no sense of who was going to come to our Open Day events. This was incredibly problematic for our large-scale undergraduate Open Days. It meant we had too many people to manage on the day and there were queues for every single talk.”
To address these challenges, the team decided to leverage more of Gecko’s features. They discovered that Gecko’s event management capabilities allowed them to precisely control capacity for individual sessions, eliminating the problem of overcrowding and long queues. By implementing this functionality, the team gained exact registration numbers for each talk and activity, enabling them to plan more effectively and ensure a smoother experience for attendees.
The team didn’t stop there. As Jen describes, “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 say, specifically target mature students.”
This approach centered on refining their data collection through Gecko forms. Jen elaborates, “We developed the Gecko forms so that people enter their postcodes, schools, etc., which means we can really build a picture of their backgrounds.” With this enhanced data, the team could craft more personalized and relevant communications.
The data that Gecko offers the event team also helps them to better manage their work with other teams within the institution on event days. “Gecko really helps us with allocating rooms to over 350 sessions as part of Open Day, for example, there’s sometimes multiple departments wanting the biggest lecture theatre on campus. But 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.”
The university now has multiple workflows set up on Gecko. When it comes to open-days, for example, it can send out emails and SMS detailing what to expect, how to get there and follow up after the events. Most recently, the team has been experimenting with Gecko’s broadcast feature for emails and texts.
”We use broadcasts to send out bookings to people whose data is held outside of Gecko,” says Rhianna. “For example, we’ve used it with the educational engagement team, who do events at schools and collect data from there. It’s much easier to send out a broadcast to these groups than to set up a whole new workflow for them.”
The university also created segmented broadcasts for clearing, when it seeks to match unfilled places with applicants close to the start of the new academic year. “We were able to do some really cool stuff with broadcasts during clearing, where we had about six different cohorts, each of whom we wanted to communicate with slightly differently,” says Jen. “This included people who had results that were in the UK, people who had results that weren’t in the UK and people who had results who were mature students in the UK. It meant we could communicate with all these different pockets of people and tell them about different clearing events and webinars. I had the time of my life, it did the work of a CRM that we don’t have!
“Clearing was especially busy this year for Russell Group universities and there was a lot of competition, but with Gecko we could get to candidates ahead of time to highlight which courses were likely to be in clearing.”
The events team at Leeds is making the most of Gecko and is now encouraging other departments to take advantage of all it has to offer too. “Our little corner of the university, student recruitment, has really seen the benefits of Gecko,” says Jen. “I use it every day when we’re deep in campaign planning for things like Offer Holder Days and Open Days. I think by using it in just our team we’ve established some best practice and we’ve created some great email templates and now we’re like Gecko evangelists, because it’s so easy to use, everything is in one place. The support we get through our account manager and the Gecko Academy, when we’re not sure about something, is excellent too.”
The events team knows that it still hasn’t fully exploited all that Gecko has to offer and it’s now pushing the university management to add more Gecko features.
“I’d love to add Gecko’s bulk data management functionality because I know that it will really help to clean up our data and reduce the number of people in there who have no further links to the university.” says Jen. “And, we’re now on a mission to get other departments to use Gecko too, because we’ve seen the results just on our team and we know it can do wonders for others too.”
It’s not a secret tool that they want to keep within Leeds either. When asked whether they would recommend it to other unis, the whole team screamed in unison, “Definitely. Buy it. Buy it. Buy it!”
