How Funnel’s automations transformed the admissions process

About Lansing Catholic High School

Lansing Catholic High School opened its doors in 1970, and offers students a wide variety of programs, faith formation opportunities and teaching, extracurricular activities, sports, and experiences. Lansing Catholic welcomes all students who desire a quality education steeped in the tradition and teaching of the Catholic Church, and ranks among the finest Catholic high schools in the State of Michigan.

We sat down with the team at Lansing Catholic to find out more about their admissions challenges, and how Funnel helped to meet them.

Why do you need a school CRM?

A school customer relationship manager (CRM) is a software system that helps manage the admissions journeys of students — also referred to as leads.

Unfortunately, quality leads can slip through the cracks somewhere along the admissions process, which is generally due to schools capturing and storing lead data in multiple locations with no overview of specific pipeline stages.

Think about just some of the touchpoints that a prospective family might have with your school:

• direct contact through phone or email
• completing an inquiry form on your website
• reaching out through social media
• Email campaign
• attending an Open House or community event
• speaking with school staff
• attending an alumni event

If there’s no central database to record each of these interactions, it’s a lot easier for leads to go missing and for admissions and marketing teams to forget to follow up. To solve this issue, many schools are now using a customer relationship manager (CRM), like Funnel.

The benefits of a school CRM like Funnel include:

1. Key prospective parent data is stored in a single system.
2. Task-setting and bulk communication allow you to nurture prospective parents while saving time.
3. Automations save you time and effort with your repetitive administration tasks.

“It’s something that has transformed the way that we do things in our enrolment department. It almost is like having another team member doing some work for you and we definitely feel like we’re working smarter, and not necessarily harder.” - Paula Wilcox

It was also difficult for the Lansing Catholic team to keep track of all the spreadsheets which held important admissions data.

On working with Digistorm

“If someone asked me about Digistorm Funnel, I would definitely recommend it. Just the whole experience of researching the company, onboarding, and just using it day to day, all of it has been an experience that I definitely would want another school to have, to just help the whole admissions and enrolments process go more smoothly and make your time go just a little bit further.” - Claire Boomer

The Lansing Catholic team had a few priorities when searching for a software provider:

• Customer service and support
• Customisation
• Personalisation

Because the software they would choose would play such a large role in their admissions process, they needed to be able to rely on the provider for training and ongoing support, so their team could start to feel comfortable and confident from day one.

The Lansing Catholic team were able to customise Funnel to suit their branding. It was important to them to be able to offer a seamless branding experience in tandem with their other digital touchpoints, so parents always felt like they were truly interacting with the school.

Funnel’s automations were also able to help the team achieve greater levels of personalisation, to help them forge stronger connections with leads and families who are used to receiving an overabundance of marketing messages. Through personalisation, schools can cut through this marketing clutter to connect with prospective families and stay connected with their current families.

“It really feels like there’s another set of hands helping us in our team with all of the automations we have set up; it still gives that personalised touch for each family but it's not something I have to sit down and send an email for each family who came to an event, thanking them for coming. It allows us to just have these set up and they’re going on behind the scenes so I can focus on phone calls and tours and building those personal relationships a little bit more in person.“ - Claire Boomer

On the onboarding process

“When we were shopping around different CRMs to use in admissions and enrolment, we really loved the customer service that Digistorm offered, and really the customisation that they were able to offer, rather than ‘here’s our product, you have to work with it’, it was ‘how can we build our product to work for you?’.” - Claire Boomer

As part of the onboarding process, Digistorm offers all-inclusive training to prepare the school team from the ground up, as well as ongoing support during the learning stage and beyond. The school team is paired with an Onboarding Specialist to help them learn the ropes, and who can be contacted at any time for further assistance.

“There are also a lot of resources that if there’s just something I can’t figure out, I have our service rep who’s available to us to set up a meeting if there’s something more complex that we need to walk through and figure out how to do.” - Claire Boomer

Wrapping up

The team at Lansing Catholic were ready to move away from spreadsheets to a more organised system where their whole team could be on the same page. By incorporating Funnel into their admissions process, they were able to better organise their leads and family data, save time for their team members, and personalise their messages at scale to better connect with their families. The onboarding process helped them to learn the ropes of the software in no time, so they could continue to do what they do best - forge relationships with families.