As a highly-regarded school with multiple campuses, Flinders Christian Community College filters hundreds of enrolment enquiries each year. All through the one small admissions teams. To uphold their impressive reputation and give prospective families the communication they deserve, they decided to modernise their processes.
Despite varying levels of technical abilities within their team, their shift away from Excel documents and paper forms was smooth and successful. With glowing feedback from customers and families, frustrations have slipped away both in the team and out.
The challenge
For the Flinders Christian Community College team, they reached a point a few years back where their systems felt so complicated, they needed to review them and consider starting from scratch. They knew it was important to keep clear and accurate records of all information, and the process of scanning and digitising all the forms they received was getting out of hand.
"Our life before Funnel was quite interesting,” says Monica Wulff, Head of Marketing and Enrolments at Flinders. “It was very manual. We literally had paper-based enrolment forms. We then moved to our own online forms, but it was standalone. It wasn’t integrating to Synergetic.”
The decision to seek out a more modern solution was made for the sake of both their internal teams and their prospective families. “We had to review it and say: we need something where parents can go online, do the application, attach all the documentation. But then for our Enrolments Team, we need it to integrate and move directly into Synergetic,” explains Monica.
Armed with a clear understanding of what was challenging them and what needed updating, as well as what they wanted to achieve, they began the search for a new CRM tool for their school.
Key goals
Like many schools, Flinders Christian Community College acknowledged first and foremost that they needed a program that was simple to use behind the scenes, catering to their team’s varying levels of technical skills.
They also knew that their new tool would need to cover the entire enrolment process, not just specific parts of it, such as management of their events.
“We needed to have all the information at hand and an easy system to use,” says Illana Cornell, Marketing and Enrolments Coordinator at Flinders Christian Community College. “Something that could store everything from the enquiry stage all the way to the application. And have the form as well. Funnel ticked all the boxes.”
Most loved features
For Illana, using Funnel on a day-to-day basis to coordinate enrolments has improved her workflow and her relationships with prospective families, particularly when it comes to admissions events.
“We use the events module for both open days and tour bookings,” shares Illana. “Families go to our website and they can select the day that we load in advance. We set an amount of people that can attend and we can go back in and keep adjusting it. If someone was to call and we've got a date that's full, we could manually extend that, which is always a bonus on customer service — we can help them. It's very easy. So we see really good feedback.”
When it comes to more strategic management and reporting, Monica has seen vast improvements now that they use a modern CRM system that’s simple to use.
“Funnel is such an important tool for me from a management point of view,” explains Monica. “It’s so easy to just go into reporting on our latest inquiries, our latest tour numbers, open day attendances or applications.”
