The Intellitimes

INTELLIWORKS: Tell us a bit about the The Unversity of Richmond’s School of Continuing Studies.

CAMPBELL: We’re one of five different schools at a fairly small liberal arts school, and we’re the only department that works with non-traditional students so we handle everything from adult degree programs to non-credit classes and our lifelong learning institute, plus all of the University’s summer programs.  We have a really diverse audience and typically they don’t overlap.

INTELLIWORKS:  What are some of your main goals and objectives?

CAMPBELL:  Because the programming is so unique to each division we don’t have a lot of opportunity to cross market.  We have one team of four people that has to handle all of those programs.  As a revenue-driven organization, we survive by our enrollments so our goals tend to be enrollment driven, which is why it’s really critical for us to have the right systems in place to manage inquiries and improve the efficiency of how we market our programs.

INTELLIWORKS:  How has Intelliworks helped you to acheive your goals?

CAMPBELL:  Prior to Intelliworks, we used to manage inquiries manually.  If someone called about a particular program it may or may not have been tracked on a master spreadsheet.  We really didn’t have the tools to follow up with prospects and make sure they got enrolled in the classes and degree programs they were interested.  This is particularly important on the credit side because we have such a high volume of inquiries.

When you’re enrollment driven like a lot of continuing education programs are, the folks in marketing have a lot of weight on their shoulders, and if they don’t have a great CRM there’s no way that they’re going to be able to significantly impact their conversion rates or even handle an increase in inquiries should they change their marketing. 

Our student information system (Banner) was used to manage registrations, but we had a lot of communications needs outside of prospecting and recruiting that could not be met by this system.  And thankfully we were able to rollout the system in less than six weeks, so there was very little disruption to our business processes.

INTELLIWORKS:  How has your use of Intelliworks evolved over time?

CAMPBELL: We are a small enough organization that we didn’t have to over think everything.  Once our Network Services team signed off on the security of the Intelliworks system we were off and running.  Because the system was so easy to set up, the implementation was easy for us.

At first we focused on managing inquiries for our degree programs and automating some of the responses to those inquiries based on the information they requested.  From that information we were able to mail packets to individuals that had expressed interest in our programs.  From that we were able to build at a database of prospects that we would then invite to some of our events to build a relationship with them.

Pretty soon we realized that we had lots of clients within the school that were looking to reach their audiences via email.  So we began using the tool to market our non-credit programs.  We built out some targets by program area that would could begin reaching out to.  Now we also manage a pre-college program called Summer Scholars.  We were in a position where we were outsourcing all of the promotions for that program, including search and email, while we would handle the fulfillment of those requests internally.  Unfortunately, having to pay for the outside agency to help with promotion kept the program from being profitable.  So our director of summer programs asked us to manage this on their behalf. 

As a result, we were able to save $40,000 on the cost of promoting the program.  We brought all of the creative work in house and leveraged Intelliworks as the the back-end technology support to distribute these campaigns.

Additionally, we’ve been able to expand our communications to be much more personalized with our outreach to prospects.  That has been critical to us because it’s part of our brand promise to be student-centric in our approach.