VCU College of Health Professions: Connect with Prospects
Virginia Commonwealth University’s College of Health Professions offers 3 undergraduates, 6 master’s degrees, 6 doctoral degrees and 3 certificate programs across nine different fields of study including Gerontology and Rehabilitation Counseling.
The College of Health Professions’ (CHP) central recruiting/student success team works with department-level recruiting contacts to funnel prospective students to their desired programs. Before Salesforce, the team would host informational sessions and leverage Google Forms to collect information from prospective candidates. Then they would manually share that information with department-level contacts and send follow-up invitations to recruiting events. The team would cross-reference with the school's student information system, Banner, and communicate verbally or via email with departments to follow students through the admissions process.
Not only did the team face this challenge of having multiple online and offline systems and manual processes, but they wrestled with helping students narrow down program interests to better serve them with the correct information for their admissions journey. Additionally, the team needed a way to target underrepresented minorities and ramp up admissions activity for under-subscribed departments.
The team saw an opportunity to streamline their lead generation process, harvest even more prospective students, and better target their efforts to meet department and college goals by implementing Salesforce with Education Data Architecture and Pardot in partnership with Tipping Point Consulting.
GOALS
Streamline offline recruiting process to a CRM in order to better target prospective students according to both their interests and department diversity goals.
Know where a prospective student is within the funnel at any given time.
CHALLENGES
Small team wearing many hats.
Limited resources.
Juggling the needs -- and data -- of 9 departments.
Students often come in with multiple program interests and need help narrowing their focus to one program to which they’ll apply.
The team needed to be able to target under-represented minorities effectively, and to more heavily recruit students for particular under-subscribed programs.
OUR SOLUTIONS
Implementing Salesforce CRM with EDA, focusing on essential custom fields for contacts and campaigns.
Consolidating, cleansing, and uploading existing data into Salesforce, where it would be dynamic, actionable, and accessible to Pardot.
Implementing Pardot to sync with CRM data and ease the process of connecting with constituents.
Utilizing Pardot’s native tools to collect, segment, nurture, and track prospects based on key demographic and program interest data.
Constructing a lightweight custom form (via Salesforce Flow) to allow for event registrations to blend seamlessly into the CRM.
Training the CHP team via hands-on training sessions and video documentation, and empowering them to stay up-to-date on the CRM with a customized home page and reports, Activities and calendar setup, and more.
CUSTOMIZE SALESFORCE & EDA FOR VCU
TPC implemented Salesforce CRM with Education Data Architecture, creating custom fields to capture essential contact-level data, including a slate of demographic information to assist in targeting key audiences. We also consolidated, cleaned and imported existing data.
Housed together in a custom App, the key objects are at the ready for the staff at VCU’s CHP.
TPC then implemented Pardot, setting up custom Prospect fields mapped to the CRM contact fields. Using the power of the Pardot Grading system, we automated grades for each existing and new prospect based on a combination of program interest, entry term, and demographic data. Using these same parameters, we also set up automation rules and segmented lists to automatically route incoming prospects to the appropriate list.
CAPTURE WEB VISITORS
Tipping Point placed a web form on two key areas of CHP’s homepage which utilizes Pardot’s progressive profiling tool. The form asks for limited information each time a visitor fills out the form to gradually build a robust view of the prospect.
Utilizing Pardot’s Completion Actions, CHP sends a targeted auto-responder to prospects when they first enter Pardot. Then, the team can further nurture incoming leads by sending department-level messages to specific lists, which Pardot manages automatically. This allows a small recruiting team to have a big impact through automation.
To help solve the issue of students who need to narrow down their program choices, Tipping Point created an email drip campaign via Engagement Programs to follow up with prospective students who have multiple program interests. Through the campaign, students use a secondary form to narrow down and rank their areas of interest.
EVENTS
To solve for event-related challenges, we set up an additional Pardot Form using the Kiosk setting, which allows for multiple entries from the same browser. Since the team needed a way for prospects to register for events, we also set up a Flow-based automation to register students as campaign members in the system. It’s a lightweight solution that gets CHP the information they need without the bulk (and expense!) of a robust event management system.
