Hi

Why last year’s courses will sink your next year’s student recruitment.

Irritating fact: Courses change all the time. You need one single source of truth so all your marketing campaigns always use the latest courses.

Courses get added, amalgamated and sometimes even withdrawn due to lack of interest, and of course, the inevitable internal reorganisation when new faculties and schools are merged or created. The challenge is in ensuring your courses are the same across all platforms.

The Courses and Subjects app from Student CRM can help you.

Why using Student CRM to recruit students saves you time and money

So the unseen knock-on effects of a simple course change can often surface well after the change occurred, and this leads to checking and double checking all the time and then unpicking the problems detected afterwards; when, and if, they are spotted at all.

And the solution, of course, is to have one single source of truth.

One master list of courses connected to everything. And the Courses and Subjects app does precisely that. Allowing you to manage courses by subject, level of study, faculty, school...for all past, present and future years of entry.

Changes take effect immediately. So not only can you find all of your, for example, undergraduate courses for next year’s entry, but you can also edit each one and set it to published or draft to see it instantly appear across your system. You can add tags to courses to create even better granularity for students.

So, for example, you may wish for a certain subset of courses to appear on a web form. By assigning a tag, a new virtual list is now available in that webform - one change instantly updates everything. For course enquiries, students can select a future year of entry and see the correct courses from that year. Officers can respond with correct course information, and you capture the prospective students’ course of interest for marketing.

For online event bookings, they can book onto the events for their chosen course, as your event forms are automatically updated with the latest course list. As are course groups in open days. And again, you capture the prospective students’ course of interest for marketing. 

Your online application forms update with correct course changes automatically, and course matching by code ensures that the new courses are immediately recognised in Student CRM as it can tell the difference between the same UCAS course code N103 for Business Management in year 2021, and the same course in year 2022.



Your web forms get fresh drop-down menus. Students can select their course by selecting year of entry, level of study and so on. And because your webforms are all by the course list in Student CRM, all the changes take immediate effect without you needing to ever update a form. 

You can configure your email touchpoints to always merge in the correct course information code, UCAS number - even the URL that the student can click to see more course info on your own website. You can also add conditional content into your emails based on course tags for more granular and targeted messaging.



And all email content stays evergreen. So you never have to revisit and update the email just because a course was added or altered.
 
You can download courses at any time. You may wish, for example, to make bulk changes all-in-one-go on your desktop, using Excel before uploading them back into Student CRM. And when you upload the courses, it recognises the existing courses and updates them accordingly.



Maybe, for example, it might add some new tags that you added to some courses. And if it doesn't recognise the courses you've uploaded, it creates those courses as brand new. 

You can copy courses from this year to next. And this is one of the hardest tasks each year, but it's now one of the easiest, because you can easily duplicate a full year of courses then make small adjustments to save time.

• improve their student recruitment results,
• use easier and more effective technologies to recruit students each year,
•  start off by following best practice from day one, and
• use the best, newest, cutting-edge recruitment tools year after year.