Best Practices For Student Recruitment ?

[grant.swaim]

Hi,

I am an instructor in the automotive department at a community college. We have 7 instructors and an administrative assistant who need to recruit about 150 students each year. In addition to marketing ourselves to prospective students we also must maintain relationships with the local automotive garages and dealerships. I think SugarCRM will be a great app for these tasks.

I have installed Sugar Open Source and all is well. I am just trying to wrap my brain around the best way to use the modules for student recruitment. This is a little different than traditional SFA. So here are the particulars.

Most leads (prospects), and even contacts (current and past students), are not associated with a company. They either do not work or work at a temporary job that would be irrelevant.

A lead to us would be anyone who has expressed an interest in our program. With the leads we would primarily follow up with phone calls.

When ever a person actually registers for our program (becomes a student) we would convert the lead to a contact. We would then use Sugar to somewhat track their progression through the program and onto the work force. We would then be able to track our graduates even after they graduated.

Another goal is to keep Sugar as simple as possible to help assure it will be used by all.

So question time...

Can I pull off the student part by simply using leads and contacts along with a status field to do a decent job of tracking a person from a lead to a student? When I look at "Opportunities" and "Campaigns" it looks like it might be a little overkill for my application, but then again if that is the best way to go, I will tackle the learning curve.

Any ideas?

It would be great to hear from someone else who has used Sugar for basic student recruiting.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[SugarDev.net]

Can I pull off the student part by simply using leads and contacts along with a status field to do a decent job of tracking a person from a lead to a student?

Yes, I think you can!

When I look at "Opportunities" and "Campaigns" it looks like it might be a little overkill for my application, but then again if that is the best way to go, I will tackle the learning curve.

Again, yes, it's complicated. Opportunities I cannot find in your case, so you may just be able to disable that. Campaigns are difficult, but the manual helps a lot in this case.

[sugarcane]

Hi Grant,

you can definitely pare down the application to the modules that only apply to you, and hide all others (this can be done in the Admin area).

Based on your business process, you could definitely use the Leads and Contacts modules to track the progress from a lead to a student. The application is built to be account centric, so if you do want to use the opportunities or cases modules, the required account name field can be modified to un-require it (or you could always replace the account requirement with a required contact instead via custom coding). We would need to know more details regarding your exact process to determine if using the opportunities module is relevant to your business process, or if you could just get away with creating some custom fields on teh contacts module.

If you would like to discuss your requirements in more detail, do not hesitate to contact us.

[piuskid]

Grant,
As the previous notes state, you can use Sugar for what you are trying to do.

I have done a bit of work in this space for larger universities using a big enterprise software vendor, and really all you need is Contact for tracking your students, Account and Contact for your Vendors as well as future Accounts that you want to link to your graduated students and I would also propose that you use the Projects object and Projects activities to track instances of the student lifecycle. You could make use of contact history, but in case you want to do additional task tracking, follow up and track the movement of a student, projects and project activities are a good way to go.

Many colleges are also implementing Campaign management for newsletters, recruitment and alumni solicitation and while you might not use Campaigns for traditional lead and demand tracking, you could use the features as an advanced correspondence engine which will give you good real time data as to what communications are working and not working so you can better tailor your correspondence with your students and alumni to get them on board with whatever you are doing.

Good luck and congrats on being a thought leader !
-A

[grant.swaim]

Thanks for all the ideas and words of encouragement. I am going to use Sugar to manage our student recruitment and public relations efforts with surrounding automotive facilities.

I'll report back in the future on how it worked.