You Can’t Do That in Your CRM: Benefits of a family engagement platform

When it comes to meeting your enrollment goals, parent engagement is no longer a “nice to have”, 72% of families expect weekly communication from their student’s institution and 94% of parents say the quality of communication they receive is a key factor in their student’s enrollment decision.

But with shrinking teams and tighter budgets, personalizing outreach for thousands of families is a tall order for a standard CRM. That’s why a dedicated family engagement platform is vital for enrollment success. 

So what really makes CampusESP so different from the CRM you may be already using? How can you use them in tandem to do even more? Darryl Isom from University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) and Clayton Walker from Belmont University shared their insights on how they use CampusESP and what differentiates it from other software they’ve had.

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An all-in-one platform allows you to do more with less resources

From collecting parent information to multi-channel outreach, CampusESP is an all-in-one parent engagement solution. 

Right from the start, CampusESP will add parents into specific “communities” (groups of parents with similar interests) based on the information they input into their sign-up registration. This allows for content tailored to their interests and their student’s stage to display within the portal automatically, and gives you an easy way to segment your audience when it’s time to send out announcements or reminders. 

“It takes a long time to find the right list of parent emails to send something. CampusESP makes it really easy to send out an email to a specific group of parents in a community. That’s something I didn’t have before.” said Walker.

To take it a step further, Belmont creates communities based on admission counselor territories to humanize the recruitment process. They also use communities for webinar attendees and campus visitors to keep families engaged long after their visit ends. 

With your own content library, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Content that is built in the portal can be reused enrollment cycle after enrollment cycle, saving future you time, too.

Let AI and our higher ed experts handle the heavy lifting

One of the biggest hurdles to effective engagement is the time it takes to create meaningful content. To solve this, the CampusESP Content Network™ handles roughly 93% of your family content for you. Our team curates a library of articles written by higher ed experts on topics like FAFSA completion, mental health, and move-in guidance.

“I only spend about 30 minutes a week in the portal because the vast majority of what I do is merely approving posts that have already been created by your team,” shared Walker.

This automation allows for deeper partnerships across campus; other departments can be invited to share their own updates and events, ensuring families get a holistic view of the student experience. “It takes a big weight off of me.”

Isom agreed, noting that because the curated content covers the vast majority of topics families care about, UMES only needs to create about 12% of their own content.

In addition, CampusESP Account Managers provide dedicated support to help you meet your specific institutional goals. From onboarding to ongoing strategy discussions, the focus is on a true partnership.

“With previous CRM’s we did not utilize all of the capabilities of the platform, but with CampusESP we utilize 100% of the features,” said Isom. 

Clear analytics show you what's working and how to continue to improve

With any strategy, you need to know if your efforts are actually moving the needle.. That’s why CampusESP acts as a superpower for your CRM, providing a Performance Dashboard and monthly insight reports that summarize your results and ROI. Instead of digging through raw data, you get a clear view of which families are highly considering your institution, helping you evaluate your initiatives and prioritize outreach.

The CampusESP Parent Promoter Score™ (PPS) is a predictive model that summarizes family interest to help your team forecast which students are most likely to enroll. The impact of high engagement is significant: data shows that students with a parent in the top quartile of engagement are 3x more likely to enroll.

“We haven’t had CampusESP for even a year yet, but it’s showing success and I can already see that our yield is going to be higher than average based on the data,” said Walker.

UMES has been using CampusESP since 2021, and has first-hand seen how engaging families has impacted enrollment: the yield rate for their Fall 2022 first-year students was around 11%. For students with a family member in CampusESP, it was 16.5% — a 5.8% gain.

By identifying these highly engaged prospective families, your team can focus its efforts where they matter most. “I no longer need a data researcher to see what’s working. I’ve got it” says Isom.

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Ready to scale your family engagement strategy?