CRM for educational institutions

Education – is one more example of an activity where process automation brings tangible results. Private schools, training centers or courses often face problems that could be avoided if they had a universal assistant in their workflows. CRM – is just such a tool.

There is a fairly typical stereotype that such software systems are justified only in the field of trade and e-commerce. However, CRM for schools does not differ in its functionality from those used in business.

Customer Relationship Management is a client relationship management system. And if we consider the relationship between students and the school as a typical client communication with a business, everything immediately falls into place.

Opportunities offered by CRM for schools:

1. Effective management of relationships with students and parents. Thanks to CRM, an educational institution will maintain closer contact with students and their parents. information about learning history, successes, appeals, and complaints is stored in a single database. This makes communication with students and their families more personalized. With CRM, it is easier to tell your audience about important events, changes in the schedule, planned events or vacations. And the ability to integrate with existing communication channels (for example, school’s information website) simplifies notifications.
2. Optimization of the class enrollment process. CRM for an educational institution helps to organize the process of accepting new students, store information about applicants and potential students. The administration can track applications, general statistics and the effectiveness of the admission are stored in a single database.
3. Monitoring of academic performance. Thanks to CRM, all information about the results of pupils (students) is available in one click. This helps to identify problems and weaknesses in learning in time. The system makes it easy to generate reports for parents or the school itself. Thanks to the advanced analytics, the administration can develop more individualized plans for students with weaker results.
4. Convenient staff control. Teachers and lecturers get a powerful assistant that will help them plan an effective work schedule and, for example, remind them of the next class. The process of planning workload and vacations is simplified. The administration will always know the feedback on the staff work – CRM is able to record any appeal and save it in the database of the educational institution.
5. Event planning. Excursions, concerts, exhibitions, public communications – all these events used to take time to prepare. With CRM, manual, routine work is a thing of the past, because the system will automatically process all the data. With its help, the administration will be able to conveniently notify participants, register visitors and control the events organization.

The main advantage of CRM in the education system is about reporting. The database can store all the document templates that are needed in work processes. Moreover, the system is able to automatically generate reports in one click.

CRM for a kindergarten, school or university – is more than a digital assistant. This system is ideal because it is specially designed to automate tasks that used to take a lot of staff time. CRM unites all parts of the educational complex into a single digital space.

Examples of ready-made software solutions for schools, universities and other educational institutions:

• Salesforce Education Cloud: a powerful system that allows to track interactions with students throughout their learning journey, providing in-depth data analysis and the ability to integrate with various educational platforms;
• Zoho CRM: a functional CRM for schools that allows to effectively maintain a student database, automate marketing campaigns to attract new candidates and provides extensive performance analysis capabilities;
• HubSpot: a well-known CRM that is in demand due to its simplicity, free version and good functionality for organizing a digital environment in an educational institution;
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Education: a powerful complex for educational institutions of any scale – from kindergartens to large universities;
• Schoology: a solution for institutions that specialize in creating thematic courses (including online learning), allowing to store educational materials, organize communication between students and teachers, as well as conduct online courses, testing and assessment.

The choice of CRM for an educational institution depends on the size of the institution, the specifics of its activities, as well as the need for integration with other platforms and tools.

Developing a personalized system for an educational institution has a number of significant advantages over conventional out of the box versions. This approach allows to take into account specific needs, which can significantly improve the work of the administration, teachers, and students.

What does a personnel CRM for  an educational institution offer – the main features.

Your own CRM can be integrated with other internal systems of the institution:

• online learning platforms;
• financial and accounting programs;
• course or library management systems;
• parental chats in messengers, etc.

This allows automating data exchange between different departments and provides convenient access to all the necessary information from one place.

With a personal CRM, a unique level of security can be set that will be available only to the owners of specific software. For example, students can have access only to their own grades and course materials and teachers can have access to their students’ performance and attendance history.

Personal CRM allows to create customized reports and analytical forms that display valuable information for making management decisions. At the same time, the type of information presentation is selected based on the customer’s needs. The educational institution is not tied to the unified solutions of the software developer, but chooses the necessary functionality for analytics in its institution.

Personal software is fully set to the needs of a particular educational institution. A simple example is that CRM for a kindergarten does not require special functionality, as in the case of a university. Instead of paying the cost of the full version of an out of the box software and using only 10-15% of the features, the customer agrees with the developer what he/she needs to achieve specific purposes. The savings and efficiency of CRM with this approach are many times greater.

Personal CRMs are developed taking into account the possibility of scaling – an increase in the number of students in a school, the number of teachers, or the expansion of the educational process. For example, an educational institution adds distance (online) learning to the schedule. Custom CRM is easier to adapt to such changes, because it already has the ability to scale workflows in its core.

Personal CRM is free from the imposed conditions of the developer or software supplier. The owner pays once for the design of the software system and then it is completely his intellectual property. No licenses, cloud subscriptions or regular payments.

An educational institution (school, university, kindergarten) receives full software support directly from the developer. The provider integrates the software into the processes of the institution and conducts initial training of staff to work with the complex. 

In addition, personal support of the CRM system in education gives an opportunity to quickly eliminate technical problems and provides flexibility in customizing the functionality to meet specific user requirements.