As a higher ed Salesforce admin or CRM manager, we are used to building student communities with RFI and applicant forms that leverage FormAssembly to a certain extent. Now, these forms are the basis of your prospective student pipeline that your admissions team engages with in order to get students to apply for programs. With the recent trend in decline in enrollment numbers, how we can help our short-staffed admission team to meet their enrollment numbers? Well, FormAssembly Workflow is something that we can leverage to meet our goals for the admissions teams. So let us dive deep in!
RFI to Application Automation
We all know how our RFI forms capture prospective students’ programs of interest in Salesforce — as a contact and an affiliation or a custom object. However, once the admissions teams act on the program of interest, there is a considerable amount of time lost back and forth to get the student an application. The reason is that there is a siloed RFI form with applications that are hidden on a student registration portal. What if we can get the student to register quickly on the applicant portal with prefilled information and program of interest? This will be a bit of a lift because each university has a picklist of values on the programs which does not match the EDA program record. This is where FormAssembly Workflow can help.
- With the prospective student deduped to Salesforce, an email can be sent to the prospective student with a link to start the application.
- FormAssembly Workflow can get the prefilled form query easily and display the contact data on the application page.
- Leveraging the email notification feature of FormAssembly, as a Salesforce admin, you can send the prefilled FormAssembly form embedded in an email easily.
Guiding the student through the application
Once we get the student to start on the application, each university has a list of checklists and prerequisites a student has to submit to move the application stage to the final stage. Now, all universities have the checklist data configured leveraging Admissions Connect or the enrollment applicant packages available in AppExchange. So the question is, how do we notify the student about each step needed to complete the application? Here is how FormAssembly Workflow will help to automate this need:
- The email notification feature on FormAssembly can be used to send emails on each step of the journey to notify the student of any missing steps and documents.
- The sensitive data feature of FormAssembly Workflow can be used to encrypt any sensitive student data to be displayed on forms and ensure that the university is in compliance. By leveraging the FormAssembly Compliance Cloud, we can easily hide and show fields on the application pages to internal university users based on security policies set by the university.
- If you are using Admissions Connect, FormAssembly Workflow features easy-to-use, drag-and-drop form fields along with navigation and a collection of input fields. These can easily be leveraged to quickly build the custom applicant pages needed to complete the checklist data from the student.
- Leveraging response data from FormAssembly Workflow, automation can be built in Salesforce to populate the corresponding EDA objects to share the data across departments.
Increase your donations with donor-engaging automation
With the decrease in enrollment numbers for the past two years for universities, a lot of news has been received in the media an uptick in donations for the foundations resulting in millions of dollars for endowments. As college presidents look for ways to increase financial aid for the students, donor engagement has been a key priority for universities from public to Ivy League schools. So as a CRM leader, how can you equip your advancement teams to engage with donors and help to increase donations? FormAssembly Workflow can help in this regard as well.
- By leveraging FormAssembly’s drag-and-drop form features, campaigns with links to donor forms can be sent easily through your favorite marketing automation platforms. Engagement of the donors is tracked in your donation journeys.
- For large donations, engaging forms can easily be built online. These forms can capture important information about your donors to personalize the experience. For example, you may consider gathering the donor’s shipping address so you can automate thank you gifts and create a memorable experience for them.
As an admission user or Salesforce admin who is using FormAssembly, here are three simple ways you can help your university meet your admission numbers:
- Leverage automation to help students prefill application data from RFI forms.
- Transition custom-built forms to FormAssembly Workflow forms to quickly build and pre-populate checklist data.
- Increase your donations and create a memorable experience for your donors easily with point-and-click automation.
As always, feel free to post below or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for any questions.
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