Admissions for High School in RE?

Miki Martin

Currently, only our Advancement Department is utilizing RE. Our Admissions office works off a spreadsheet and Constant Contact for communications, while the “front office” of the school is on yet another platform. Has anyone utilized RE for prospective students? Our Admissions person is considered part of Advancement so we are thinking it would be great to get her prospective students in our database early to ease the transition for when (if) they become students for their freshman year. We would segregate them somehow, likely with a different constituent code to keep them from receiving standard mailings from our office and make it easier to identify them for Admissions. Then when they enroll for high school we can change the code and even the constituent ID for the student to her school ID (new process for me this year).

I appreciate any insights or thoughts. We are hoping if we can do this we can help quantify our use of this expensive database. Thank you!

Faith Murray

We do use RE for our monastic vocations prospects – kind of like prospective students, only these are prospective monks who haven't joined yet. Because these records differ from a standard donor record, we do segregate them by Constituent code. We also use Security by Constituency to make sure that ONLY the Vocations Director (and DBM) can view and access records with that code. That is because oftentimes, confidential information is included in their records that our regular fundraising staff has no need to see since they are not donors.

The benefit of sharing is that our Vocations office can benefit from our regular address/data updates and vice-versa. And, if a prospect does become a full monk or donor later on, we already have their backstory.

Depending what kind of students you are recruiting, I would also put in specific policies to protect underage minors from any data sharing or solicitations processes that might affect your general donor universe. You may also want to peruse the number of prospects in their workflow to make sure it isn't so large that it would bump up your RE subscription level with a large number of names that don't go on to enroll.

Miki Martin

@Faith Murray this is great! Thanks so much! We have five feeder schools that feed into our high school with many girls coming but also many that choose other paths. I do not think it would bump us, though, but that's definitely something to consider.

I'm just starting (unfortunately) to restructure the whole security thing and did not even realize I could do that based on constituent code. I know we'd have some cross-over, though, since we have alums all over the place and big sisters already here and such. I don't think our Admissions Director captures anything we don't use for our systems, though, and I'd just be sure the prospects would not be included in any mailings.

I am wondering how we'd handle the whole student-parent thing, though. We'd have to likely have two codes, one for prospective student and then one for the parents since we track both. We just exclude current students from any of our mailings but are starting to track more information on them when they attend, like those who are being mentored by an alum and what scholarships they receive while here since those come from our office.

I'd love to find a way to make this work to start to consolidate the databases we have floating around our school. Maybe one day they'll all actually talk to one another! Thanks, again, for your insight!