How does your school handle casual inquiries?

Sondra Berry
Sondra Berry
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™

Our school has one inquiry form on our website. We request a lot of information on the inquiry form, so often, families do not want to complete it. Instead, they only want a little information from the school to determine if they're going to proceed. They want no additional contact with the school until they decide they are ready. We send our weekly newsletter to those who complete an inquiry or application form based on the Candidate role. Currently, our admission team keeps up with these casual inquiries with paper records. We need the ability to track them but do not need a database full of candidates who receive our unsolicited newsletter. We thought about setting up a second inquiry form to be used internally, but again, I'm not sure if that creates a user with the Candidate roll. How does your school handle casual inquiries? Do you have more than one inquiry form?

Comments

  • Jess Moxsky
    Jess Moxsky
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    @Sondra Berry
    This is where candidate statuses and multiple checklists can come in handy. I'd create a very bare-bones inquiry and name it something like “Prospect Inquiry” and create a checklist to assign that only has a single milestone and step - that inquiry form. When you process that inquiry and assign the nearly-empty checklist, you can give those candidates a different status like “Prospect” and then simply merge the candidate with the new official inquiry if the family moves forward. This gives you the flexibility to manage those not-quite-ready family relationships in the system while not adding them to your mailing list for those official candidates.

  • Sondra Berry
    Sondra Berry
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    @Jess Moxsky Thank you for replying. It has been YEARS since we last took the enrollment classes and I feel there is so much we could do we are not doing now. We have only a couple of checklists and I'm not sure we are using them to their fullest. Our biggest concern is not spamming people with emails who don't want to get them. I pull a “candidate” distribution list when I send my newsletter. Are you saying there are ways to pull some candidates and not others? Any advice or instructions is very much appreciated!

  • Jess Moxsky
    Jess Moxsky
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    @Sondra Berry
    Yes! You can filter candidate lists by Candidate Status, so if you gave the not-serious-yet inquiries a “Prospect” or some other status, you could filter to exclude them in your distribution lists.

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