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” — with 85% of parents expecting weekly communication, it’s become a “need to have”. But with time restraints and teams often being short staffed, putting together a personalized, coordinated parent communication plan can seem daunting. That’s why having the right technology that can tailor your family engagement strategy to the specific needs and expectations that families have is vital for enrollment success. 

So what really makes CampusESP so different from the CRM you may be already using? 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.

More of a visual learner? Jump to the video recording of the webinar below!

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

From collecting parent information to sending out various types of content, CampusESP is an all-in-one parent engagement solution. 

Right from the get go, 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, where they blog to humanize the admissions experience.

Belmont also creates communities for webinar attendees and campus visitors to further engage based on what they know the family has experienced.

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. 

Experts help ensure your success. 

CampusESP creates 90% of your family content for you; our team will curate weekly content and add it to your portal as part of the solution. 

“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. Additionally,  other departments can be invited to promote their own events in the portal which allows for more partnership across campus, as well. “It takes a big weight off of me.”

Isom agreed, sharing that because the content added by CampusESP covers the vast majority of topics their families are looking for, UMES only needs to create about 12% of their own content.

In addition to content help, CampusESP Account Managers provide institutions additional support every step of the way. From questions on how to use features of the platform to strategy discussions on how to hit an institutional goal, Account Management’s focus is ensuring customers feel comfortable and successful.

“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 family engagement is working. And we want to prove our value to you. That’s why in addition to a robust administrative area with lots of helpful metrics, we send you a monthly engagement report with the most important data showcased. Review for your regular check you know you’re seeing an ROI, or forward to your team to quickly show how effectively the platform is helping you achieve your goals. 

With CampusESP you also get Parent Promoter Score,™ is a predictive model that elevates the most engaged parents, helping your team identify the students most likely to apply. Based on this data, you can focus your efforts on highly engaged prospective families in order to heighten their likelihood of enrolling at your school.

“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.

“I no longer need a data researcher to see what’s working. I’ve got it” says Isom.

Watch the full webinar!

Ready to scale your family engagement strategy?