Public Sector

“I have to say we have been suitably impressed with Call Collect. We have improved the whole way we capture data from prospective students and certainly lowered the costs associated with this area of student recruitment. We are currently looking at how Call Collect can be deployed elsewhere on the Campus”                                Graham Brown, Marketing Department.

The Organisation
Staffordshire University, one of the leading universities in the United Kingdom, has a long and proud history of providing high quality, progressive and inclusive higher education for people from across Staffordshire, the region, the UK and the rest of the world. They operate from two main campuses in Stoke-on-Trent and Stafford and a co-funded University Centre in Lichfield (SULC). Nursing and midwifery courses are taught at Stafford and, following the integration into the University in 1995 of the Shropshire and Staffordshire College of Nursing and Midwifery, there are also bases in Shrewsbury, Telford and Oswestry. 16,000 students make up the University's vibrant cultural mix from the UK and around the world. The University provides an extensive range of courses at foundation, certificate, diploma, degree and postgraduate level in the areas of: arts, media and design; business and law; computing, engineering and technology; and health and sciences.

The Challenge
In an increasingly crowded educational arena, attracting students to attend the university remains a challenge. The university would attend many fairs and educational events around the country and abroad and encourage visitors to their stands to complete a paper form outlining their possible future course interests, and giving some details about themselves. These forms would then eventually be manually inputted at the university and a personalized information pack together with the appropriate course prospectus would be dispatched to the enquirer together with an invitation to come and visit the university. The key problems in this process were delays in inputting the data meant that prospective students often had a long wait for information and looked elsewhere in the meanwhile, a great deal of time, effort and money was expended on the process and obtaining accurate reports and information was time-consuming and costly.

The Solution
Call Collect was introduced to streamline the process. E-forms containing all the required fields in a series of easy to use answer fields and pull-down lists were created which were deployed to PDA’s which were operated by university staff. During the course of conversation with a prospective student at the stand, the university staff would quickly and easily input the enquirers information into the PDA. In addition, two static lap-tops were available on the Staffordshire University stand, also configured with Call Collect, which allowed enquirers to key in their own details at their convenience. Captured data was transferred regularly during the course of the event to the university enquirer database which automatically generated personalized letters which were used to create the mailing pack. The mobile nature of PDA’s allowed university staff the flexibility of moving around the events and allowed them to capture information from interested parties at a number of different locations; not just at their exhibition stand.

The Benefits
Enquiries from prospective students at fairs and educational events around the country and abroad are now handled in a modern, more efficient streamlined way. There has been a direct reduction in overhead in relation to reduced clerical data-inputting costs. Furthermore lead times have been shortened leading to increased conversion rates and clear reporting modules now mean that university have clear and immediate visibility of enquirers and course popularity. Furthermore, because enquirers had historically completed the forms themselves, they had a tendency to tick lots of boxes to request a wide variety of course and university information. Since using Call Collect, brochure print costs for the university have fallen as enquirers – guided by university staff - have been more selective in their choice of marketing material.