Which Enrollment Management Platform is Best for Your Small School or Camp?

By Emily Hannah

With any small school or children’s camp, a main goal will always be attracting new prospective students. While marketing your school and getting the attention of these new students is one process, guiding them through the entire marketing funnel to enrollment, and managing that complex process in a simplified, efficient way is an entire other can of worms. 

Small school administration offices are busy and don’t have time to manually manage the recruitment and enrollment process for each prospective school family. And on the other end, parents don’t have time to fiddle with lengthy, complicated inquiry forms to receive information about the school they’re interested in. Luckily, this is where enrollment management platforms step in. 

What are enrollment management platforms? 

In a nutshell, enrollment management platforms can enhance a school’s marketing funnel while streamlining and organizing the recruitment process to positively impact a school’s growth. These softwares are scalable and range from smaller platforms tailored to the needs of smaller schools, to larger packages that can manage marketing, recruitment efforts, and enrollment or registration altogether, serving as both a CRM and a marketing tool in one.

When utilized at its highest potential, an enrollment management platform can help schools and camps connect with more students and families; recruitment staff can engage with parents and keep them in the marketing pipeline from first interest through enrollment. 

Apart from marketing benefits, an enrollment management platform provides schools with essential family information that is relevant to the school. This information allows schools to receive feedback and improve the admissions experience to be more efficient and effective, and serve as an aid to help boost internal processes, from using recruitment data to inform financial planning, to streamlining workflows and making enrollment a much easier process for parents. 

At DesignTLC, we’ve been lucky enough to work with and recommend some fantastic enrollment management platforms. In this blog post, we’ll list just a few of our favorites, explain their key features and why we recommend them to the small schools and camps we work with. 

Enquiry Tracker

Enquiry Tracker, an enrollment management software based in Australia, is an end-to-end online solution for K-12 schools. Currently used by over 300 schools globally, the Enquiry Tracker product is a CRM database, analytics tracker, event planner, marketer, emailer, customer service assistant, and application tracker all-in-one— bringing all of the important elements of student recruiting into one easy-to-use tool for schools. 

What sets Enquiry Tracker apart is its design to be used by people without tech experience. A common frustration with CRMs is that they are not user-friendly— Enquiry Tracker seeks to solve that issue with easy-build templates for the database and endless live support to customers. The goal is to liberate school staff from the endless admin work and manual recruitment tracking once they are fully operating with Enquiry Tracker.

Key features of Enquiry Tracker include: 

• Beginner-friendly user interface developed for people without tech experience, making it a seamless and simple database to work with.
• The CRM has everything built and ready for your school with customizable templates, making it as easy as possible to use.
• It’s a quick onboarding process for new customers. If your school is integrating Enquiry Tracker into its system, onboarding could take as little as one day to get up and running. 
• Unlimited amount of users on an account. With Enquiry Tracker, you don’t have to pick and choose which employees can access the CRM. 
• Transparent and flexible pricing packages that haven’t been raised since Enquiry Tracker’s founding in 2018. 
• Unlimited resources and training available to customers, including live support. 
• Several products to choose from for a customizable experience, and frequent product updates made several times a year. 

“Enquiry Tracker has been a very important platform for our schools to capture data, automated school tours and calendar invites, and track student and family information. From the first contact with families and down through the enrollment funnel the personalized communication and customization of the Enquiry Tracker platform has helped increase enrollment and has added that personal touch for each of our prospective families,” said a happy Enquiry Tracker customer. 

If you’d like to learn more about Enquiry Tracker, check out our Mindful School Marketing podcast episode recording with Anthony and Greg Campitelli, Enquiry Tracker co-founders, or reach out to their team for a demo.

Digistorm 

Digistorm began its journey in 2012 after creating the first Australian school app, now offering customized enrollment management platforms for over 700 K-12 schools across the globe. Digistorm is another top rate all-in-one admissions solution designed specifically to help educators support families from initial interest to enrollment.

Digistorm’s key features include: 

• Digistorm’s all-in-one CRM, Funnel, allows school staff to easily keep track of leads, manage school events, send school communications, track conversion rates (with key insights like lead scoring!) and more. 
• Each enrollment funnel is customized to the needs of the school, and seamlessly integrates with a range of other software systems.
• Ability to compare conversions from years past with highly specified reports and data. You can even track which neighborhoods near your school are the most popular amongst your school families. 
• Easily customized inquiry forms on your website can trigger specific marketing communications in Funnel. For example, on an inquiry form, if a parent selects they are interested in a STEM program specifically, they will receive information from the STEM marketing campaign that exists in the CRM. 
• Digistorm also designed an app to connect school parents with their child’s teachers, administration staff, and other families in the school community to set students up for success. As soon as parents login to the app, they have full access to their child’s schedule, materials and books checklist, school calendar, newsletter, sports team information, and more. 
• Digistorm offers all-inclusive training sessions for all school staff planning to utilize the platform, and easy access to helpful resources and a sales representative in case an educator needs any additional assistance. 

“It’s something that has transformed the way that we do things in our enrollment department. It almost is like having another team member doing some work for you and we definitely feel like we’re working smarter, and not necessarily harder,” said a happy Digistorm customer using Funnel. 

If you’re interested in learning more about Digistorm, check out their customer testimonials and stories or reach out for a demo!

Sawyer

Enrollment management platforms are not limited to just schools, they are helpful in children’s camps and enrichment classes as well! If your camp or children’s organization is in need of support for class registration, marketing, and more, we recommend checking out Sawyer. 

Sawyer’s goal is to give educators back time doing what they love, and not spend hours buried under admin work; in fact, with most of their customers, Sawyer has proven to free up 28 hours of admin time a month. Sawyer is a widget that embeds directly on a webpage, meaning you don’t have to worry about any updates or plugins when it comes to managing the platform. 

Key Features of Sawyer Include: 

• Mimics the familiar process of online shopping but is specifically tailored for children’s enrichment classes and camp, and fully designed for parents and families. 
• Is a simple registration and organization process for parents on the front end and educators on the back end.
• Sawyer creates a profile for a family, including important information like the child’s name, age, birthday, allergies, etc., that is automatically plugged into every registration form a parent completes, saving them time and energy instead of having to fill out a new form for each class. 

• Payment processing is built into the tool, making purchasing classes a breeze for parents on the go, and provides revenue analytics for educators. 
• For educators and business owners, they can use Sawyer to track registrations and see a roster of children attending their classes beforehand. They can take attendance, find parent contact information, and more.
• Has a built-in marketplace for parents looking for activities for their children, doubling as a registration platform and a discovery tool. 
• Sawyer is completely optimized for both desktop and mobile browsing.
• Pricing packages for educators are provided in tiered levels, based on the level of support you need. 

“Sawyer is a straight to the point simple tool but at the same time covers every area my business needs,” said a happy Sawyer customer. 

If you are interested in learning more about Sawyer, check out their web page of customer stories to see how they are making a real impact for children’s classes and camps across the country, or reach out for a demo!

Contact Us

Aren’t sure about your next steps in securing an enrollment software for your small school? Not to worry— contact us TODAY for a free 15-minute consultation. We can discuss your current needs and provide a recommendation on a platform we believe is the best fit!