Tara is the in-house content lead at Digistorm, tending to all content needs, big or small! When she’s not writing copy or managing the Insights editorial calendar, Tara is passionate about supporting theatre and live music.
St Andrew's School, Walkerville is a leading South Australian independent, co-educational specialist primary school providing excellence in education from playgroup to year seven. In 2019, the team discovered Digistorm's leading school CRM, Funnel, which has since allowed them to streamline their entire admissions process, kick serious enrolment goals, and save a significant amount of staff time and resources. We spoke to Marissa, the Director of Marketing and Community Engagement at St Andrew's School to learn more about the impact Funnel has had on school enrolments two years on.
Before Funnel, we were using Excel spreadsheets and paper-based forms. As you can imagine, there was a lot of paperwork, collation, and information duplication. We collected information on various forms, our registrar was inputting that data into various spreadsheets, and it was all collated. That, as you can imagine, took a lot of time! I first heard about Digistorm Funnel when my registrar came and told me about it. She was looking for a way to simplify our enrollment process and reviewed several systems, and Funnel was one of those.
We then got on the phone with Digistorm to find out more about the platform and how it might suit our school, and we determined that it was the best solution for St Andrew’s School. I primarily look for something easy to use because we have multiple staff who might be engaging with that system, so it really needs to be user-friendly and intuitive. Part of that means that we need something really visual, customisable, and gives us key data to project future enrolments for our school.
We wanted to achieve with our enrolment management system to simplify that traditional paper-based system. We also needed to understand where those prospective families were in our sales funnel. Were they at the enquiry stage? Had they attended a tour? Had they had an interview with the Principal?
Digistorm Funnel has helped us to improve our admissions process by enabling us to be more personalised with prospective families. By simply looking at the notes in Funnel, we understand when they last called, what they’re after, what they’ve already done in terms of engaging with St Andrew’s. This makes them feel very special and important to us, as they should, and it’s a big improvement compared to what we’ve done before.
I find Funnel very easy to use. As a tool, I find it really intuitive. I’m of the generation where I press things and wait to see what happens, so I feel like you can’t break it, which is a great thing. If I don’t know how to use something, I’ll contact our Digistorm Customer Success Manager, who’ll talk us through it. It has saved us a lot of time and has streamlined our enrolment processes. All of that [lead] information is captured in one easy spot on Funnel and has helped us convert enquiries into enrolments.
The main people who use Funnel in our team are our registrar, myself, and our communications officer. We all use it in slightly different ways; from my perspective, I use Funnel to monitor where we’re at from an enquiries perspective, while our communications officer might use Funnel to send emails to prospective families.
Together with our own marketing and retention strategies, we’ve seen enquiries almost double, plus we’ve saved an enormous amount of staff time, which is a real saving for our bottom line.
One of the features I really enjoy using in Funnel is the events feature. We had switched over all of our school tours to using the events feature, and that really helps us on the day to sign in prospective families and keep in touch with those who have attended a tour and follow up to see if they wish to enrol.
The main reason I’d recommend working with Digistorm is because of the team’s professionalism. I’m so impressed every time I engage with Digistorm; whether it’s a question about how something works or starting a new project, they’re always really professional and super helpful.
I would rate their customer service as amongst the best customer service I’ve received. The onboarding, training, and support since we joined Funnel have been fantastic. I find that there’s never a question that’s too hard for our Customer Success Manager — they’re always willing to help us out.