Pre-applicant Open Days

Fill every open day with students who book and attend. Include tours, talks and personalised programmes with Student CRM.

1. Overview
This app allows the Establishment to set up and manage a full season of Pre-applicant Open Days each academic year. These Open Days are for students who have not yet applied through UCAS, but who may have previously shown interest in studying at the Establishment. The content of these open days is more general than that of Applicant Open Days, where they have chosen a course.

The app sends invitations out to students by email or by post. Students click the link in their email (or visit the URL in their postal invite) and register online. Students can also book online after seeing billboards, adverts, web banners or hearing radio ads, etc.

Once booked, the app sends out all subsequent communications automatically. The app shows you how registrations are going for each Open Day, and provides attendee lists for on-the-day welcoming. Students arriving on the day can book in by bringing their booking confirmation which can be scanned using a hand-held barcode scanner by any officer.

The app can also survey* students after the day to gain valuable feedback, (* this requires the ‘Surveys’ app).

2. Adding Pre-applicant Open Days
Each year your establishment can host as many open days as you like; there is no limit. One open day can involve a single faculty, several faculties or all faculties. Activities can be scheduled throughout the day, and students book onto these when making their online open day booking.

3. Inviting students
The app invites the correct students from the CRM, based on their previous activity and Year Of Entry (ie: they might have requested a 2013 prospectus, or attended a UCAS event, etc). The invitations are sent according to the channel you selected in your workflow:

•    Email invitations: these are automatically broadcast from the app.
•    Postal invitations: you print and post the mail-merged PDFs that are automatically e-mailed to you. (You can view a list of all mail-merged PDFs at any time by viewing the PDF Log report.?)

4. Registering online
Students clicking through from the email invitation don’t have to complete their personal information again as the CRM knows who they are. If students choose to also edit their personal information while booking, their central Student Record will be updated with their latest contact information. They select a year of entry, course of interest, say how many people will be coming with them and register.

When students select a course of interest, that determines which faculty the student will visit on the Day, which dates are still available with remaining capacity, and which activities they can book.

If you receive postal registrations in your office, any CRM user can search for that student (or add them as a new student in the CRM) and then book them onto an open day.

Unknown web bookings create a new student record with their booking, for example responses to your local radio adverts or billboards.

5. The personalised programme
Each student booking creates a useful personalised programme of what that particular student is doing are different times throughout the day. The student can log back in from the links in their confirmation email and update their activities to get a revised programme whenever they want. The app only lets them change to activities or days with capacity, full activities or days are not available to see.

6. Workflow and Touchpoints
The app has a built-in default workflow with a series of touchpoints. We can modify the Workflow for you, adding new touchpoints in as we configure your app occurrence, and then you can edit the texts within each touchpoint as many times as you like.

7. Default Touchpoints
Before registration:
•    email invitation = when data is available
•    2nd email invitation = (x) days before an open day

After registration:
•    registration confirmation = Immediately after registering online
•    1st reminder = 56 days before Open Day booked
•    2nd reminder = 28 days before Open Day booked
•    3rd reminder = 2 days before Open Day booked

After Open Day (if they attended)
•    survey = If attended

After Open Day (if they registered but did not attend)
•    re-invite = If not attended

8. Summary of benefits
Once an open day is set up (and we train you how to do this, and are available for telephone support if you need more help on the day), the app runs all the bookings and communications automatically for you. You can take control of each day like never before.

It adjusts which days and activities are available based on remaining capacity and provides clear information to ensure booking is fast and easy, and the student is reminded to turn up on the day by the scheduled touchpoints.