Overview
In this guide, you will find the steps needed to configure Insightly for tracking and engaging with prospects, students, alumni, donors, and affiliates.
Configuration
1. Customize Leads to manage your Prospects
We know connecting with Prospects who want to learn more about your institution, programs, or campus is time sensitive, so let's start by creating a lead qualification and conversion strategy.
First things first - where are your leads coming from? Update your Lead sources so you can track the inbound interest from your various marketing channels.
These sources might be purchased marketing lists, online advertising, social media marketing, telemarketing, or even a simple referral.
Use Lead statuses to track where leads are in your qualification process. You can add as many Open or Closed statuses as you’d like. Some examples we've seen for Closed are 'Send to Marketing' and 'Future Interest'.
Set up Lead assignment rules if you want to automate the process of assigning Leads as they are added to Insightly. This can distribute Leads on a team evenly or according to specific criteria like programs of interest or language.
Add custom fields to capture the data that's important to your institution. Out of the box, Insightly will track general contact information, but if you need to know their program of interest, timeline, preferred language, or pronoun, you will need to create custom fields.
Lastly, create a Web to Lead form so people can request more information directly from your website. They will be added as a lead to Insightly automatically.
In this example, Leads are added to our CRM after completing a form on our website to learn more about our courses. We are tracking information on what program they are interested in, if they are interested in financial aid, if they're requesting or have taken a campus tour, and what information session they've attended.
We will convert the Lead into an Opportunity after they've applied online for admissions and/or financial aid.
2. Organize your various Contact types
Being able to segment your Contacts by type (students, alumni, donors, affiliates) is as simple as creating a multi-select dropdown field.
Deciding which custom fields to add starts with defining the details you need to know at a glance. Consider the information you want to segment or filter by and what reports you want to pull in the future.
Here's a list of fields to consider:
- Source - Dropdown with a list of your marketing channels
- Referred by/to - Lookup Relationship to Contact or Text
- Best Contact Method - Dropdown with a list of contact methods
- Status - Dropdown for active, passive, etc
- Timing - Dropdown with timeframes
- Motivation - Dropdown with predefined options
Are there any fields that you want to map to Contacts when a Lead is converted? Instead of recreating those fields when the lead becomes a Contact, use Lead Conversion Mapping to automate the process.
Don't forget to utilize Page Layouts to remove any fields you don't need. The simpler the record, the better!
3. Configure Opportunities to manage admissions and enrollment
The Opportunity record should track the journey a new student takes after they have applied to your institution.
Below, we have configured our opportunity Page Layout to include fields relating to orientation, admissions and financial aid, placement, and counselor information.
Our pipeline makes it easy to see where in the enrollment process this student is. We'll mark our opportunity 'Won' once enrollment is complete.
4. Create a custom object to track your class roster
We created a custom object for the classes we offer where we can view scheduling details, class size, and teaching staff.
Here's an example of one of our Class records.
5. Create a custom object for class registration
To link multiple classes to a contact, you will need to create a connector object between the two records.
It's simple, and easy to use - differing only slightly from the other objects we previously discussed.
First, we created a custom object and labeled it Registration.
Then, we created a text custom field for the Semester so we could use it to record the semester this student is registered for.
The other custom fields for this object are simply capturing the classes this student is enrolled in.
Now from the student's contact record, you are now able to add their Registration details from the Related tab.
6. Using Events to schedule tours or appointments
By logging an event to your lead, contact, or opportunity, you can schedule a tour or appointment that will appear on the Insightly calendar for your whole team to view.
Scheduling a tour is simple from the Activity tab.
