Increasing data visibility to enable  evolving team workflow and strategic decision-making

THE CHALLENGE

A reorganization of Prime Digital Academy’s staff resulted in creating a team focused on student recruitment, the earliest phase of our customer journey. This team was responsible for defining and implementing new approaches of connecting with potential students, identifying their goals, and providing them with guidance surrounding their next steps related to their career goals. 

The team was looking for a tool to help them document, track, and refine these tactics based on results. Hubspot collected basic contact information and tracked all communications, but was overly complex for piloting new approaches. Prime’s custom CMS (the “Student Portal”) was built for management of student data post-acceptance, and adding upstream functionality would be costly and time consuming. 

The team needed a flexible, adaptable tool that could insert itself between Hubspot and Portal, while ensuring that the data transferred between the two was maintained and only entered once. This would allow the team to iteratively pilot and evaluate new tactics that met their strategic goals.

THE PEOPLE

• Recruitment team members wanting track and iteratively modify their approaches for effective and meaningful student recruitment

• Potential students wanting to be understood and guided towards their career goals as quickly and efficiently as possible

• Leadership team members wanting to understand short-term and long-term trends in recruitment and admissions pipeline in order to make more informed programmatic decisions

OUR SOLUTION

I designed a low-code Airtable database that provided this new team with a flexible way to document and track their new tactics for connecting with potential students. I worked closely with technical team members to ensure that the database integrated seamlessly with our existing tech stack, including 2-way syncing and zero instances of duplicate entry. In collaboration with the recruitment team, we created customized table views to allow for easy data entry that matched their natural workflow while companion interface(s) were designed to provide a visual roll-up view to support team meetings and strategic discussions.

Key features include:

• Seamless integration with existing workflow and tools (Hubspot and custom CMS)

• Scalable, usable, and permissions-based editable by organization, team(s) and/or individual contributors

• Responsive and customizable according to planned and spontaneous needs for tracking and reporting

RESULTS & IMPACT

The resulting low-code solution was initially implemented in under two weeks and iteratively modified for nine months post-implementation. Through daily use of the dashboard and interface(s), the recruitment team:

• Established a data-informed outreach strategy

• The ability to create and modify tags on individual student records allowed the team to track and evaluate which outreach tactics were effective. This made it easier to see how specific actions influenced a student's journey from initial contact to application and acceptance. As a result, the team was able to eliminate underperforming tactics, focus on what worked, and reduce wasted effort—ultimately improving staff productivity and clarifying offerings to students.

• Improved forecasting of enrollment trends

  • Custom filters, tags, notes, and table views allowed the team to track both qualitative and quantitative indicators of a lead’s likely enrollment path. This information was easily surfaced to leadership, helping them identify emerging trends, forecast enrollment more accurately, and make informed decisions about product offerings, marketing strategies, and the student experience.

• Filtered and managed unqualified leads efficiently

  • The integration between HubSpot and Airtable allowed the recruitment team to quickly identify and filter out prospective students who were not a good fit or did not meet key qualifications. Automations supported timely, respectful communication with those individuals, allowing staff to focus their time and energy on more promising candidates.

With a tool built to support their workflow and inform their strategy, the recruitment team was able to focus their work on supporting qualified, good-fit leads through to successful conversion into program applicants. This resulted in meaningful business outcomes, including:

• A 20% increase in leads and applicants within the first 3 months of implementation

• Increased applicant conversion rate from 18% to 40% within the first 4 months, eventually reaching 60%

• An increase in cohort size from 10 to 23 candidates for three consecutive cohorts

• Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty scores in post-enrollment feedback