UCI seeks to enroll the best students, while simultaneously maintaining our commitment to a diverse student body. Enrollment Services invests considerable effort and expense every year in identifying and encouraging high school students to consider us for their college career.  UCI doesn’t lack for applicants; the approximately 4,500 new freshmen who enrolled for the Fall 2012 term were selected from a pool of 65,000+ applicants. Appealing to the best students, as well as those whose goals align well with UCI’s strengths, and those who represent a variety of backgrounds and interests requires a lot of data collection, analysis, and management. Combine this with the fact that colleges and universities across the country are all aggressively recruiting the same caliber of students from the same pools, and the task of identifying, recruiting, and enrolling the best of the best becomes extraordinarily complex and competitive.

Early in 2011, the Office of Admissions & Relations with Schools realized that maintaining UCI’s high entrance standards while going up against some of the best recruiters in the business would require something more than business as usual. As a result, Admissions launched a project in collaboration with OIT to implement a state-of-the-art constituent relationship management (CRM) system to help stay competitive. Admissions eventually selected Intelliworks CRM as the system of choice for this essential mission.

Intelliworks not only allows for the collection and reporting of key information, but it also allows Admissions to automate much of the routine work (e.g., responding to interest inquiries, prompting for follow up activities, managing bulk email campaigns, etc.). This, in turn, frees up valuable resources within Admissions to provide key face-to-face contact and other personal touches with prospective students and their parents.

The transition from a manual system based on emails, spreadsheets, sticky notes, and hallway conversations to an automated state-of-the-art CRM has not been without its challenges, but the payoff of being able to more accurately target UCI’s message, more carefully manage the recruiting cycle, and capitalize on opportunities to recruit the type of student UCI wants at any particular time, is already paying big dividends.