Organizational Leadership Portfolio
Implementing a CRM for Law School Admissions
Introduction and Description
A surprising opportunity came to me last February to be a part of the implementation of a new Customer Relations Management (CRM) system on campus at the Law School. In conjunction with the Undergraduate Admissions Office on campus, the Law School Admissions Office decided to move to Slate – a system that would allow us to do drip marketing, personalized messaging, texting, and automated communications to prospective students and applicants as well as allow us to read and review applications, collect tuition deposits, and collect student information all in one place. In short, it would completely revamp our jobs and make our communication efforts more efficient and streamlined. I elected to be in charge of the integration for the Law School. Three captains were chosen, two from undergrad and one from law. Together we began the process of building out this new technology for our offices to use. We began in February and are still working on the build out and implementation; however, many aspects of the system are online and active. We are currently finalizing different aspects of the implementation and continuing to build out reports and queries within the CRM. The overall goal of the CRM is to increase our outreach and communications with students while streamlining our internal processes and minimizing the manual labor that has been a part of our system for so long. Many parts of the old system were clunky and done by hand when they could have been automated. Streamlining this will free up time for those employees doing the manual input to focus on other aspects of their jobs and also allow for more personalized communications with each student interested in the school. Before taking this on, my job was to clean up application data, handle most of the data entry, and be the first point of contact for most students in our office. Taking over as Slate Captain for my office has increased my responsibilities and brought out new leadership qualities in me. Through the CRM implementation I was challenged on many levels and was asked multiple times to step into more responsibility and higher-level leadership roles. Despite being the program assistant in the office, I was granted decision-making power during this process because I had the knowledge of the system and our processes as well as the ability to understand and quickly learn new technology. Because of this, I have had to step up and apply many different leadership skills that I have learned in these classes. Every class I have taken at Gonzaga has impacted how I have handled some part of the CRM project and made the implementation for this new change much easier to manage.
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The ways that I am measuring and evaluating the changes that I am putting into place are layered. The first and easiest measure is simply ROIs, particularly time saved. As our new communication plan goes into place, I will be able to measure the amount of time it would normally take to build out and maintain our applicant and prospect communication plans versus the new time it takes to build out and maintain the communication plans. The biggest time-saving measures I expect to see are on the maintenance side. It may take the same amount of time to build out our application cycle during the beginning stages of the implementation but maintaining it going forward will be much less time-intensive. The second measure is via interviews with the staff in my office. These interviews have allowed for a feedback loop to improve flaws in the buildout and to make sure that the system does what the staff expect it to in an improved or more efficient way. Lastly, another measure will be reports. To know that the system is working, we expect to see an increase in applications within the next three years. I will be able to build reports within the current system that will collect comparative data as applications come in so that we will be able to accurately measure how impactful these changes are on the recruitment side in years to come.
Implementation in Motion
February - May 2019
Phase 1
This phase was filled with training. Here is where we learned what a CRM was and how it could benefit our respective offices. We were then sent to a training in Portland, OR to learned the basic ins-and-outs of this new system. When we returned home, we set to work with a group of outside consultants to begin to build were our student information would live and the different forms that we would use to collect this information from prospective students. During this time, we realized how much work this new system would be. I saw an increase in my responsibilities by about 50%. Thus I learned to balance both my previous workload as well as my new responsibilities.
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Measurables from Phase 1
During this phase, measures were almost non-existent. We marked our successes by learning new things within the system, for example: creating a form or building out new fields. This was mostly a training, learning, and preparing phase.
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Classes during Phase 1
Leadership and Human Potential
taught me that action research can create a cyclical way to tie in processes like Dialogic Organizational Development and Appreciative Inquiry while also stepping back to allow us to reflect, evaluate, analyze, and adjust our actions in light of how the organization reacts to these changes as they occur. In this class, I created a video presentation about action research and my plans for implementing the CRM (see script at bottom of webpage).
Listen, Discern, Decide
taught me to remain open and accepting of Fortuitous Encounters - things are interconnected and remaining open to these connections will only make them stronger. Additionally, it taught me to listen-first, seeking clarity and knowledge not just a desired outcome and to use discernment to make decisions that are helpful long-term, keeping the future always in mind.
June - August 2019
Phase 2
As soon as the students left for the summer, our offices hit the ground running with building out this implementation. We continued to build out forms and fields, but we also began to create emails and establish an entirely new process around our student visits to campus. These sorts of changes (though not yet live) had the potential to completely revamp the way the office handled different operations, from our student visits to our communication plans. Thus, we were introduced to the concept of Change Management for the CRM system. What started as a monthly meeting regarding change management best practices to communicate to the University at large, quickly petered off into nonexistence. However, I took the concepts I learned in those few meetings and paired them with the concepts I had learned in different classes throughout my Master's program and began to use them around my own office. I spoke positively of the changes to come and asked for feedback as I built out our new processes. This way when the changes did occur,the office would not be taken completely off-guard and would understand why the process was built the way it was. At the end of this phase, our prospective student inquiry form to request information about our program was live as well as our new visit process. Our new visit process turned an incredibly manual visit structure into an automated online format that was easy for students and staff to use.
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Measurables from Phase 2
During this phase, some parts of the CRM went live. Before hitting "go", I sat down with the members in my office and walked them through the process I had built. I then listened to their feedback, implemented some changes, and repeated the process until the system worked in an intuitive way and produced the results that we expected. Additionally, as these pieces went live, we were able to compare the time savings from the old way of doing things to the new CRM process. The request for information form saves roughly four hours a month as I am able to train the student workers on pulling a report from the CRM with student's addresses and printing labels for the informational mailing. In the old system, pulling the report and printing the mailings was not intuitive at all. The new visit process has the greatest ROI, in that it saves our Visit Officer hours every week (depending on the demand for tours and meetings with counselors every week). In the old system, she would have easily spent two to four hours on a single student in emails back and forth to set up one tour and one counselor meeting. With the new system, she can be done in as quickly as fifteen minutes.
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Class during Phase 2
Organization Theory and Behavior
taught me Systems Thinking - how to see cause and effect of different variables on the overall system of an organization. It taught me to look beyond the "symptoms" that I see immediately in front of me, but to look for the deeper problem. Additionally, it taught me to problem solve with the future in mind and build long-term solutions.
September - December 2019
Phase 3
This phase began as the students came back to school and the office became busy with recruitment season. Due to my increased responsibilities, we hired a temp to cover the duties I could no longer keep on top of - the CRM implementation was taking 100% of my focus. This phase focuses on our application cycle:Â building out the application review process, setting up our decision release process, creating our applicant communication plan, and moving applicant data between university systems. The movement of data requires an integration between different systems and the mapping and formation of this integration requires heavy IT involvement. Every step of this phase went relatively smoothly until we got to the IT heavy side of the implementation. This is where we ran into the most difficulties as the different systems the data needs to flow through do not want to communicate well with each other. Due to our timeline, workarounds were made to allow data flow between certain systems so that students who applied could be admitted. We are currently using these workarounds and working with IT to create an automated, seamless integration in the future. However, currently we are using the CRM to read and review applications, release decisions, and communicate with our applicants. With this done and IT working on the integrations between systems, I can now focus my energy on creating reports to track our applications over the next few years to be able to see the overall benefits of using this new CRM.
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Measurables from Phase 3
One of the biggest measurable items from this phase is the ease and time saved for reading and reviewing applications. In the past, our old system allowed for items to be read one by one and the reviewer had to click back to different screens to catalog their notes on the applicant. The CRM allows for reviewers to see a synopsis of the applicant and easily scroll through all their documents while keeping the review form on the same screen, so that they may read and take notes simultaneously. Reviewing an easy file in the past could take fifteen minutes; it will now take closer to five or ten (depending on your reading speed). Additionally, the ease of creating queries and reports in the CRM is astounding. I am currently building reports within the CRM to track applications in realtime as well as over the course of the next few years - so that we can have comparative data and see the affects of the CRM on our recruitment process. Lastly, with the CRM I do not need to monitor the emails that I frequently send out to students. Instead, I create the email, set the parameters, and hit send. It will continually send to applicants as I need it to until I tell it to stop. Thus, I can create one mailing and let it run for a full application cycle without needing to babysit it, which saves me time to continue to build out more mailings or reports or whatever else the office realizes that it would like to see implemented on the CRM.
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Classes during Phase 3
Organization Change and Transformation
taught me about change management models and gave me better tools to facilitate change. Through this class I was able to map out an Action Plan for implementing the CRM across the University (see action plan at bottom of webpage).
Leadership Seminar (Capstone)
gave me the resources to pull together all I have learned from past classes and apply them to the implementation. It had a space to create this portfolio to track the timeline and the changes that the CRM has brought to my organization.