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All your information in one place

Leads from Unibuddy in your CRM saves you time, and gives your team a ‘unified view’ of who is enquiring.

Measuring ROI with lead attribution

Easily create a report in your CRM to see which leads sources deliver the most applicants.

Validate other sources and student infer engagement

A student may have told you their program of interest on Unibuddy and at an open day or open house event. Having this data in your CRM allows you to act on it. A student who chats on Unibuddy and attends an Open Day may be considered ‘high intent’, whereas a student who has done neither might be considered low intent. In this scenario you could choose to focus your efforts on engaging those high intent students who’re more likely to apply to your institution - reducing the overall cost of your recruitment activities.

Tailor communications

Knowing that a student is looking to study a particular subject or program for example Mechanical Engineering, from the data captured on Unibuddy, your recruitment and marketing teams acn automatically tag that student as ‘interested in Mechanical Engineering’ using the inbuilt CRM functionality. Those students can then be added to a drip feed marketing email campaigns where content relevant to that subject or program can be shared frequently.

Trigger workflow automations

When custom prospect sign up fields in Unibuddy can be pushed through to your CRM, advanced workflows can be set up.

For example, you can collect a phone number, and a postcode during the sign-up process on Unibuddy. You can set up workflows within your CRM that would decide if this student is located within a region that you’re targeting, if for example increasing diversity is a goal. You can then send that student information plus prompt a team member to engage with the student.

Know where a student is in their journey

Using the student funnel stages graph in Unibuddy along with if and when a student has attended an event or joined a Community, you’ll be able to know what questions they might have and what they need to help move them forward.

Improve student communications experience by tracking what they’ve already received

Knowing exactly touch points a student has interacted with, you can ensure not to spam or confuse a student who has, for example, ‘opened an email in the last 3 days’ or ‘attended a Unibuddy live session this week’. Improving the communications experience for students.

Understand engagement

CRM’s often include the functionality to create an abstracted ‘score’ based on lots of different interaction data. This helps recruitment teams act on their data. Some very sophisticated teams might decide that if a student attends a live event AND has a chat with an ambassador, they get a higher engagement score. That score can then be used to help focus your efforts as a team on those students who need the most help, improving the efficiency of your recruitment strategy, and hopefully saving some effort and cost in the process.

Personalize communications

Knowing who a student is helps tailor communications, but knowing what they’ve been doing allows your team to send timely follow up comms. For example, if a student attended a live session on Unibuddy, you could use the in-built functionality of your CRM to automate the sending of an email to ask them how the event was via a follow up survey, or to deliver follow up in the form of live session recordings and other campaign related communications.

Trigger more advanced reports and workflow automations

By knowing ‘when’ something happened, your team can create advanced reports for sharing internally or across your entire institution. For example, you can ask your CRM to fetch a list of ‘all of the students who want to study Biology, who are joining in 2025, and who’ve attended a live session on Unibuddy’. Some CRM’s will enable students who qualify for that rule to be automatically tagged as being ‘engaged’ and ‘interested in biology’. These tags will then enable you and other users of your CRM to report in real-time on these students, as well as that data being captured on individual student records so that other users can identify these students quickly and easily in the future.

Saving manual effort, and facilitating better 1-1 conversations

Having a summary of what students have been talking about on Unibuddy, allows recruitment teams to save time on manual data entry (we know some teams might typically be typing call notes up into their CRM after interactions). Having context like this inside the CRM enables your team to consult notes when calling a prospect - perhaps you or a fellow recruitment colleague see that a student was worried about finance when chatting on Unibuddy. In that call you might subtly offer the scholarship and bursary details to the student who may have been too embarrassed to ask these questions directly.

Don’t wait until the end of year survey to understand your incoming cohort

When you have conversation summaries for every student in your CRM, advanced CRM’s will be able to run analysis against these data points and help you look out for trends. For example, you could download all of the summaries from Indian students coming to study Mechanical Engineering. Rather than manually analyzing the raw data, ChatGPT or another Large Language models can help cut through the noise and identify the top concerns, issues or questions. This data is valuable, especially when it can be viewed and interpreted directly from your CRM.

We’re continuously looking for new ways to save you time and effort when it comes to analyzing your conversation data - we recommend checking out our roadmap of upcoming features in our Premium package, which will bring powerful chat insight and analysis tools directly into your Unibuddy dashboard.

Getting beyond ‘hygiene level data’ to truly know your students

The first two categories of data described in this document are fairly typical from third party data sources. However, getting beyond this surface level data like ‘nationality’ and ‘year of entry’, gives your team the potential to get to know your students in a much deeper way. Knowing what your students' key decision criteria are, and how they like to be communicated with, is what will make the difference between two similar universities. This level of data is what big brands use to personalise, and its this level of personalised experience that students have come to expect.

Making Unibuddy insight actionable with scoring

Lots of our partners set up their own scoring mechanisms inside their CRM’s. But it’s time consuming and takes expertise to set up. Unibuddy is looking to deliver our own scoring to the CRM to help universities save on this time, and not to worry too much about the details. E.g. A ‘confidence’ score, or ‘best-fit’ score, will enable universities to filter only those students with a low confidence score and focus their marketing and recruitment efforts on them instead.