When prospective students apply to colleges, they often have no visibility into their applications’ real-time status or access to admissions teams for questions. The experience can leave students feeling isolated and frustrated as they begin to choose their next steps in life.
While working at NYU’s engineering department, Ardis Kadiu and JC Bonilla saw first-hand how the lack of transparency in the application process hindered prospective students.
“They had to jump through hoops in order to get what they needed and there wasn’t much one-on-one engagement,” Kadiu tells Hypepotamus. “But students are applying to more and more schools and they need to reach the right type of student.”
A few years later, Kadiu and Bonilla reconnected and formed a communications agency to work with universities from the outside and help them with their recruiting. From email communications to landing pages and application management, the team already had the advantage of their extensive university staff experience.
‘That’s how Element451 started,” says Kadiu, now the company’s CEO. “We started started to serve an internal need for our marketing company to help schools, but then we slowly saw that as we were making more and more best practices into this product. That’s when we realized, ‘why can’t we let our schools have access to it so they can manage it on their own?'”
Higher education CRM solution Element451 helps university admissions teams successfully recruit and enroll incoming students by transitioning them into a marketing funnel to increase engagement and follow up on leads. As capturing prospective students becomes more competitive, universities can stand out by providing a better recruiting experience.
“The student was just acting as a data entry person. That was one of the problems that we wanted to solve,” says Kadiu. “How do we bring a more friendly marketing approach, a more student-centric approach, to the whole application process?”
