Improving student recruitment with better data in Salesforce

Why Royal Agricultural University needed better recruitment data

Royal Agricultural University has trained students in agriculture and rural enterprise since 1845, and one of its ongoing strategic goals is growing the overall number of students it enrolls. That goal depends on a recruitment process that reaches every prospective student cleanly, without duplicate outreach or gaps caused by messy CRM records.

"That is why we invested in a recruitment CRM some three years ago," says Alun Dawes, Head of ITS at Royal Agricultural University. "Effective management of the communications with our potential students is essential."

How duplicate records were slowing down recruitment

The university's recruitment CRM is TargetX, built on Salesforce. Salesforce holds 225,000 records in total, and the team checks two objects for duplicates: 56,000 Accounts and 27,000 Contacts.

Duplicate records meant applicants sometimes received the same message twice. "It would result in the same applicant receiving the same communication more than once. That is not a good thing to happen, of course," Dawes says.

Records reach Salesforce from recruitment events, student record systems, and other recruitment-related databases. "Records come in from various sources, including manual inputs and API imports. Data related to one single person may be present in more than one of these sources and needs consolidation," Dawes says.

The university's previous duplicate-checking tool shipped bundled with its recruitment CRM. "The product's supplier recently changed the licensing terms, which would have resulted in a significant increase in our costs," Dawes explains. "We searched for an alternative and found Plauti. It is integrated into our student recruitment CRM, and we use it to eliminate duplicate student, family, and teacher contact records."

How Plauti fit into the Salesforce-based CRM

Switching duplicate-checking tools works best when setup doesn't stall the recruitment team, and the university found the change straightforward. "We found the setup very easy to execute, and overall it integrates much better into our CRM software than its predecessor," Dawes explains. Because Plauti is a 100% native Salesforce app, the experience is cleaner than the tool it replaced. "The export and import functionality in the configuration provides for a very straightforward way to replicate all our initial settings straight into the live environment. Within seconds, our users can easily run manual duplicate checks with various rules applied to them."

Plauti is now built into the university's data upload processes, and staff also run periodic manual scans to catch duplicate contacts. "We are also able to use Plauti to identify duplicate records from the other systems, to help us better maintain those data sources," Dawes says. "In the future, we want to enable automatic merges for duplicate records. This will further reduce our workload on duplicate checking."

How the university kept sensitive student data secure

Keeping data inside Salesforce mattered as much as the added functionality. "Once it was installed, we didn't need data transfer to start finding duplicate records in our CRM. Alongside that, the added benefit that our data didn't need to be moved between databases was a key security benefit for us. It helps us ensure our data is secure, and the privacy of our records is guaranteed," Dawes says.

The switch also brought a better day-to-day experience. "It has significantly greater functionality and a much better end-to-end interface," Dawes says, comparing Plauti with the university's previous tool. Checking for duplicates the moment a record is created in Salesforce lets the team review records daily and resolve them much faster than before.

Asked what he'd tell other universities considering Plauti, Dawes keeps it short: "Don't hang around – just buy it."