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Case Study: TargetX and Concordia University Texas

Challenges: A small team didn’t have bandwidth to deliver the targeted data dashboards that campus constituents needed to be effective recruiters

At Concordia University Texas, a motto is that recruitment is everyone’s job. Unfortunately, not everyone on campus felt equipped to be fully involved in the process. 

Concordia’s Office of Admissions was doing its best to make sure its faculty, programs, and athletics had the data and information needed to engage with recruitment and enrollment. However, they were sending and posting weekly funnel reports that were 25 pages or longer. It was a lot of information delivered through unattractive spreadsheets to many, diverse constituencies. Some found the reports overwhelming. Others, confusing. Many didn’t read them at all. 

Brandy Fowler, Director of Enrollment Operations, has worked at Concordia for a decade and she ran reports on her own for much of that time. She knew the office needed to deliver simple, individualized reports, but that they didn’t have the bandwidth to do so with a small team. 

“We definitely have faculty or coaches that really want to be a part of the process, but because we didn’t have the resources to give them what they needed, that limited their engagement,” explained Fowler who understands that engagement from others on campus could mean the difference between a recruit becoming a student or not. “At a small school, every enrolled student matter. I knew we needed a solution to provide pinpointed reports in a fast and easy-to-understand way.”

Solutions: TargetX Insights provides data simplicity and accessibility for recruitment results

Fowler had already led Concordia’s transition from a previous CRM to the TargetX Recruitment Suite in 2016. She believed in TargetX—its products, customer service, and ongoing supports and tech updates. So, when she saw the release of TargetX Insights, a tool that allows institutions to easily see how recruitment activities are performing with real-time data dashboards, she was excited to try the demo. 

She said, “The minute that I saw TargetX Insights, I knew it would be a great solution to our problems and allow everyone to be involved in the enrollment and recruitment process in the ways that we had always hoped.”

With TargetX Insights, Concordia can get consistent, real-time data that is easily tailored to the specific enrollment metrics each campus constituency cares most about. Now, athletics, individual faculty members, graduate programs, and more, can see things like point-in-time funnel reports, event attendance to enrollment metrics, progress to application, enrollment target progress, and academic performance dashboards, quickly and with ease. Best of all, it’s simple to use and understand.

“We all know it’s not easy get people to ‘learn’ a new program, especially when they’re often working in multiple systems already,” says Fowler. “TargetX Insights is different. It’s not complicated or difficult to navigate. We can easily filter and tailor the data dashboards to deliver exactly what individual programs need without our faculty and staff having to learn a new technology. It’s accessible and simplifies everything for folks and best of all, it saves everyone time and energy while allowing them to be partners in the recruitment process.”

TargetX Insights also provides data consistency, and more importantly, consistent context, which are key to building a data-driven culture across campus. With TargetX Insights, everyone is working from a single source of truth, meaning that data-driven decisions are better informed, and leadership can trust the reports, every time. That’s the crux of a true data-driven enrollment strategy where everyone is a recruiter.

“Because we are a small university in a competitive market, we have to be super nimble. We have to really be able to strategize, change our strategy, be on top of the data, and really understand what’s going on because if we become complacent or our tools aren’t serving us, it could hinder us. For the last six years, TargetX has delivered for us,” said Fowler. 

Results: Everyone on campus is armed with the tools to be an effective recruiter

TargetX Insights saves the Office of Admissions considerable time and effort while delivering better, targeted reports on enrollment activities and targets to individual constituencies. 

“Having a tool that we can use across the university that delivers on all of our needs for attractive, easy-to-understand data dashboards and reports is going to relieve a lot of frustration, save time, and improve our enrollment outcomes,” said Fowler. For example, now, each individual sport within athletics can see exactly how they’re doing within their admissions funnels and on tracking to goals without having to reach out to the admissions office for assistance. 

Fowler concluded, “We’re a small liberal arts school but we’re progressive in terms of our tools. We want the tools that we’re using to keep up with us. TargetX has always done that.”

Concordia University Texas at a Glance

TargetX Solutions

Goals

Concordia University Texas needed a solution that:

  • Made it easy for diverse constituencies on campus to engage with recruitment data through real-time dashboards that are simple and attractive
  • Encouraged a data-driven recruitment culture across campus
  • Supported more strategic recruitment practices to increase enrollment.

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