The University of South Florida, a preeminent higher education institution with multiple campuses across the Tampa Bay region, leveraged Dynamics 365 as they sought to modernize the student recruitment experience.

Challenge

With disparate systems utilized across campuses, USF’s desire to better personalize and automate communication was a top priority. To do so, USF needed a way to visualize a single view of students’ attributes and engagement throughout the student recruitment process. It also sought to better capture the student experience beyond the initial stage of the learner’s lifecycle with the institution, student registration and attendance tracking for on-campus events.

Solution

USF partnered with Coffee + Dunn to bring their vision to life, leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing (Events) to develop a custom, branded, university-wide portal, with calendar solution that allows departments to create, review, approve, and publish events to engage with students, employees, parents, and the community at large. The calendar displayed events by type, campus, visitor type, stage and location which featured USF branding. In addition, a process was designed to support group tour requests.

In tandem with the calendar solution, branded, fully optimized marketing assets were developed, with customer journeys architected to support event-related communication, including registration confirmations, cancellations, and post-event engagement.

To better understand the organizational impact of these events, Coffee + Dunn developed customer Power BI dashboards to visualize registration, attendance and yield rate for event, with filtering options that enabled users to gather learnings + opportunities in the way that best suited them.

Finally, the team aimed to accelerate adoption with custom training and post go-live support for USF users on feature functionality and best practices, increasing tool confidence in the platform.

Results

Centralizing event management with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys reduced production time for USF communication specialists, decreasing marketing costs and enabling the team to focus more on strategic events that continue to both streamline processes and increase recruitment.