Chapman University utilizes best practices to nurture more leads

The challenge

Chapman University in Orange, California wanted to scale their ability to nurture prospective undergraduate students. The process to connect students in their funnel with current student ambassadors was onerous – forms, emails and lots of manual work.

Chapman University was given a free trial, which began right at the start of the pandemic in March of 2020.

It was great timing, as it became imperative that they provide some virtual offerings very quickly.

The solution

Chapman University decided to adopt Unibuddy to eliminate this tedious process and scale their approach to nurturing students who land on their website. Serendipitously, the team at Chapman got started with Unibuddy Chat in March 2020, just as the pandemic made it impossible for students to visit campus.

The Unibuddy Customer Success team was able to get them set up in no time and onboarded their entire undergraduate recruitment team.

The Chapman team also had the opportunity to meet up with other Unibuddy university partners to discuss how best to utilize the platform—in true peer-to-peer style. As a result, they implemented pop cards, carousels, and traffic drivers across multiple pages on their website to drive students to the Unibuddy Chat landing page.

Chapman also added traffic drivers to various program and organization pages to directly connect prospects to the specific students who could answer questions about those areas of study and activities.

As both Unibuddy and Slate partners, Chapman was able to leverage the two integrated platforms to upload new leads from Unibuddy directly to Slate, in order to get a full view of the prospective student profile.

The results

“Before Unibuddy, we had talked about ways to connect our tour guides explicitly with people visiting campus, and there was a fairly complex system to do so involving forms and assigning tasks to others. Unibuddy is helpful because it’s software that cuts out that process. It doesn’t require any kind of manual work,” said Brendan Babish, Associate Director of Admission Communication.

Placing Unibuddy in so many spaces across their site has been instrumental in facilitating more personal connections with the right ambassadors that generate a sense of belonging for prospective students.

It’s worked so well, in fact, that these ambassadors have answered 22,000 questions since Chapman launched the platform.

“We do see that it’s used by a lot of people who are already inquirers, applicants, or incoming students,” Babish said. “It’s useful as a nurturing tool to give people who are already interested in chatting more than just an introduction. And that helps tremendously with conversion.”