Australian Film Television and Radio School
Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) is Australia’s premier national screen arts and broadcast school. AFTRS focus is to advance the success of Australia’s screen arts and broadcast industries by developing the skills and knowledge of talented individuals and undertaking research.
The Challenge
AFTRS application to enrolment process was decentralised and outdated self-service experience. It was to the point that they couldn’t manage or measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. They couldn’t send personalised messages to prospective students because they weren’t capturing the students’ interests. To top it all off, they had a complete rebranding and new website coming out in a few months and absolutely needed top notch marketing capabilities onboard in time for the new branding launch.
The Solution
Datacolada took a three staged approach to the project to align with their most pressing needs first and to make the tight timelines. First, the Salesforce EDA model was put into place and Salesforce Marketing Cloud was implemented to enable AFTRS to capture student interests with a custom built preferences portal. Next, a Salesforce Community Cloud based portal was created to allow degree level applications and assessments to be managed and evaluated digitally. Finally, a short course enrolment and payment system was added to the Community Cloud and seamlessly integrated to their new website.
The Benefits
The project was a huge success with nearly all the AFTRS database of prospective students responding with their preferences. New email campaigns dynamically adjust their content to meet the personal interests of prospective students and course registrations are higher as a result. Digitising the application process for award courses has ended the old requirement for having all evaluators spend time closed off in a room to go through applications, they can now do it from wherever they access the internet.
Now AFTRS has complete visibility into the applicants’ activities and can intervene when it looks like and applicant needs a nudge to get them to complete their application. Similarly, real time visibility into short course registrations allows AFTRS to create targeted marketing campaigns to fill seats for courses that are near their break-even enrolment levels saving them from running classes at a loss.
