Education Partnership North East, or EPNE as it’s known, is one of the UK’s largest further education college groups. It has a student community of over 21,000 people, spread over three campuses: Sunderland College, Hartlepool Sixth Form and Northumberland College. EPNE had largely relied on prospective students seeking it out through recommendations from their secondary schools and word of mouth. But to get the most engaged students, EPNE wanted to move its student recruitment from reactive to proactive.
We sat down with Stephen Welsh, Head of CRM insight & reporting, and Rachel Cook, CRM & systems co-ordinator, at EPNE, to see how Gecko helped them achieve that and so much more.
“When I joined EPNE in February 2022, everything was working off spreadsheets. There were a lot of manual interventions, the data that was being captured was poor and nothing was tagged to a CRM. When it came to events, data had to …