Wingate University

With approximately 3,600 students spread across three campuses, Wingate University is the fastest growing independent university in the state of North Carolina. Having grown 37% over the span of five years, the university needed to implement a strategy that would allow them to sustain their constant growth in an efficient manner. The steady increase in enrollment also meant that they needed a platform that would allow them to seamlessly communicate with their students. Employing a CRM system that supported their Admissions office in an efficient manner was crucial to properly interact with students and sustaining their growth.

Using several computers to send mass emails to students via Outlook was not unusual for Wingate University. “We didn’t have a community platform or marketing platform, which made it challenging to work with students in the space they communicated,” said Sam Petoskey, VP for Enrollment Management and Business Intelligence at Wingate. Leveraging Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, and Enrollment Rx, the school now offers self-service communication tools to their prospects and current student body rather than outsourcing their marketing and communication needs. “The savings from this allows us to redirect resources into expansion markets and other recruiting efforts,” said Petoskey.

Implementing these new strategies and technologies in February 2017, Wingate’s project was live and fully operational by June 2017. “We felt like we had a great support team that did an excellent job of moving us from vision to go-live in 4 months,” said Emily Poplin, Salesforce Administrator at Wingate. Poplin stated the most valuable part of the onboarding process was learning how to “utilize the resources available to you, whether that be user guides, watching [tutorials], or training support.” Because the administrators at Wingate University took time to learn the Salesforce platform fundamentals, they have been utilizing Enrollment Rx products, all built natively on Salesforce, to their fullest potential.

Since 2017, Wingate University has grown their admitted application pool from 5,000 to 15,000, and their matriculation from 685 to 1,157, according to Petoskey and Poplin. Salesforce and Enrollment Rx have allowed the university to generate consistent growth in student numbers while creating an easy way for student communications. Their goal of having a centralized space for admission needs has been easier to achieve than ever because of this. “There is no way we could have sustained that growth with the way were operating before,” said Petoskey.