Creating CRM Visibility to Boost Early Childhood Enrollment

You can’t fulfill your mission of educating and fostering skills in children to thrive in kindergarten and beyond if the children never make it through your doors. Early Learning Indiana (ELI) understood the importance of enrollment accuracy as it worked to provide equitable access to families across all economic statuses.

The Challenge

Early Learning Indiana continued to open its doors during the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the children of essential workers while navigating a period with small enrollment numbers. So when more people went back to work and transitioned into old routines, enrollment regrowth was critical.

ELI implemented Salesforce as its CRM during the pandemic, with the hope that it would provide better line of sight across its early childhood schools. The previous, basic system didn’t allow the leadership team overseeing enrollment at every location to accurately fill seats. 

The issue became that no technology can fix issues if not configured correctly. And ELI’s instance of Salesforce turned out to be more of a disservice than an asset. Because of this, team members were not consistently using the software and instead finding alternative methods for enrollment planning and decision-making. This practice resulted in lack of data validity when reviewing open seats across operations.

The Solution

What ELI quickly learned was that its Salesforce instance was not built for the users, and instead designed to be restrictive at the individual center level. And because those who worked at each center could not use the platform how they needed, those overseeing enrollment at a state-wide level couldn’t see how many seats were open in a given building to then find new students. 

This led ELI to bring in Studio Science to help fix the issues. Studio Science’s team dove into the tool, working to understand the biggest pain points and potential solutions. Along with coding issues that needed to be fixed, Studio Science and ELI determined ways to simplify and streamline the solution to be more user-friendly. Often, ELI staff must make business decisions that are not always black and white, and it needed a more flexible tool that was designed to accommodate those nuances. Along with greater simplicity, Studio Science focused on monitoring and visibility, giving the ELI leadership team insight and accurate data in order to make more proactive decisions. 

ELI and Studio Science also realized an opportunity for consolidation and efficiency. ELI uses a tool called ChildPlus to handle the very specific data requirements and reports needed for ELI’s EarlyHeadStart grants. But with the advancement of the Salesforce platform due to Studio Science’s fixes, ELI now had two platforms serving the same need and duplicating information. ELI can now plan to sunset ChildPlus and move everyone into Salesforce for a more cohesive experience.    

The Impact

With the previous iteration of Salesforce, ELI would receive handfuls of case tickets every day from staff members reporting issues with the platform. Now, ELI’s state-wide team may receive one or two per week as the buildings’ operations managers and staff report much higher satisfaction levels. 

“The real-time, accurate visibility to data across all of our locations has allowed us to change the way ELI thinks about our approach to offering seats to families and our comprehensive wrap-around support in our early head start childcare partnership program,” said Asheligh Hoekstra, Senior Director of Early Head Start And Operations at ELI. “Having more confidence in the data we review so frequently has allowed us to think differently about our business processes and update accordingly. ELI has an opportunity to be more proactive in its outreach to fill open seats as children move into kindergarten, to customize our family experience based on identified trends, and to continue to provide quality access to early care and education for children and families across the state.”