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6 Ways Ravenna Enables Remote Admissions

June 1, 2021 | read
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What if you could easily manage your entire admissions process cozied up at home during a snowstorm, nursing your kid with a stomach bug, or sitting in the quad on a nice day? With Ravenna, you can!  

You deserve a paperless solution that allows you to compare notes, send targeted family communication, and gather insights with a click. Ravenna was built to enable admission management from anywhere long before it was needed.  Let’s take a look at the ways our platform enables this process to benefit your school and families. Listen to our webinar on demand for a deeper conversation on remote admissions and to learn more about Ravenna’s product features. And if you want to chat with someone one on one about your school’s needs, request a demo here. 

1. A truly paperless process

There is so much collaboration that needs to happen when it comes to school admissions. From getting transcripts from feeder schools to reviewing applications to reporting applicant status to stakeholders and families, so many individuals have a need-to-know relationship with your data and process. Paper files do not make any of that easier. And, they certainly do not make it more secure.  

Ravenna was created by former K-12 admissions staff with school stakeholders in mind. Applications can be completed, scored, reviewed, and decided on without any family member or school staff ever needing to touch a piece of paper.  

The average person spends 6 months of their life looking for lost things. Take back that time! 

2. Real-time family updates 

Ravenna makes it as easy as possible for families to apply and check their status in real-time.  No one wants to write the same information over and over. It’s frustrating. And when people are frustrated, they quit. With Ravenna, families can set up an application profile that is easily shared with any school of their choosing.   

Your families are then provided with an easy-to-read checklist, that you customize to your own process, so they can see what is completed or missing at a glance. Imagine if you could cut down on transactional phone calls and needless follow-up about missing questions and forms. Free up that time for more quality conversations with your prospective families.  

3. Events and communication 

With Ravenna, your admission event management and family communication is fully integrated into your process. You can completely customize your event catalog – with RSVP limits, sign-up deadlines, and more. Every interaction potential applicants have with events and emails is automatically tracked. You have the option to track your phone and in-person conversations, too.  

Why is this valuable? All of this tracking means you can personalize your future communication. Did you have lower than expected completed applications from open house attendees? Call the families who you are waiting on to connect. Are your emails about club offerings getting high read rates? Consider doing office hours with your Director of Student Life, and follow-up with an email invite to those families that calls out their interest.  Around 7 in 10 marketers say personalization has a high impact on returns and engagement. Use a tool that makes this process easy! 

4. File reading, review, and committees

You likely don’t find sharing hundreds of paper files or PDFs efficient, and it is a risk to have all of that data unsecured. With Ravenna, schools can give specific, secure ‘reader permission’ to an unlimited number of users. This allows these individuals to read, share and take notes on the applications that you assign to themand more than one reader can be in a single application at a time. Our school partners consistently share that ‘reader permission’ is the most valuable feature of Ravenna to them. And, you can have people sharing their opinions from anywhere, be it apart or together.    

When it comes to decision-makers, you can identify a smaller group to make final admission decisions. We know many schools have a threshold for decisions, such as a minimum test score or interview grade. You can make a bulk decision on those applicants, and then your decision-making committee can look more closely at the rest. A benefit of Ravenna is that you can segment the remainder to compare to historical data or current demographics. Do you typically have a higher percentage of applicants convert to enrolled students from a certain feeder school? You can, with a click of a button, see which of those feeder school applicants do not yet have a decision made. This sort of easy, hyper-segmentation allows you to qualify your admitted students in a careful, data-influenced way.  

5. Decision letters

After all of the event hosting, email sending, note-taking, and committee conversing it is time to notify families of your decisions! With Ravenna, you can set up as many acceptance letter templates as you need. Your accepted students can be segmented by whatever you decide, such as financial aid recipients, sibling of a current student, or anything else you can think of. And you can not only send decision notifications in bulk, making the whole process a lot easier for your team, but you can customize individual letters before you send them.  

And to protect your school’s integrity, we’ve created safeguards. For example, Ravenna’s software would never allow you to send a waitlist letter to someone you accepted. We know that the busy time in an admission office is BUSY. Mistakes can happen. We help stop them before they do.  

6. Data at your fingertips

Data is only as good as the insights you can gather. Of course, most admission systems have some reporting feature. But how easy are they to read and share? How detailed is the data you can report on? And how quickly can you pull complex information in a user-friendly way? Ravenna’s Data Explorer creates bar charts, pie graphs, and easy-to-read reports in an instant. This time-saving feature allows all stakeholders to understand the state of your admission funnel quickly, so you can strategize and adjust as needed.  

The more specific you can get with your reporting criteria, the more strategic and timely your admissions plans can be. To learn more on how Data Explorer works, give our webinar on-demand a listen 

BONUS: Electronic contracts and deposits 

Ravenna supports your school even after decision letters go out. With Ravenna ENROLL, you can send customized contracts at the push of a button to complete both your enrollment and re-enrollment. ENROLL also creates instant invoices and allows you to collect deposits electronically, getting your school those dollars fast and without manual processing.  

Interested in learning more about how Ravenna can support your admissions and enrollment management? Request a demo here 

Across the board, schools saw an increase in applicants for the 2021-2022 school year, but many also had a surprising dip in enrollment. This means you need to get even more applicants into your funnel to hit your enrollment goals. Schools see 10-25 increase in applications in their first year using Ravenna. Don’t wait to make the switch. 

Kathy Nothnagel

Kathy Nothnagel

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