The Challenge

De Montfort University sought to enhance agility and gain deeper visibility into the Student Recruitment journey. The university recognised an opportunity to modernise its approach by unifying its systems and reducing reliance on external IT resources, particularly as its existing marketing automation platform approached the end of its lifecycle. The existing setup required substantial, ongoing development support from the IT department for marketing activities. This created opportunities for improvement in several areas:

• Resource Allocation: Marketing requests for activities like creating web forms competed with other IT priorities, resulting in extended timelines.
• Data Integration: Key elements of the prospective student journey - including web traffic, email engagement, and application data - existed in separate systems, limiting opportunities for attribution and personalised engagement.
• Process Efficiency: Many tasks required considerable manual effort and time investment, presenting opportunities for streamlining.

"Our former setup  required a lot of development work from our IT department and that was a lot of ongoing development work, our requests would often just go to the back of a backlog and it would take a long long time to be able to do what we wanted to do from a marketing point of view." Andrew Durnin, Associate Director of Web & Digital Experience, De Montfort University (DMU)

The Implementation

BabelQuest addressed this expansive challenge by implementing a highly custom solution centred around HubSpot, positioning it as the central hub for all marketing and recruitment efforts. 

Strategic Customisation and Integration: The primary technical requirement was achieving seamless, resilient integration with DMU's foundational systems. BabelQuest utilised the HubSpot API to bridge these multiple, complex systems, ensuring one 'Source of Truth' for core student data, which flowed into HubSpot.

The CRM data model was tailored specifically to the institution's recruitment life cycle:

• Admissions Pipeline: The HubSpot Deal object was adopted and custom-configured as an "Admissions Pipeline," condensing existing application categories into fewer stages for cleaner conversion reporting. These deal stages were set up to mirror DMU's specific recruitment stages.
• Custom Objects: Industry-specific objects, such as the HubSpot Course object, were loaded into the CRM to manage and organise detailed course and academic structure data.

Andrew noted that this sector-specific tailoring was essential: "The deal stages in the platform mirror our recruitment stages, which translates to the way our teams are going to be using the platform".

BabelQuest Lead Higher Education HubSpot Consultant Hannah Fisher affirmed this strategy, emphasising data integrity: "We mapped out the current processes that were being followed across each of the systems and discussed and designed how that could be plugged into HubSpot to enable HubSpot to access all of the information it needed to whilst it's retaining data integrity”.

The Innovation

BabelQuest integrated AI functionality into the solution to not only solve immediate issues but also to future-proof the platform and drive continuous adoption.

AI for Continuous Improvement: To ensure BabelQuest's deep technical implementation documentation (the 'what' and 'why' of the custom API setup) remained accessible to DMU’s internal team, BabelQuest is leveraging the internal FAQ agent (powered by AI), allowing end-users to query the custom setup documentation directly.

Hannah explained the strategic value: "We're excited to lean on the internal FAQ agent to plug our documentation - the ‘what we've done’ and ‘why’ into the agent so it's easy for the client team to query. So if they need anything in the future - they can ask the agent". This implementation ensures sustained adoption by mitigating the friction points typically associated with highly tailored systems.

Andrew highlighted the profound time savings: "Recently, our team used the Breeze AI assistant to get clear answers, following the clear steps. And again, I think that's something that historically probably would have been a ticket to the service desk, but we got the answer really quickly and it was resolved really quickly".

The Results

Even prior to the official launch, the implementation yielded immediate, quantifiable results related to efficiency, speed, and governance compared to DMU’s historical processes:

Andrew captured the immediate benefit of migration efficiency: "We earmarked days and hours to move the data across, instead it took minutes... these data migrations that previously with our old systems were taking a long time are so much faster now - this is just the dream".

The usability improvements enabled continuous learning for the first time. Andrew noted: "The marketing users have much more control over the tool, whereas before, the platform was a limiting factor. I feel that now we can use it to get real value - testing what's working, including the whole continuous learning piece that we couldn't do as well before".

The Impact

The implementation of HubSpot transforms DMU's marketing team from a department burdened by administrative tasks and technical constraints to a strategically agile, data-driven engine.

Transforming the Marketing Team: The most significant impact is the drastic reduction in administrative hours. By empowering the marketing team with control over forms, automations, and data, they are released from the IT bottleneck.

Hannah summarised the shift: "The impact on the marketing team will be a drastic reduction in admin hours, the time spent having to find data, to build reports, to collect lists and segments for sending out emails - that is now time that can be used to focus on using new 360-view and insights for data-driven strategy, allowing the team to create more  innovative and exciting marketing campaigns underpinned by real insights".

Driving Core Business KPIs: The single platform view allows DMU to connect previously disparate user journey data, enabling much better targeting, which is the key driver for conversion. The ultimate impact is improving the core KPI of converting prospective students into enrolled students.

Andrew emphasised the strategic value: "A big part is joining up the different parts of our user journeys, if we're able to get all of our data into a single platform, it enables us to target people much better in terms of spotting trends in what they might be interested in and reacting during the critical high-intent phase".

Organisational Scalability: The successful integration has established a foundation for wider institutional adoption. DMU is already planning Phase 2, which includes migrating other functions, bringing international campuses, and communication channels into the same single platform, creating channel-agnostic automations. 

“I think with HubSpot we're really looking forward to being able to connect up those different touch points. Our road map for HubSpot - we're hoping we can continue bringing more and more teams and functionality into it to have it as a central hub for all of our marketing efforts and bringing everything together”. Andrew Durnin, Associate Director of Web & Digital Experience, De Montfort University (DMU)

Why BabelQuest?