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The Best CRM for Schools and Higher Education

Managing student enrollment and onboarding takes a great deal of time and effort, particularly if your school, college, or university provides educational services for thousands of new students each year. And let’s not forget the need to build and maintain relationships with alumni and key stakeholders.

With the right CRM and supporting tools in place, you and your team can enhance stakeholder engagement, elevate student management, increase admission rates, and meet your students where they need you throughout their student lifecycle.

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Why you should opt for an Education CRM

As communication technology advances, educational institutions must adapt to stay in touch with students and stakeholders. Today, educational establishments need to engage with role players across several digital platforms, making effective contact data and interaction management vital.

A modern CRM system can help your educational facility improve data and engagement organization and management. With it, you can stay on top of all communications and relationships with prospective and current students, alumni, employees, donors, and other stakeholders.

With a great school CRM solution, you can collect student and stakeholder data from various channels and employ a centralized hub for storing and accessing that information. In fact, your institution will enjoy several worthwhile benefits when implementing a reliable CRM system, including the following:

Essential CRM features for educational institutions

Finding the right CRM for your university or educational facility begins with determining which features you’ll need to support your operational needs. Think about the different tasks related to prospective student engagement and student data capturing, admissions, onboarding, progression monitoring, and communication.

You’ll need a CRM with several crucial features to balance and execute these activities in a productive and efficient way. Apart from the CRM basics regarding contact management, you’ll want the tools to automate processes, evaluate your wins and losses, and interact with students, alumni, donors, and faculty.

Nutshell offers schools and higher education institutions an all-in-one CRM solution ideal for their needs. It combines essential contact management features with best-in-class lead generation, sales pipeline, and performance-tracking tools to help institutions conduct these core activities and more.

In fact, your educational institution will benefit from a host of cutting-edge features when you choose Nutshell as your higher education CRM, including:

Seamless contact management for effective data storage and organization

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There are several benefits to managing and storing your student and stakeholder data in a centralized CRM hub. Most importantly, it’s a great way to oversee data and ensure accuracy. It also allows everyone on your team to access the same correct data, providing consistent services and messaging at all touchpoints.

Access to error-free information also prevents your team from having to look for contact data and documentation when they need it, helping them do their jobs faster. Nutshell’s user-friendly interface and powerful contact management tools ensure your team is as productive as possible while delivering excellent service and support.

With Nutshell, you get the following contact management features:

  • Save time by syncing email contact information and scanning business cards, eliminating the need to enter every detail manually.
  • Source and organize contact data quickly and easily via many different channels.
  • Use business intelligence tools to upload visitor contact data to your website and other individuals that fit your target audience profile.
  • View a detailed timeline of interactions with each contact and monitor communication from the Nutshell desktop or mobile app.
  • Highlight vital information by adding notes within contact records to ensure all team members have the information they need to ensure student and stakeholder satisfaction.

Automated workflows for streamlined student journey management

Sales Email Drip

One of the key features you should look for in a modern CRM system is its workflow automation capabilities. If you can automate certain tasks and activities, you and your team will have more time to devote to student relationship-building and communication.

Nutshell’s CRM provides schools and higher education facilities with industry-leading automation tools, increasing the efficiency and impact of admissions, enrollment, and student management teams. With Nutshell’s automation features, your team has the ability to:

  • Customize your workflow to best serve your students, faculty, staff, and other stakeholders.
  • Automatically initiate the next best action within your prospective student outreach pipeline or existing student progress tracking pipeline once a task or activity is complete.
  • Set up automated reminders and alerts so you and your team remain on top of student and stakeholder engagement and needs.
  • Make staff onboarding easy with structured, automated workflow sequences, ensuring new team members know exactly what to do next.
  • Get a bird’s eye view of your processes with automated pipeline reports, letting you easily identify roadblocks and opportunities.

Personalized email sequences for tailored communication

automated emails example from Nutshell

With the need to track thousands of students, staff, and others related to your institution, crafting timely messages and staying in touch can become an elaborate juggling act. A reliable CRM system can help you keep those juggling balls in the air through automated emails and sequences.

Nutshell provides users with powerful tools to create world-class email sequences triggered by specific actions within their pipeline and workflow. This lets you stay in touch with stakeholders when it matters most without lifting a finger.

Opting for Nutshell as your chosen higher education CRM system gives you access to the following email sequence features:

  • Craft personalized one-on-one email sequences and messages to send automatically when triggered by the actions you specify.
  • Send follow-up messages to prospects, students, and donors at crucial points to prevent them from falling through the cracks.
  • Access professional email templates to get you started or design your email messages precisely the way you prefer.
  • Identify the most effective messaging through email reports showing key metrics like reply rates, opens, and overall email health.
  • Create highly targeted email audiences by segmenting your contacts and setting up and saving mailing lists in Nutshell.

Advanced reporting and analytics for process improvement

a screenshot of a Nutshell contact record showing automatic data enrichment

Evaluating and monitoring your pipeline and workflow performance and results is essential to ensure they remain effective. And the best way to do this is through advanced reporting and analytics features integrated with your education establishment processes.

Running your funding, prospecting, course sales, enrollment, onboarding, and student monitoring processes through a CRM solution like Nutshell makes this easy. With Nutshell, you can access powerful native reporting tools, letting you leverage standard and custom reports and analytics according to your institution’s needs.

Here are some of the advantages you can look forward to with Nutshell’s next-level reporting and analytics features:

  • Generate accurate forecasts of future admissions and enrollment figures, giving you insight into your school, college, or university’s potential revenue.
  • Determine how successful your efforts have been in moving prospective students through your sales funnel to become active students and where you may need to make changes.
  • Discover which channels bring you the most promising prospects or donors and where you can double your efforts to increase your numbers.
  • Know exactly how many prospective students or donors are in your pipeline at any time, including which are more promising and more likely to enroll or donate.
  • Measure the success of each stage in your pipeline to identify where most prospects move through to the next stage, hesitate to move forward, or drop out of the pipeline altogether.

Nutshell is the best value for the money. The versatility and functionality make it a very easy and powerful product to use.

Mark M. Southwestern Scale Co.

I have used Act, Goldmine and Salesforce in the past, and I have found that Nutshell was the easiest to get started with and to set up custom fields. I would recommend Nutshell to others that are interested in an easy to learn and navigate CRM.

Craig C. Thermal-Tec

We left Hubspot for Nutshell because Hubspot was too complex. Nutshell makes software for humans.

Daniel H. EOS

When we were evaluating CRMs, the one deciding factor between Nutshell and Salesforce came down to spin up time and price. Nutshell wins on both counts (by a huge margin). Salesforce was 10 times as much per month for what we wanted.

Jason C. Arrow Container Corp

Enhance your education tech stack with CRM integrations

As a school or higher education facility, chances are that you already have software and apps in place that help you with some of the crucial elements of running the institution. An education CRM acts as a foundation to support your current systems and improve your data management and stakeholder engagement abilities.

With thousands of integration options available, Nutshell lets you connect your favorite tools with your CRM, giving you a potent tech setup operated through a central hub. For educational institutions with more specific software needs, Nutshell’s engineering support team is ready to help you make the app connections you need where possible.

Nutshell’s long list of integrations includes native, one-click, and Zapier-enabled integrations, including:

  • Accounting integrations: Bring pertinent data regarding your student and donor accounts into your CRM with accounting app integrations, making it a one-stop source of information across departments.
  • Communication integrations: Nutshell’s communication app integrations let you initiate phone calls, virtual meeting calls, webchats, and more directly from your CRM contact record.
  • Lead generation integrations: Leverage the power of lead generation app integrations for online ads, landing pages, and web forms that let you capture lead information and automatically populate Company, People, and Lead records in Nutshell.
  • Social media integrations: Engage with students and stakeholders where they are straight from your CRM using Nutshell’s social media app integrations for Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
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Why you should pick Nutshell as your school or higher education CRM

Perhaps you’re in the process of comparing Nutshell with other options and want to know what makes our software the best CRM for educational institutions. After all, finding a CRM solution with all the necessary features to adapt to your establishment’s processes and needs is optimal.

Having provided leading CRM software and services to several educational facilities, the Nutshell team has deeper insight into the needs of institutions like yours. That makes us equipped to deliver the tools and guidance you need to operate at your best.

Choosing Nutshell as your education CRM means benefiting from these value-added services:

  • A broad spectrum of features to help you customize and employ sales, onboarding, and monitoring processes that make sense for your organization.
  • Affordable pricing plans to ensure all schools, colleges, universities, and related educational institutions have access to a top-tier CRM system.
  • Formidable email marketing tools to help you stay in touch with prospective students, current students, donors, and more.
  • Thousands of useful app integrations to help you build a more extensive, holistic operational system.
  • Award-winning, live, and free customer support provided by our knowledgeable Ann Arbor-based team.

But don’t just take our word for it.

The impact Nutshell has had on educational institutions just like yours is far-reaching. Our CRM has helped countless schools, higher education facilities, and similar institutions enhance their performance and increase revenue.

Take a look at what other educational institutions have to say about using Nutshell and find out why it’s the ideal education CRM for organizational growth and success.

Read customer stories

Explore our plans

All plans include unlimited CRM contacts, unlimited data storage, and technical support from real human beings.

Billed Annually
Billed Monthly
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Simple, flexible CRM that helps teams organize their contacts, leads, and conversations.

$16 per user per month

Included in all plans…

  • Unlimited Data, People, Company & Leads
  • Contact management and communication timelines
  • Email and calendar sync
  • Customizable single sales pipeline
  • Sales and lead reporting
  • Drag-and-drop pipeline board and interactive lead map
  • Embeddable web forms
  • Activity reminders
  • Free onboarding white glove imports
  • Free live support
  • And more
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CRM, sales automation, and advanced reporting to help your team maximize every opportunity.

$42 per user per month

Everything in Foundation, plus…

  • Sales automation
  • Multiple pipelines
  • Personal email sequences
  • Sales quotas and activity quotas
  • Full reporting suite, including Activity, Funnel, and Forecast reports
  • Click tracking notifications
  • Up to 5 Teams
  • Unlimited in-app phone dialing and recording
  • Connected form set up
  • And more
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Nutshell Power AI logo

Harness the power of artificial intelligence to improve efficiency, effectiveness and revenue in your CRM.

$52 per user per month

Everything in Pro, plus…

  • 50 AI timeline summarizations per user each month
  • Zoom transcription summarization
  • Click tracking notifications (also in Pro)
  • Connected form set up (also in Pro)
  • Unlimited in-app phone dialing and recording (also in Pro)
  • And more
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No limits. No caps. No breaking the bank. Our tier that gives your team the most firepower without costing a fortune.

$67 per user per month

Everything in Power AI, plus…

  • Unlimited pipelines and custom fields
  • 100 AI timeline summarizations per user each month
  • API support, Audit log, Changelog and read-only SQL access
  • Enterprise SSO, User/Group provisioning & other SCIM provisioning: Microsoft Azure & ADFS, Google Workspace SAML, Okta, Auth0, OneLogin, & PingFederate
  • Multiple currencies
  • Free scheduled phone support
  • Dedicated success strategist (5 user minimum)
  • And more
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When you choose Nutshell as your Higher Education CRM, you have the option to partner with 500+ digital marketing experts to help drive leads to your sales team. Learn More

Boost enrollment, funding, and student success with the best education CRM

Keep prospects, students, donors, and faculty engaged with all the features you need to ensure positive experiences across the board each time they interact with your educational institution. Nutshell provides the absolute best in contact management, automation, and communication features, helping you stay organized and in touch with those who matter most to your establishment.

Discover the many reasons educational institutions recommend Nutshell. Sign up for a free 14-day trial now, or speak to our friendly team to learn more about how Nutshell can elevate your school, college, or university’s productivity and profitability.

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