Doane College has signed on to be one of the first users of Intelliworks Bluechip, a CRM software system designed specifically for college athletic departments.
The Web-based system will help Doane recruit for its baseball and women’s soccer teams and manage communications with prospects. If Bluechip achieves good results with those programs, Doane will roll it out to its other athletic teams.
“The athletic department was looking for a tool it could use to better communicate with our admissions counselors on recruitment,” said Mike Carpenter, VP for IT and chief information officer at Doane. “There were some products in the marketplace specifically targeted for that, but I was looking at beyond just that specific requirement and looking at CRM as a need as a whole for the entire college. This has both the entry level capability to get you started with athletics as well as tools to assist with admissions and advancement initiatives.”
With Bluechip, Doane can create personalized mail and e-mail for prospective student athletes. Prospects will also be able to fill out interest forms online. Bluechip will collect that information for Doane’s database and notify the appropriate coaches and counselors. Each team at Doane has specific admissions goals, so the school will use Bluechip to organize recruitment efforts for individual teams and positions.
Before turning to Bluechip, Doane College had been using an enterprise resource plan system. Carpenter explained that the system was not very intuitive or user-friendly and was difficult to access on the road. Intelliworks Bluechip was chosen partly because it was easier to use in multiple locations.
Bluechip, which is built off of Intelliworks’ CRM platform for higher education, is also being implemented by athletic programs at UMass, Albion College and Southwest Minnesota State University. The Bluechip system can also be used for fundraising and marketing — applications that Carpenter said would be rolled out in time.
