Look-up tables allow you to specify the primary and secondary categories of marketing that you wish to capture.

As the quality of your data capture increases, so the ability to use the marketing information for honing future marketing improves. Try to avoid the temptation to put prospective pupils into an ‘unknown’ category. Far better to go back to the look-up tables and specify a new Primary or Secondary source if that is necessary.

Marketing Data

The Marketing Menu shown below allows you to analyse your marketing data and hence target your marketing more effectively. It also lets you see a snapshot of the stages which your current prospective intake have reached.

The first part of the Marketing Menu provides an analysis of these sources of marketing. Simply use the drop down to select the year(s) of entry and hit the Prospect Source Analysis button.

A typical analysis graph is shown in the next figure.

The primary categories are shown as blocks on the graph.

The secondary elements are colour coded with a legend to categorise them.

Holding the cursor over any colour gives the name of this secondary category and the number of pupils in it.

N.B. it is useful to view these graphs over different time periods to see the change in your marketing strategy over school years and to help you decide on how to improve your new intake capture for future years.

Stages of Entry

Each school specifies, via the Look-up tables, its own Stages of Prospect.

From the Marketing Menu, decide on the full date range – or create a comparison between two dates. Then select the year(s) to be analysed and hit the graph button to create a graph like the one below.

The stages of entry are shown across the horizontal axis, sub-divided by the snap-shot dates you have selected.

The colour coded vertical lines represent the school years that new entrants would be going into. [Hold the cursor over any colour to get its value and category].

This form is in Excel and has various drop-down boxes to allow you to manipulate the data as you want.

For example, the Stage Name drop down can be used to select different categories for analysis. (See figure below)

Clicking Show All at this stage will ‘un-tick’ all categories. You could then tick, say, those enrolled or those on the waiting list.

Clicking Show All again re-sets it to cover all categories.

In a similar way, you can tick or un-tick across the range of snap-shot dates and the School entry years.

Combining these toggle buttons allows you to view, at a glance, the total position of your new entrants for any point in time.

N.B. the data used in these pivot tables is held in the second and third Excel sheets. Use normal summation if you want to obtain totals for any particular grouping.