Imaging Success: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Helps Link Students to Career Colleges and a Better Future

The award-winning Imagine America Scholarship Program was established in 1998 to help students make choices for a better future. Whether it is choosing the right career, finding the best school to complete a career education, or exploring financial aid options for career training, the Imagine America Scholarship Program helps its students every step of the way. 

With over 35,000 scholarships awarded to high school students from more than 10,000 high schools, Imagine America needed a way to internally manage the applications for scholarships and provide seamless communication between their students and the career colleges.  The Imagine America Foundation deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM running on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system and quickly began reaping the rewards, which included streamlined access to student application status, more effective communications, and improved management of career college partnerships.

Situation

The Imagine America Foundation (IAF), originally named the Career Training Foundation, was established in 1982.The Foundation’s mission has been to provide scholarship programs, conduct sector research, elevate public awareness and honor achievement in career education. 

The Foundation is the proud sponsor of three Imagine America scholarship and award programs, including Imagine America (for graduating high school students), Imagine America II (for adult students), and the Imagine America—Military Award Program (for active duty or honorably discharged U.S. military veterans).

IAF was using iMIS for tracking colleges and members and realized that moving forward, their solution needed to be integrated to their Web site. iMIS was too limited in its ability to easily provide Web functionality and automate processes.  Robert L. Martin, President of IAF wanted to turn their application process into a fully-automated Web-based system. “Students today are born into an ever-increasing technological society. The idea of asking a possible future MCSE to fill out a paper application and mail it in was a process that, to our 21st Century students, would not compute.” IAF turned to their trusted Microsoft Partner for help. “Brittenford has been a trusted Dynamics GP advisor of our sister organization, CCA, for over 4 years. We went to our partner with a problem and they delivered a solution”.  Martin continued, “Rajev Bricksin and his team at Brittenford were instrumental in fleshing out the ideal workflow process.  They helped us determine what optimal workflow looked like, how to document it, and how to put it into practice. We knew we wanted to incorporate each of those into the way we did business, and that we would need a customer relationship management system to get the job done.”

Further, Imagine America needed a consistent process for both marketing to students and for measuring the effectiveness of that communication. Imagine America also needed to manage the entire process from scholarship application to college acceptance and scholarship award.

Solution

Because Imagine America had already standardized on Microsoft technologies, and because of the potential for tight integration between students, career colleges and the Imagine America staff, Imagine America’s Microsoft Dynamics partner organization, Brittenford, based in Reston, Virginia, recommended Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

“We realized Imagine America had the potential to be enormously successful and we needed to build our growth around a solid solution so we turned to our Microsoft Partner for answers.” said Martin. Working with Brittenford, Imagine America originally implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 1.2 on Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003.  IAF has since upgraded to Dynamics CRM 4.0.  Brittenford took the basic functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and customized the solution to track the students, high schools, college and all related people involved with the awarding of Imagine America Scholarships. Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s workflow manager automated the application and approval process so that the Imagine America staff could focus on growing the program and expanding the Imagine America message to military, online and adult focused education and training centers.

Benefits

The deployment and integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM has made a dramatic impact on the way IAF runs their scholarship program:

1. Imagine America staff is now handling the 100% growth in processed-scholarship applications without any additional administrative growth.  
2. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution allows all of Imagine America’s student applicant information to reside in a single database.  
3. Processes, such as updating and locating student information or completing the application process, are subsequently faster because processes are automated.  No longer does information have to be transferred manually among several disconnected business systems.  
4. Employees have a comprehensive look at the students’ application status and the college profiles, thus creating a streamlined process of communication. 

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Solution has helped streamline and automate Imagine America’s exponential growth. In 2006, approximately 9,000 scholarships will be awarded to graduating high school seniors around the country with some participating colleges offering as many as 500 scholarships to incoming students.  In just six years, the Foundation has awarded $35 million in scholarships to students attending career colleges and universities.
   
The Foundation has seen an impressive start to its Imagine America II and Imagine America Military Award Program (MAP).  Created in 2002, the Imagine America II adult scholarship with corporate funding has secured more than $250,000 in grants.  Now in its fourth year of operation, the MAP program currently has 275 participating colleges and to date has issued more than $1.3 million in awards.