WEBINAR @ 13th May, 2 PM (GMT+1)
What’s Stopping Progress in Higher Education?
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Let’s explore how Full Fabric can help you and your institution.
Let’s explore how Full Fabric can help you and your institution.
You've got a CRM that cost a fortune to implement. An applications portal that mostly works. A student information system that requires someone to manually export data every Monday morning. And somewhere in between, a spreadsheet that Sarah from admissions built three years ago because nothing else in your higher education technology stack would talk to anything else.
We know this setup. We've seen it at dozens of institutions. And we know what it costs you: not just the hours lost to manual data entry, but the enrolments that slip away because your student recruitment software can't keep up with how prospective students actually behave.
Let's fix that.
Here's what happens when your admissions technology doesn't talk to your CRM: your staff become the integration layer. They copy student data from one system to another. They reconcile discrepancies that shouldn't exist. They spend hours generating reports that should take seconds.
Teams without seamless data integration spend significant portions of their week on exactly this kind of manual transfer work. That's time they could spend building relationships with prospective students, personalising outreach, or actually thinking strategically about student recruitment.
The problem gets worse as you scale. Marketing generates leads but can't tell which ones become applications. Admissions processes applications but can't see which touchpoints influenced conversion. Leadership makes decisions based on incomplete pictures because nobody can stitch the full student journey together.
And the higher education martech stack explosion hasn't helped. The number of marketing technology products grew from roughly 150 in 2011 to nearly 14,000 in 2024. Each tool promises to solve something. Almost none of them promise to work with what you already have.
You might think the answer is a bigger, better CRM. Just get your enterprise platform to handle the entire student lifecycle. Consolidate.
We wish it were that simple.
Enterprise CRM implementations in higher education typically take six to twelve months for comprehensive deployment (and that's if everything goes smoothly). One institution reported needing a full IT team working for months just on integration. Not configuration. Not training. Just getting the thing to connect to their other student management systems.
That timeline kills recruitment cycles. If you're launching a new executive education programme, you can't wait eighteen months to see your admissions funnel properly.
Custom development on generic CRM platforms creates different problems. These systems don't understand programme catalogues, application workflows, conditional offers, or student data compliance requirements. Every adaptation requires customisation. Every customisation becomes technical debt. Staff leave. Knowledge disappears. Suddenly you're dependent on a consultant who charges €200 an hour to fix something that breaks every time you update.
The fundamental issue is context. Enterprise CRMs are brilliant at what they do. But they were built for selling widgets, not managing student enrolment. They're powerful, flexible, and completely generic.
The institutions we've seen succeed don't choose between their enterprise CRM and purpose-built student recruitment platforms. They connect them.
This works because it respects two realities. First, you've already invested heavily in your CRM. Leadership won't abandon it, and honestly, it does serve legitimate institutional needs. Second, student recruitment and admissions management require specialised capabilities that generic platforms don't provide natively.
So you integrate rather than replace.
Full Fabric's Enterprise CRM connectors do exactly this. Rather than asking you to rip out your existing infrastructure, they create bidirectional sync between your CRM and a commerce platform designed specifically for higher education. Leads flow automatically. Applications sync in real time. Payments, enrolments, communications: all connected without manual intervention.
Your enterprise CRM stays the system of record. Full Fabric handles what it was built for: the student journey from first enquiry to confirmed enrolment.
Here's what that means for different teams:
Connecting your admissions technology stack takes planning. Here's the practical approach.
Before you integrate anything, know what you're working with. Document every system that touches the student lifecycle. Include the obvious platforms (CRM, student information system, learning management system) and the shadow IT that admissions built because nothing else worked.
You'll find redundancy. Three departments storing slightly different versions of the same contact. Weekly exports that someone runs because nobody trusts the automatic sync. Temporary workarounds that became permanent three years ago.
This inventory matters because integration projects fail when they miss systems. A connector that doesn't account for the agent tracking spreadsheet will create data conflicts the moment it goes live.
Every piece of data needs one authoritative home. For most institutions, the enterprise CRM becomes the master record for contacts and organisations. The higher education platform becomes the source of truth for application details, academic requirements, and payment status.
Clear ownership prevents conflicts. When two systems can both modify a student record, you need rules about which one wins.
You don't need to integrate everything at once. Identify where disconnected student data causes the most pain.
For many institutions, that's the handoff between marketing (lead generation in the CRM) and admissions (applications in a separate system). Fixing that single connection often delivers immediate visibility into your student recruitment funnel.
Other valuable integrations for your enrolment management stack:
This is the beauty of connector-based higher education CRM integration: you don't need wholesale replacement. You can deploy commerce tools to fix an urgent applications problem, prove value within a single recruitment cycle, and expand later.
Each success builds the case for further work. You're not betting everything on a multi-year digital transformation. You're demonstrating results incrementally, which is far easier to justify (and far less risky).
We'll be honest: connecting student management systems still takes effort. Data migration always reveals quality issues you didn't know you had. Staff need training on new admissions workflows. Reporting needs adjustment.
A few things that help:
Integration succeeds when you can measure the difference:
Track these before and after. The comparison makes value concrete.
Students expect seamless experiences. They research programmes on their phones. They apply during lunch breaks. They expect instant confirmation and clear next steps. Disconnected student recruitment systems create friction that drives them to institutions with smoother processes.
Your competitors are investing in this. Purpose-built higher education platforms are gaining adoption precisely because they solve problems generic tools can't address. The institutions still running on spreadsheets and manual exports are falling behind, and the gap widens every year.
The technology to connect your student recruitment stack exists. It works. The question is whether you'll use it.
The development and maintenance of an in-house system is a complex and time-consuming task. Full Fabric lets you turn your full attention to maximizing growth and performance.
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