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Building a Better Admissions IT Ecosystem: How to Complement Your SIS/CRM System with a Centralized Application Service (CAS™)

RJ Nichol
Nov 14, 2019

Many admissions professionals face the same daunting challenge: Your school or program desperately needs to upgrade its application processes and technology, but you’ve already invested in costly SIS and CRM systems that could be significantly affected by any changes you make.

Will your new system achieve its primary goal of increasing the size of your applicant pool and the reach of your marketing efforts? Will it deliver all of the data you need to make timely, well-informed decisions? And will it “play nice” with the systems you already have on campus?

When you adopt a Liaison-powered Centralized Application Service (CAS™), the answer to all of those questions is a resounding, “Yes!”

Complementary Tools and a Larger Pool

“A CAS is a national marketplace for schools that offer programs in a particular profession. For example, nursing schools use NursingCAS™ and engineering programs use EngineeringCAS™,” says Mike Margitich, Liaison’s vice president of CAS Products. “A CAS provides a source of applicants from a pool that’s bigger than you might get otherwise, and you can use it to complement the systems you already have on campus for taking in and processing your applicants.”

To elaborate more on how a CAS can bring new benefits to your admissions office while integrating smoothly with your existing systems, Margitich recently hosted a roundtable discussion with several admissions leaders who successfully integrated a CAS with legacy technologies to achieve key goals for their institutions. He was joined by Leslie Levin (director of admissions, College of Public Health, Temple University), Greg Martin (assistant director, Planning and Institutional Research, Drexel University) and Kari Shotwell (director of admissions, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine).

Together, they talked about their experiences:

  • Using a CAS to manage their applicant pool and make decisions about admitting “best-fit” students.
  • Maintaining and exporting data in a consistent manner across programs and systems.
  • Creating a more uniform, intuitive application experience for students.
  • Utilizing limited staff resources in new ways that allow them to spend more time with students and less time manually processing applications and supporting documents.
  • Using Liaison’s WebAdMIT™ tool in tandem with a CAS to communicate directly with applicants from “first interest to first day.”
  • Working with partners at their institutions to bring a CAS to campus and to benefit from the tremendous amount of data it provides.

To hear the panel’s insights and advice, watch Liaison’s on-demand webinar Complementing Your SIS/CRM System with a Centralized Application Service (CAS).

RJ Nichol

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Over the last three decades, Liaison has helped over 40,000 programs on more than 1,200 campuses more effectively manage admissions through its Centralized Application Service (CAS™) technology and complementary application processing and support services. The higher education technology leader supports its partner institutions’ total enrollment goals by pairing CAS with its Enrollment Marketing (EM) platform as well as the recently acquired TargetX (CRM) and advanced analytics software Othot.