For school administrators, there’s almost nothing as time-consuming during the school year as the enrollment process.
First, your administrative team must create and send out packets for current students with the hope that they’ll make it into the right hands (i.e. their parents or guardians and not the dark bottom of a backpack). And while that’s being worked on, new welcome packets are also created and distributed to prospective students and parents in order to increase the enrollment rate.
As these forms are completed over the course of a few months, they’ll begin to make their way back to the busy team that created them. Of course, a few friendly reminders may also be sent out along the way to facilitate getting everything ready on a deadline.
Once that’s done, your admin team is stuck with a mound of paperwork to sift through and organize. They have to go through each individual packet to ensure all of the necessary signatures are right where they should be, then they must organize the entire packet in your gigantic school filing system. Let’s not forget that this system must be repeated a few several hundred times depending on the size of your school.
It’s clear to see why this process is so time-consuming, but would it surprise you to learn that it doesn’t have to be this way?
Thanks to a few simple changes, you can easily streamline your enrollment process without losing any forms or signatures along the way. We’ll show you just how to do that in today’s article. By the end, you’ll wonder why your school didn’t start digital enrollment sooner.
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Why Go to a Digital Enrollment Process in the First Place?
For the most part, your school has probably been using the same enrollment system for the last few years (maybe even a few decades). And your school’s admin team is probably pretty confident and comfortable with how the organization works.
The problem is, even in the most organized systems, paper forms still slow your team down. If you wanted to know which students have a peanut allergy, it could take a few hours to pull this important data together, which is something most admins (and school nurses) don’t have time to wait for.
Another downside to using paper forms is that one teeny tiny paper or packet can easily fall through the cracks never to be seen again. And if that one paper is missing and it just so happens to be the only one you need (again, in an emergency situation), your school could be in serious trouble.
Finally, using paper forms is also more expensive for two reasons. First, it raises your supply costs. And if someone loses a packet, you’ll be stuck making extra copies, which only raises your expenses further. Second, paper enrollment also raises your personnel costs. If you have a large school, you’ll need to hire more than one person to tackle this job, otherwise you’ll risk too many costly errors from overworking your team.
Now let’s talk about how your school could save time and money by going digital.
Step 1: Switch to Digital Forms
Your first move to streamline the enrollment process is to switch to digital forms.
With digital forms, you’ll have access to all of your students’ completed paperwork within a matter of seconds. This makes everything from searching for allergies to organizing a field trip a walk in the park.
Plus, you’ll never have to worry about losing an important paper copy ever again. If you need to have a paper copy, you can print one off at any time.
Action step: Your first step towards streamlining your enrollment process is to convert all paper forms to digital ones. This may sound daunting at first, but we promise it’s not as hard as it sounds. See, you’ve already created all of your forms using a computer. So this means you have a digital copy that just needs to be uploaded to a universal database. Once that’s done, you’ll head right to our next step. Yep, it’s that simple.
Step 2: Give Parents the Option to Sign Forms Digitally
Action step: Next, you need to send a digital copy of your forms to your students’ parents. The best way to do this is to send them an attachment directly to their email address.
Using programs such as Hubbli or DocHub, parents can digitally sign the forms and send them right back to your database once they’re finished.
From there, you’ll cruise right along to step three.
Step 3: Automatically Organize Forms as They’re Completed
Before the forms roll in, you’ll need to set up a location for where they’ll go. Essentially, you’ll be making digital folders similar to what you’d have in person in your filing cabinets.
However, unlike paper forms, you can add the same copy of that form to multiple folders. For example, if someone has a peanut allergy and their parent selects this option on the enrollment form, you can set the process up to organize the form within your master filing system and under a special folder containing all of the names of children with allergies. This means you’ll be able to find information much faster than by using paper alone.
The system will also automatically check to see that every signature is where it should be (instead of someone from your team having to do this manually). After uploading, the form will be organized based on the information selected during the filling out phase. This means you’ll save countless hours of sifting through and filing these papers—which is huge!
That’s another plus to using this digital form of organization: the amount of time you’ll be saving. With digital forms, you’ll create one master copy you’ll email to every parent, which means you won’t have to print and create individualized packets to send out. Switching to digital forms means your entire enrollment process will be cut down to a third of the time it would normally take, for both parents and your staff. Imagine what your team will be able to do with all of this extra time.
Action step: In addition to sending parents a copy of their enrollment form, you can also provide an “Enroll Now” button on your website that links directly to these forms. Once your parents fill them out and hit submit, they’ll be sent right to your team.
As you can see, it’s time to ditch paper forms, if streamlining your enrollment process is your school’s ultimate goal. By making this simple change, you’ll save your team both time and money and you’ll make your process more efficient along the way. Welcome your school to the modern age!
Digital forms are also easier for parents to tackle, so you’ll have more completed forms in a shorter amount of time. Say goodbye to the days of having to pester parents for completed forms. You can even set an automatic (and friendly) reminder to do that for you.
To get started, or for additional help, contact anyone from the Hubbli team today.
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