The Client
At the beginning of 2017 we began a HubSpot website redevelopment and CRM implementation project with an organization called IDEAS. IDEAS is a professional placement agency for individuals who are seeking to broaden their horizons by using their professional talents overseas. Prior to starting the project, IDEAS had an aesthetically pleasing but only semi-functional website hosted on WordPress. As IDEAS grew, they could not find an easy way to manage the contacts and applicants they were gathering through WordPress while keeping the website online. This was the start of their problem.
The Problem
Before working with ClearPivot, IDEAS had a very aesthetically pleasing site built in WordPress. However, the IDEAS staff encountered several technical and functional issues related to the WordPress site.
First, there were the complicated plugins they had to navigate to both build the pages they needed and gather the information applicants were submitting. IDEAS was using WordPress Gravity Forms and Microsoft Access to gather and store all of the information individuals submitted in order to work overseas. The first issue was Gravity Forms had no easy export feature for form submissions which would interface with Microsoft Access. This led to the staff manually inputting every form field submission into new contact records on Microsoft Access. Once the information was in Access, sorting and viewing the content was difficult and unwieldy. The staff at IDEAS was spending a lot of time simply moving data from one place to another.
Second, and worst of all, on average the IDEAS website was down for one-fourth of the year due to other broader technical issues. To run a functioning organization nowadays, organizations need websites which will be live at all times. IDEAS reached out to ClearPivot for a solution that would both keep the aesthetics of the website and reduce the amount of technical issues which were crippling its ability to work as an organization.
The Solution
ClearPivot provided a comprehensive HubSpot website migration and CRM implementation in order to maximize IDEAS time and their use of the HubSpot platform.
The site migration consisted of moving the existing website design into the HubSpot platform. This meant shifting IDEAS professional placement section of the site from a WordPress plugin and formatting the system within the HubSpot blog tool instead. A second website update was moving from Gravity Forms on WordPress into HubSpot forms. Moving the forms onto HubSpot allowed for the use of smart fields which auto-populate forms with any content which had been submitted previously. The movement of the website and forms onto HubSpot coincided with the implementation of the HubSpot CRM. When individuals fill out forms on the IDEAS site, the content is now directly tied to their contact profile in the HubSpot CRM. This means the staff no longer spends hours a week manually transferring the data over. With the implementation of smart forms, individuals are now able to complete only part of their application on the IDEAS site and return to finish the rest of the application at their leisure. Previously individuals had to complete the entire application in one sitting. With all of the information in HubSpot, the IDEAS staff was able to setup an automated follow-up system for their placement application. With the adoption of smart forms we were able to split out IDEAS applications into multiple pages. Now if people do not complete the entire application they will receive follow-up emails to encourage them to complete the application. These solutions led to some very impressive results.
The Results
The first result was the amount of man-hours saved on importing new applicant information each week, coupled with the automated follow-up process for people who do not complete applications. The second is an increase in the amount of applications completed due to the automated email follow-up system in place. Finally, a result which was not initially expected but was nevertheless welcomed was the dramatically faster site loading time when IDEAS moved from WordPress to HubSpot.You can read about that result more in-depth in an article we wrote specifically on the subject.
We are extremely proud of the results we were able to bring to IDEAS. Sarah Rymer, Director of Communications and Recruiting at IDEAS had this to say:
“I am happy to see our system becoming so efficient and effective! Because of the integrated connection between our website and our CRM, I spend a lot less time on the computer and more time talking with potential recruits. Thank you for making my job easier!”
