Website, CRM & marketing package for education providers

The whole front end: a website built for search and AI answer engines with course pages that stand on their own, hosting and domain, branding and graphics, a CRM configured around an admissions cycle rather than generic sales stages, the automations that carry someone from prospectus to open day to application to enrolment, an AI chatbot for out-of-hours course questions, email and SMS, and Google and Meta accounts set up and tracked. It is scoped per provider, so whatever already works we leave alone.

Price on application, and that is not evasion. An independent training provider with six courses is a different build to a college with four faculties, an MIS to connect and an accessibility statement to stand behind. Some already have branding, some need their student record system integrating rather than replacing, some want paid campaigns for one intake only. We scope it, price it, and you see the number before anything starts. Publishing a headline figure we would not honour helps nobody.

It depends on your subject areas and how much of the stack you need. What we can point to is Fast Track Leasing: around five enquiries a day from search, with £0 spent on ads to get them, off the back of 400+ pages answering what customers search for. That is a different market to education and we would not promise you the same numbers. Course content compounds over months and demand runs in intake cycles. If your next intake is closer than that, ads run alongside while the content builds.

If you are a state-funded school, college or university you are a public sector body, and the 2018 public sector accessibility regulations apply: the site needs to meet the WCAG standard at AA and publish an accessibility statement setting out anything that does not. Schools sit in a narrower scope than colleges, but the content people need in order to use your services is caught either way. Private training providers are not public sector bodies, though the Equality Act still applies. We build to that standard from the start rather than retrofitting it, and we will tell you honestly where legacy content, old PDFs especially, is the real problem.

Usually yes, because they do different jobs. An MIS or student record system manages people who are already yours: enrolment, attendance, results, funding returns. A CRM manages everyone before that point — the enquiry, the prospectus download, the open day no-show, the applicant who went quiet after the offer, the person who deferred to next September. Most providers have an excellent record of enrolled students and almost none of the ones they lost along the way. We connect the two rather than replace what already works.

Usually. Most student record systems, learning platforms and payment providers offer an API, a webhook or at minimum a scheduled export, and where they do we wire straight in. Some sector-specific admissions and awarding body systems are genuinely closed. Where that is the case we say so up front and build around it, normally by making the CRM the front end for enquiries and pushing a clean handover at the point of enrolment. We work that out during scoping, not after you have paid.

As two separate audiences on the same enquiry, because they want different things. A sixteen-year-old wants to know what the course is like and who else is on it. A parent wants entry requirements, costs, travel, safety and what it leads to. In the CRM the parent is a contact in their own right with their own consent and their own messages, so an open day invitation, a deadline reminder and a funding explainer can go to the right person rather than to a single shared email address and hoping.

We do, end to end. The reason this is one package rather than five suppliers is that the handovers are where these projects fail: the web agency blames the MIS vendor, the marketing agency blames the web agency, and someone in admissions is holding it together during clearing. HDC covers development, marketing, CRM, integration and process design in one team, so there is one number to ring when something needs changing.