The Company
The National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS) (www.nscs.org) is an honor society that engages high-achieving first- and second-year students in the top 20 percent of their class. NSCS has established chapters at more than 300 universities and community college campuses across the country and has more than 800,000 active members today. It is also a proud member of the Association of College Honor Societies.

Etherios (www.etherios.com) is a cloud computing expert services provider that has helped more than 100 organizations realize their IT strategies around cloud computing for CRM, system integration, training and custom application development.

The Challenge
As a rapidly growing organization, NSCS wanted to completely overhaul its marketing processes in an effort to streamline communication with members and automate the acquisition of new society members. The first phase of the revamp was to select Salesforce.com as the CRM followed by a marketing automation platform that would allow them to move from “batch and blast” emails to adopting a more strategic approach.

One of the biggest challenges NSCS faced was its distributed model in which chapter leaders needed individual access to the marketing automation system to communicate with individual chapter members.  Another big challenge was that NSCS wanted to automate its method of prospecting new members for up to 300 different schools. 

The Solution
NSCS initially collaborated with Etherios to select Salesforce.com as its CRM and later to select a marketing automation solution as the next phase of the project. After a competitive selection process, NSCS selected Silverpop Engage for its easy integration to Salesforce.com, Programs functionality that would enable the automation of its prospecting process, and the ability to offer a secure and easy-to-use way for 300-plus chapter leaders to access Silverpop Engage with their own permissions.

Within eight weeks, Etherios had helped NSCS integrate Salesforce.com and Silverpop Engage with a bidirectional synch and implemented several campaigns across the organization. Those campaigns include:   

•    NSCS’ more than 300 chapter leaders and officers can individually access Silverpop Engage and email their specific member lists (both students and alumni) using pre-defined templates and secure permissions.
•    Replacing an archaic manual import and export to an external database, NSCS now uses Silverpop’s Programs functionality to automate its process of seeking new members (high-achieving first- and second-year college students in the top 20 percent of their classes) with multistep automated programs that help qualify NSCS’ newest members.
•    Marketing team members from the NSCS corporate office in Washington, D.C. can now send out personalized communications including information on events and scholarships, based on pre-defined member preferences, to its large database of select contacts. 

The Results
With Etherios’ expertise, NSCS has been able to completely automate its marketing outreach through the integration of Salesforce.com and Silverpop Engage. NSCS now has the flexibility to allow its chapter leaders and officers from each of its 300 chapters to access Silverpop Engage and communicate with its members with an easy-to-use and secure solution. Overall, this has increased productivity exponentially by saving up to a day’s worth of effort per chapter each month.

By taking advantage of Silverpop’s Programs functionality to manage its prospecting process, NSCS has created multiple campaigns that bring prospective new members into the program based upon data populated in Salesforce.com and then synchronized into Engage via Silverpop’s CRMi integration. Once a prospective member enters the Program, they are then led through the qualification process through a series of multistep emails. In most cases, these emails are complemented by direct mail pieces to reinforce the benefits of membership. “With Etherios’ expertise and the product capabilities of Silverpop Engage, we've completely overhauled how we market to current members and the acquisition of new ones," says Bailey Khan, NSCS' director of operations. "This initiative has exceeded our expectations.”

Download the PDF to learn how National Society of Collegiate Scholars completely automated its prospecting activities and enabled Engage for more than 300 chapter leaders.