The Enroller Story - Growth amidst a global pandemic
In 2015, Enroller was established to set out and achieve 2 things.
Open up new opportunities for our world's youth to realise their dreams and ambitions through international education
To make busy people’s lives easier through digital transformation.
In order to facilitate this process Enroller developed a software that would provide a central platform to connect agents and educational institutions, to help students find the best fit school for their international studies.
Our journey started by supporting the first key issue - recruitment. How do we highlight our schools to prospective international students?
Enroller spent the first two years understanding the market, speaking to many stakeholders involved in the process - to understand their challenges and pain points. Asking the question, “what can we do?”.
We later went on to create a platform that would be the starting point of Enroller’s exciting journey into the world of international student education.
As they say, that’s the “spark” which ignited a mission. Enroller didn’t just want to solve one problem, we wanted to try and solve as many as we could within the student enrolment process.
COVID-19 struck and turned everything upside down, putting immense pressure on the international education sector - for our agents, schools and Enroller as a business.
Surrounded by uncertainty and frustration amongst those impacted, we were determined to stay focussed and use this time to re-group internally and re-engage with our customers - to step back and listen to their needs.
Whilst there is nothing we can do about the current border situation, or have any control over when we can get students back into NZ, Enroller took the opportunity during this time to work closer with our clients (specifically our Customer Advisory Group) - to build and improve on our current offering to provide better support.
When international students are able to travel again, we want to be ready to welcome and support the educational institutions and agent partners - together and efficiently.
With the months that followed, Enroller’s product offering and purpose expanded, leading to developing a more robust, comprehensive international student recruitment, enrolment and management solution - a far cry from simply being a ‘recruitment’ solution at the beginning of our journey.
Whilst the initial focus was providing this service and opportunity within the New Zealand borders, with the unexpected disruption caused by COVID-19 brought a realisation that our goals, values and offering need not be restricted only to local markets.
Our platform can serve a greater need, a greater purpose for students, agents and educational institutions at a global scale.
Most importantly, an opportunity to engage in a country where they were seeing some active international student placements - albeit not at the usual scale.
In April 2021, amidst all the uncertainty at a global level, Enroller launched into the USA market, onboarding our first international school client! It wasn’t long before we signed up the next client, then the next, and next, and so forth.
We didn’t stop there! May 2021 - Enroller signs its first Australian school client!
Again, we are starting to see a steady increase and are thrilled thus far at the feedback we have received. As a small but very efficient and passionate team, navigating a global pandemic we managed to:
Create 3 new products
Develop a comprehensive international student management platform (cloud-based)
Launch into 2 countries
Create “Marketplace” for our Agents to market themselves to our school partners - globally
And a couple additional requested upgrades along the way - to keep our clients happy, of course!
As we continue with our “business as usual” improvements, Enroller’s vision is to create and facilitate a collaborative environment where schools and agents can connect, engage and support their students through their international student journey.
COVID-19 may have disrupted everything, but it presented a new challenge, which offered us the opportunity to think bigger, look elsewhere, listen more...
The future may be a little uncertain around timelines, but we are optimistic that we will welcome the students (hopefully) soon enough.
In the meantime, we will continue to work with our growing base of schools (local and international), agent network and with our strategic partners to do what we can to help prepare the sector for when the borders open.
That day cannot come soon enough and we look forward to it, but in the interim we will continue to ask “How can we help?”