Every family who interacts with your school — inquiries, bookings, open-house signups, applications — flows into a single CRM view. The goal is one place to see "who is this family, what have they done with us, and what's the next step?" without juggling multiple inboxes.
This article covers the day-to-day mechanics: how the pipeline works, when to reply vs. add an internal note, how to keep the list tidy as inquiries accumulate.
The pipeline view
The CRM tab opens in pipeline view by default — a Kanban-style board with five columns matching inquiry status:
- New — just arrived, nobody on your team has touched it yet
- Contacted — your team has sent at least one reply
- Qualified — you've confirmed this family is a real prospect (right age range, right program fit, real budget) — typically after a tour or in-depth conversation
- Won — they've enrolled or committed (often paired with an active application in the Admissions tab)
- Lost — went elsewhere, ghosted, or explicitly declined
Drag an inquiry between columns to update the status. The drag is instant in the UI and persists to the database on drop — no extra save button.
You can also flip to Table view (top right) if you prefer a sortable, filterable list. Pipeline is better for daily triage; table is better for monthly review or exporting.
Replying vs. internal notes
Click any inquiry to open the conversation thread. You have two ways to add to it:
- Reply — sends the message to the family by email. Goes out from your school's contact address. Appears in the thread with a blue "sent" indicator.
- Internal note — stays inside the dashboard. Only your team sees it. Appears in the thread with a yellow "note" indicator.
Use replies for anything the family should see. Use internal notes for everything else: triage observations ("seems serious, follow up by Friday"), context from a phone call ("they mentioned a sibling at our sister school"), or coordination between team members ("Anna should handle this — she ran the tour").
A reasonably-managed inquiry thread alternates between replies and notes; the notes give the next team member the context they need to pick up where the last one left off.
How email replies sync back
When the family replies to one of your emails from their normal inbox, the reply lands in the dashboard automatically (via a unique reply-to address per inquiry). You don't need them to use the dashboard — they keep using email, and you see everything in one place.
The exception: replies from a different email address than the one they originally inquired with. Those land as a "new inquiry" because we can't match the sender to an existing thread. If you see two threads for the same family, merge them from the inquiry detail menu (... → Merge with another inquiry).
Importing inquiries from the admin queue
If your school is on the free tier, families who try to inquire about you don't get routed to your inbox — they go into our admin queue, where we hold them until you upgrade. When you upgrade, those held inquiries don't auto-flow into your CRM (we don't want to dump 6 months of cold leads on you on day one).
Instead, the Admin tab shows you the held leads and lets you import them in batches. Each import row shows: who, when, what they asked about. You decide which are still worth pursuing and import only those. Imported leads land in your CRM with status "Contacted" (since the admin team has already sent them an acknowledgement) and a note showing the original inquiry date.
For Pro and Premium schools, this whole queue is bypassed — inquiries hit your dashboard in real time.
Bookings as part of the CRM
Tour bookings, virtual visits, info sessions, and open-house signups all appear in the CRM alongside inquiries. From the family's detail view you can see their full timeline: when they first inquired, every booking, every reply, every status change.
This matters because a family doesn't experience the boundary between "inquiry" and "booking" — to them it's one ongoing relationship. Treating the timeline as one story (rather than fragmenting it across tabs) is what makes follow-up effective.
Keeping the pipeline clean
A messy pipeline is the most common operational complaint after 3+ months of use. A few rules that prevent it:
- Move New inquiries out of "New" within 48 hours. Either reply (→ Contacted) or archive (→ Lost) if obviously not a fit. Anything sitting in New for more than a week is stale.
- Lost is final. Don't reopen Lost inquiries to "give them another chance" — if a Lost family comes back, they'll inquire again and start a new pipeline entry. Trying to revive an old Lost record creates duplicate-management headaches.
- Won implies enrolled. If a family is just "very interested," they're still Qualified, not Won. Move to Won when their child has a confirmed seat.
- Archive Lost after 12 months. The CRM has a bulk-archive action in the table view; old Lost records don't help with current pipeline reporting.
Bounced emails and dead addresses
If an email to a family bounces (their address is invalid, mailbox is full, etc.), the inquiry surfaces a red warning indicator in the CRM list. Click into it for the bounce reason. Bounced families won't receive broadcasts until you update their email or remove them — the system suppresses sends automatically to protect your sender reputation.
For permanent bounces (invalid address), the right move is usually to mark the inquiry Lost and add an internal note explaining why. For soft bounces (mailbox full), wait a week and try again.
Merging duplicate families
Same family inquires twice — once via the public form, once after a phone call. From the family detail view, use the ... → Merge action to combine them. The older inquiry becomes the canonical one; the newer is folded in (preserving its messages and bookings) and removed. Merge is reversible within 7 days from the audit log if you do it by mistake.
Privacy + GDPR
Families have the right to ask you to delete their data. The inquiry-detail menu has a Delete action — it removes the inquiry, all messages, all bookings, and all notes for that family from your school's view. It's irreversible. Use it when a family explicitly asks; otherwise archive is the better choice (data preserved, removed from active pipeline).