CRM for Schools

A simple system for schools to track prospective families through admissions: inquiry, tour, application, decision.

The problem

Small school admissions offices run on a spreadsheet and a shared inbox. Families fall through the cracks between “toured the school” and “submitted an application,” and nobody can see the pipeline. Generic CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) are overkill and speak sales-language, not admissions-language.

Why now

The workflow is narrow and well-defined (inquiry → tour → apply → decide), which makes a focused tool genuinely better than a bent-to-fit generic CRM. A small team can build the exact thing a school needs.

The smallest version that’s useful

A family list with a status column you can drag between stages, plus a public inquiry form that drops new families straight into the pipeline. That alone replaces the spreadsheet.

What’s hard

This is a relationship-and-trust sale, not a self-serve signup. The product is easy; the hard part is getting the first 5 schools, which means knowing someone in admissions. If you do, that’s your unfair advantage.

Build it with

The public inquiry form is the Build a Waitlist Page pattern. Staff logins and per-school data come from Add Authentication.