Nightingale Case Study

Located in Salt Lake City, Utah, Nightingale College is an accredited nursing school that offers many different programs and degree paths for its students.

Since its founding in 2010, the school has helped thousands of nursing professionals pursue their dreams by earning degrees such as LPN-to-ASN, BSN, MSN, and more.

Rick Bentz, Nightingale’s Director of Marketing, has been with the school since 2019 and has played a huge role not only in recruiting and enrolling the next generation of passionate nurses, but also overseeing and improving general college operations.

Before working with Verity, Rick and his team had done a tremendous job in hitting their enrollment goals, but it was in spite of their software, not because of it.

Prior to working with Verity, Nightingale was working with legacy software systems that were cobbled together and often failed to work completely. The leadership team knew they needed a change, and that’s when they found Verity.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced so many schools to rapidly digitize and modernize their operations to survive in the new remote reality. But Bonds was already aware that CMVC needed a new CRM even before the pandemic hit.

“Everything we did was on paper,” Bonds explained. “Our applications, attendance tracking, job placement, you name it.”

The fact that the whole school relied on paper documents created many issues: they were easy to misplace, they were prone to errors, and the manual processes across the institution were very time-consuming.

The software that the school did have didn’t integrate with other technology, which severely limited the school’s ability to modernize and meet the evolving needs of its student body.

It was not a profitable or scalable model. Something had to change.

“We were losing money every month,” said Bonds. “We knew that if we wanted to scale we had to fix this.”

That’s where Verity came in.

Unfortunately, Nightingale’s story was a common one for many Higher Ed institutions: they were using outdated software systems that were clunky, time-consuming, and prone to breaking down.

As Rick explained, they were trying to retrofit an SIS platform to be usable as a CRM,so there were many limitations to what the Nightingale team could do.

For example, the marketing team wanted to use their makeshift CRM for email campaigns and they simply didn’t have the data they needed to execute them how they wanted to—not to mention the CRM was constantly freezing up and not working properly.

On top of that, they had multiple systems that didn’t integrate or communicate with each other, which forced the Nightingale team to have to do a lot of manual data entry. Not only did these extra steps require a lot of time, but they were prone to human error, which created a cycle of failure and frustration for the team, including:

Duplicate work

No visibility into the paper stream

Data loss

Tasks took longer than they should

Rinse and repeat…

“The forms were always breaking,” said Rick. “You could set your watch to it: every two months, that system would collapse. For several days, leads coming in from the forms were not getting where they were supposed to be.”

These breaking forms completely disrupted the admissions team’s speed-to-lead metrics. A process that could take as little as a couple of hours often turned into 4 to 5 days because of the failing software—and this was a cycle that recurred every two months.

It was time for a change.

As the leadership group at Nightingale College explored new options for a CRM and SIS, Rick shared his positive experience with Verity, having used Verity’s platform at another institution prior to joining Nightingale.

The Nightingale team did their due diligence but the solution was clear: Verity was the answer to their problems.

Nightingale and Verity began the migration process in June 2022, with the goal of getting everything live for a September start date. They migrated everything over onto Verity’s system: their student database, class scheduling, secure documents, payments, communication tools, and more.

“The admissions process for nursing programs is very complicated compared to most others, so it required a lot of attention to detail,” said Rick. “Verity not only migrated everything in a way that made the admissions process seamless—they used their software to streamline it.”

Building out the documents portal took some additional time because it was highly customized by the Verity team to meet the school’s specific needs, but it was worth it.

“I started with Verity in their early days, and have been working with them for many years. The level of support has not dropped off even as they’ve grown, which is not common for software companies like this,” said Rick.

As the Nightingale team got onboarded onto Verity and learned the software, they also recognized opportunities for improvements and customization that would help their day-to-day operations. These recommendations have always been well received by the Verity team, who often add these ideas to their product roadmap for the future of Verity’s software.

In Rick’s role as the Director of Marketing, he is especially glad to see how well SMS and email drip campaigns work on Verity Dialog, in which he can track campaign success, student activity, communication, and more.

When the Nightingale team logs in each morning, there are individual dashboards with tasks, updates, messages, and everything else they need to know to start their day. “You just log in and there’s your work, right in front of you,” said Rick, who noted that it’s increased his team’s productivity.

In fact, Verity is working so well for the Admissions team that Admissions is now the envy of other departments at the school. Whereas some other teams are still using emails and spreadsheets for tracking everything, Admissions now has a modernized portal that’s clean, streamlined, and easy to use.

“It’s created a fun rivalry in the building because everyone else is jealous of us,” said Rick, laughing.

Verity also worked with Nightingale’s qualified leads partner to build an integration that would send contacts into their CRM seamlessly. “We had it up and running in like a week and a half,” said Rick. “If we were still on our old software, we would probably still be trying to configure that, two years later!”

In the 18 months since Nightingale partnered with Verity, the school has more than doubled in student population, but the team has stayed lean because they’re able to accomplish more—a large portion of which can be attributed to Verity.

Verity also integrates seamlessly with Anthology for the application process, which helps provide a strong experience both for the Nightingale Admissions staff but also for prospective students.