CollegePlannerPro: A Comprehensive Guide to Features and Benefits

For independent educational consultants (IECs), CollegePlannerPro offers a suite of features designed to streamline their workflow, enhance student engagement, and ultimately, grow their businesses. This article delves into the various functionalities of CollegePlannerPro, highlighting how they can be leveraged to optimize counseling practices.

Streamlining Client Management

CollegePlannerPro is built to support your business. From the moment a prospective client makes contact, CollegePlannerPro facilitates efficient management. Creating a parent Contact allows for immediate note-taking during initial conversations, capturing crucial details such as grades, extracurricular activities, college aspirations, learning differences, fees, and sibling information. This central repository ensures that all relevant data is readily accessible.

Tracking the pipeline of prospective clients is also seamless, providing a clear overview of potential business opportunities.

Centralized Student Information

Once a student becomes a client, CollegePlannerPro becomes indispensable. One of the greatest benefits of CollegePlannerPro is having everything related to my work with each student in one place. All information pertaining to a student is consolidated in one easily accessible location. Test scores, contact details, tasks, notes, file storage, and communication logs are available at a glance on a single page. This eliminates the need to navigate multiple platforms or sift through disorganized files, saving valuable time and effort.

Efficient Scheduling and Time Management

Meetings appear on the student’s profile page and feed directly into the Time Tracker, so I can easily monitor how much time I’ve spent with each student. The Calendar might be one of the most valuable tools for IECs. CollegePlannerPro's Scheduling Tool simplifies meeting coordination for both current students and prospective families.

Connecting External Calendars

To get started, I recommend connecting your external/personal calendar to your CollegePlannerPro calendar. CollegePlannerPro allows you to connect up to 3 external calendars. By connecting external calendars, all events, both personal and professional, are visible in one place. This prevents scheduling conflicts and ensures that availability is accurately reflected. While clients won't see the specifics of these external events, the system will block out those times, showing only available slots.

Customizing Meeting Types

Think about the types of meetings you'd like to offer students, clients, and prospective families. Some examples of meeting types are: Introductory Call/Overview of Services, New Client Intake Meeting, Parent Session, Standard Student Meeting. As you set up each meeting type you can set up distinct parameters for each, including Event Name, Location (or virtual meeting room link), Description, Days/Times these meetings are offered, Minimum Scheduling Notice, Blackout Dates and more. Once a meeting type is created, you can share the appropriate link with your clients.

IECs can tailor their availability based on student needs. For example, an IEC based on the East Coast can create specific meeting times for West Coast students. Similarly, meeting times can be restricted to certain student groups, such as offering meetings for 11th-grade students only on Wednesdays.

Leveraging College Data

The platform’s extensive college data saves me countless hours. While CustomCollegePlan is a fantastic tool for helping students, the real magic of CollegePlannerPro lies in how it empowers you-the counselor. CollegePlannerPro provides access to a vast database of college profiles, streamlining the college search and application process.

There are a few thousand college and university profiles available within CollegePlannerPro. Department of Education) and the deadlines are sourced from Peterson's. The focus of college profiles in CollegePlannerPro is more to provide a framework in which you can build up profiles that are helpful for you and your students and less on being a research tool.

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College Lists

You can create specific college lists for you and your students. "Suggested college lists" are lists that you create for your students. As the name implies, these are colleges that you are suggesting on an individual student basis. The student can then elect to take colleges from your Suggested Colleges list and move them to their own "My List". “Custom College Lists” are lists you can create for your own reference. They allow you to create your own lists of colleges and universities based on the groupings you decide. For example, you can build a list of schools based on a particular degree offering, a campus setting, location, etc. Please note that there are also some "Preloaded Lists" available for import (located in the toolbar of the Colleges Main tab). These lists can easily be imported and edited to meet your needs.

College Tags

You can create personalized College Tags within CollegePlannerPro. College Tags are keywords or terms you assign to a college or university. You are able to customize your college search based on your experience and knowledge; they are like bookmarks. By assigning College Tags to schools, you are able to filter through the lists of colleges.

Tasks and Deadlines

As your Students prepare their materials for the various college applications, tasks within their college profile provide a checklist of sorts to guide them through the process and help keep them on track. The deadlines for applications are super important dates your Students need to be aware of. The CollegePlannerPro college profiles hold both tasks and deadlines. These can be customized and shared with your students to provide them with the application tasks they need to complete and the dates by which they need to complete them.

Student College Lists

Each of your students, through their CustomCollegePlan account, can create their own list of colleges and universities based on your suggestions and any other schools they would like to add to the list. You can view the lists Students create by viewing their profiles within CollegePlannerPro.

Research Launch Pad

The Research Launch Pad is available on each college profile within CollegePlannerPro and CustomCollegePlan. These are additional resources that are available for you and your students to use. By clicking on one of the Research Links, a window will open with information related to that College. For example, if you are on the profile for Duke University and under the "Research Launch Pad", you click on "Niche", a new window will open with the information about Duke University from Niche. You can then click back out and return to the College Profile of either CollegePlannerPro or CustomCollegePlan.

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Marketing and Client Acquisition

CollegePlannerPro's eBook: Creating an Impressive Sample Student Profile is an incredible training tool for new members but the robust sample student profile you create can also be a dynamic marketing tool. By building out a sample student profile, you can showcase CollegePlannerPro's features with prospective families, highlighting the organizational elements, communication tools, and college list-building resources. Using the platform as part of your marketing material is a powerful way to enhance your counseling practice and highlight the value you bring to students.

Showcasing Key Features

In early conversations with counselors, families are often curious about an IEC's communication policies and practices. CollegePlannerPro's Conversation Module serves as a text message platform for students to engage with their counselor right from their cell phone. For IECs, messages are seamlessly organized on the Student's Profile page and originate from a system-generated phone number (allowing you to keep your personal phone number private). To keep parents updated on progress, a sample Note is an ideal feature to highlight.

Creating a Suggested Colleges list and a "My List" of Colleges for your sample student is a guaranteed way to impress families during your initial conversations. The Suggested List allows you to illustrate that you'll be taking time to make recommendations and suggestions for the student to consider as they research colleges during their process. Below you'll notice that students can click on the green arrow to move a college from the Suggested Colleges to "My List" of Colleges. Additionally, the color-coding (orange, blue, green) represents the IEC-assigned admissions probability feature available in CollegePlannerPro. Have fun building out your sample student profile! Give your sample student a fun name and persona to add some personality to the initial call with prospective families. In addition to the features outlined above, we've created a CustomCollegePlan one-sheet for IECs to customize (below). In the Canva flyer, you can add a logo, alter the text, change the colors, or make any other desired modifications.

Student Engagement

A significant number of my students say “wow” as they are storing documents and entering calendar items. Their use of it is very telling. They’ve told me that they trust this system more than their school system. There’s a cool factor. Students can access college profile data from any device in any location. Student accounts are enabled by consultants and are only available to students who work with CollegePlannerPro members. Meetings, task deadlines, application deadlines, and test dates all organized for students.

At family information meetings, I hand the CPP controls over to the student so they can see how easy it is to navigate. They click away on the Testing and Colleges tabs and are blown away by the information at their fingertips. I love students booking their own meetings with the Schedule a Meeting feature. The students love being in control of their list and their process. One place to store all your files, accessible from anywhere. Exchanging files with your students has never been so simple. All the information you’ve collected and communicated with clients is available within each student’s comprehensive, easy-to-navigate profile page.

Business Management and Scalability

CollegePlannerPro helps keep my students, my staff, and me totally organized! I can't imagine managing our practice and advising students without it. All the information you’ve collected and communicated with clients is available within each student’s comprehensive profile page. Create, customize and print professional, branded college reports for your clients. You and your students can see exactly how far or how close to home college campuses on a student’s list are. Easily track all of the interactions you have with prospects and clients. Store and organize all client and prospective client information in one place. Quickly and easily create lists of colleges for both you and your students. Get rid of clunky paper files. CollegePlannerPro is the best investment I’ve made in my business and it is my best selling feature (besides my witty personality) when introducing my practice to families.

Strategic Admissions Advice would not be as successful as we are without CollegePlannerPro. It’s innovative, intuitive and ever-evolving. For over five years, CPP has helped us to grow from 25 clients to close to 400. One of our planners had to step away due to a personal emergency and CollegePlannerPro was crucial. It enabled us to step in, open her account for every student, and see exactly where she was in the process thanks to the Checklists. We saw all conversations and all meetings planned. CollegePlannerPro has become an integral part of our business. The platform provides us tools to efficiently run our business and effectively serve our clients. Our favorite tools include College Comparisons Reports, Student Scheduling and the ArborBridge Testing Resource tab. When I position myself to prospective clients, the two biggest pieces are finding a great fit (financial, social, academic) and managing the process. When I show them CollegePlannerPro, it really sets us apart compared to others.

Team Collaboration

Yes. You may add as many teammates to your account and even determine how much of the account they may see.

Data Security

Yes. Your data is stored to multiple locations in real time, and in addition we automatically make a further backup of your data every hour. One place to store all your files, accessible from anywhere. Exchanging files with your students has never been so simple.

Cost and Commitment

No. CollegePlannerPro is a pay-as-you-go service. There are no long-term contracts or commitments on your part. You simply pay month-to-month. There’s no extra charge. We’re happy to spend as much time as it takes getting up and running with your account. Currently we accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express. We do not accept PayPal. We only accept payments online to keep things simple and paper free.

No. The prices you see above are all inclusive. Every plan includes unlimited contacts (your non-paying people). Just choose the plan that fits the number of clients (your paying customers) you need. Your credit/debit card will be billed once every month on your anniversary sign up date unless you cancel your account.

Alternatives

While CollegePlannerPro offers a robust set of features, it's important to consider alternative platforms like CounselMore. CounselMore's pricing model provides greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness, especially as your practice evolves.

Both software companies offer per-student pricing, but CounselMore stands out with a significantly lower per-student cost compared to CollegePlannerPro. CounselMore’s flexible plan allows customers to easily scale their billing up or down based on their needs, providing unmatched adaptability for growing practices. scalability. The platform is designed to adapt to your needs whether you're a solo counselor or part of a larger team. This is particularly evident in their licensing model. add licenses when more counselors are needed and remove them when they're not. This lack of information makes it difficult to assess whether CollegePlannerPro offers similar cost-saving opportunities. Through anecdotal conversations we were told that CollegePlanner Pro has an added burden of a limiting the number of Active students that can be added to an account without being forced to move to a higher price point. Because of this practitioners said they often "turned student records off" temporarily to make adjustments on other records and had to remember who to turn back on later. For this reason CounselMore's pricing structure offered greater flexibility without commitment.

CounselMore is designed to streamline operations, reduce errors, and automate many administrative tasks, such as time management, client information collection, and Google Drive sharing. These time-saving features translate to cost savings by allowing you to focus on more essential aspects of your business, like your client interactions and unique programming, without increasing overhead. These features also likely contribute to time savings. CounselMore offers a 14-day free trial, free set-up, and free live training, demonstrating a commitment to transparency and value for new users. This approach allows potential users to fully explore the platform's capabilities without any financial commitment, and get help with the initial set up.CollegePlannerPro also offers a longer free, 30-days. However, it is unclear from the sources whether CollegePlannerPro offers free live training other than tech support. With CounselMore's flexible licensing, automated features, and focus on time optimization, the potential for long-term cost savings is significant. By streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency, CounselMore helps counselors serve more students without needing to increase staff or resources proportionally, which makes it especially beneficial for practices that are looking to scale. CounselMore also provides the means to track time for both grant reporting and invoicing, which helps a business manage its money effectively. Lastly, leveraging CounselMore to deliver a business owner's proprietary curriculum creates a measurable, repeatable process. CounselMore stands out for its cost-effectiveness because of its scalable licensing, automated features, and commitment to transparency.

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