Every Education Fair Produces a Stack of Business Cards That Goes Nowhere
You spend three days at NAFSA or a regional agent summit. You collect sixty business cards, have forty meaningful conversations, make promises to follow up with programme details. You fly home with the cards in a zip-lock bag. Two weeks later, half of them are unsorted on your desk and you've already followed up with the ones who sent you an email first — the ones who didn't need the follow-up anyway. The agents who were genuinely interested but passive, the prospective students who asked all the right questions and then handed you their card as they walked away — those contacts are degrading in value every day they stay unrecorded.
This template is the system that exists between the fair and the follow-up email.
Contact Category and Program Interest: The Two Fields That Route Everything
Contact Category — potential student, agent, or other. This single field determines the entire downstream process. An agent contact triggers a different follow-up workflow than a direct student inquiry: agent contacts need commission structure information, partnership agreements, and co-branded marketing materials. Student contacts need program-specific fee schedules, visa guidance, and accommodation options. Mixing them in the same undifferentiated contact list is how both groups get the wrong message.
Program 1 and Program 2 capture the specific academic interest: Intensive English Program, Conditional Admissions, Bachelor's, Master's/Doctorate, Pre-MBA, American Law and Legal English. A prospective student who asks about CAP (Conditional Admissions) and mentions they want to study Business is a fundamentally different lead than one who wants IEP and is planning to transfer to a community college. The When will you begin your studies field adds the time dimension — a contact starting in September requires immediate action in March; a contact starting in January next year goes into a nurture sequence.
Event Name, City, Country, Date: Where the Contact Was Made
Four fields that geo-tag and time-stamp the encounter. When you filter contacts by Event Name six months later, you can evaluate which fairs produced enrolled students and which produced conversation without conversion. City and Country of Event let you build regional pipeline analysis — which source markets are generating qualified inquiries versus which generate volume without yield.
Photo of Business Card (stored as a text field for the file reference) solves the data entry problem at the fair itself. You photograph the card, reference it in the record, and do the full transcription later when you're back at a desk. The card is preserved even if the physical version gets lost in transit.
Date follow-up email sent is the accountability field. Without it, "I'll follow up" becomes the intention that never becomes the action. With it, you can filter contacts where this field is empty and work the list in order of event date — oldest first, before they've already enrolled somewhere else.