How Lincoln Bishop University transformed admissions with HubSpot

Industry
Higher Education (University)

Challenge
Lincoln Bishop University's HubSpot account had grown organically over several admissions cycles, without a scalable structure behind it. Admissions, recruitment, and marketing teams were all working in the same system but without a shared process, and every applicant's journey was recorded on their contact record rather than tracked properly. As data volumes grew, this made it increasingly difficult to see where an individual stood in their journey, and each admissions cycle had to be rebuilt from scratch rather than repeated.

Results
HubGem introduced deal pipelines so every applicant's journey could be tracked individually, brought the apprenticeships team onto HubSpot for the first time, and streamlined marketing automation across the university. The impact is already visible in the data: total applicants tracked through HubSpot grew by 13% year on year, and open day attendance is up 69% over two years.

Key products & services used
Marketing Hub Enterprise, Sales Hub Pro, HubGem Consulting Services

+13%

increase in applicants

+47%

increase in open day registrations

+69%

increase in open day attendees

+5% point

increase in show-up rate

About Lincoln Bishop University

Lincoln Bishop University (LBU) is a single-campus university in the historic centre of Lincoln, home to around 2,300 full-time students. Founded in 1862 and awarded full university status in 2012, LBU is consistently recognised for the quality of its teaching, ranking number one in the UK for student satisfaction (Complete University Guide 2027) and for teaching quality (Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide 2025). Its programmes span undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, apprenticeships and online learning, reflecting a university that is proud to serve students at every stage of their journey.

The Challenge

When LBU came to HubGem, they already had a HubSpot account, but it had grown naturally over time without the structure needed to support it. The admissions, recruitment and marketing teams were all working inside the same account, but without a shared process or a consistent way of working. Handovers between teams were unclear, and each team risked pulling in a different direction within the same system.

Rather than using dedicated objects to track applicant journeys, everything was being recorded on the contact record. That meant there was no way to separate one applicant's journey from another, or one admissions cycle from the next, and each new cycle simply overwrote the last. As application volumes grew, this made it harder and harder to keep data clean and reliable.

Without a dedicated pipeline structure, there was no straightforward way to see where an individual stood in their journey, from initial enquiry through to enrolment. Progress had to be inferred rather than tracked, and if an application was unsuccessful, there was no reliable way to understand how far it had progressed or why. On top of this, marketing automation had grown to include lists nested within lists, making the logic behind enrolments and communications difficult to follow, troubleshoot or hand over between team members.

Together, these challenges meant LBU had no consistent, documented way of running an admissions cycle. Each cycle risked being rebuilt from scratch rather than repeating a proven process, which was becoming unsustainable for a growing university managing multiple teams, programmes and intake periods at once.

The Solution

HubGem worked with LBU to move away from a contact-only approach and build a proper structure for tracking applicants, one designed to be repeated rather than rebuilt every cycle. The work spanned admissions, apprenticeships and marketing, bringing all three teams into a single, coherent CRM operation for the first time. LBU operates on Marketing Hub Enterprise and Sales Hub Pro.

The most significant change was introducing deal pipelines for applicant tracking. Every applicant now has their own deal, moving through a clearly defined set of stages, so teams can see at a glance exactly where each person sits in their journey and what needs to happen next. A student can now hold multiple deals at once, one per application, each with its own data, stage history and outcome, so if one application is unsuccessful, the team can see exactly how far it progressed without that data getting mixed up with any other record.

The apprenticeships team, who had previously been working from spreadsheets and manual inputs, were brought onto HubSpot and given their own pipeline within the same account. That means their data now lives alongside admissions and marketing, giving the university a single view of the student across every touchpoint for the first time.

HubGem also untangled LBU's existing workflows, merging overlapping automations into cleaner sequences and removing the need for lists nested within lists. With deal-based logic in place, automations could react to real pipeline stage changes rather than relying on contact-level workarounds. Alongside this, HubGem managed the migration of existing applicant data into the new deal structure and a wider data clean-up, then set up pipelines, workflows and templates designed to be cloned and reused for every new intake going forward.

"Working with HubGem has been an incredibly positive experience. It's made a significant difference to how we operate as a team, saving us time, reducing manual work and giving us far more confidence in our data."

- Lottie Turner (Marketing and Communications Lead)

The Results

Before HubGem, progress had to be inferred from notes overwritten on a contact record. Now every applicant's stage is visible in a click, and the impact of that shift is already showing up in LBU's data. Total applicants tracked through HubSpot grew from 3,848 in 2025/26 to 4,352 in 2026/27, a rise of 13%, reflecting both genuine growth in student recruitment and the improved capture and tracking that the new deal structure makes possible.

Open day data tells an equally encouraging story. Registrations grew 47% between 2023 and 2025, from 149 to 219, while attendance grew even faster, up 69% over the same period. The show-up rate has held steady and improved too, from 59% to 64%, suggesting the growth in interest is converting into genuine footfall rather than just more sign-ups. Being able to report on open day performance in this way is itself a product of HubGem's work. The data now exists to measure what was previously unmeasurable.

For the wider university, the change has been felt across every team. As Lottie Turner at Lincoln Bishop University shared in a five-star review: "Working with HubGem has been an incredibly positive experience, and we can't speak highly enough of the support we've received. It has made a significant difference to how we operate as a team, saving us time, reducing manual work and giving us far more confidence in the accuracy of our data and the effectiveness of our communication journeys. We couldn't recommend Leah and the whole HubGem team enough. Their expertise, support and friendly approach have been outstanding from start to finish."

As Leah reflects, the real complexity of working with a university like LBU lies in its scale:
"As a university, the complexity lies in the number of teams using the CRM and its data, and the intricacies between not only how each user works, but how each team works and then how this fits in with one another."