|
51%
Fewer Learner Dropoffs |
67% SMS Response Rate |
2-5% Previous Email Open Rate |
Weeks Time Saved, Monthly |
Per Scholas is a national nonprofit that provides tuition-free tech training across 25+ cities, preparing thousands of learners each year for careers in cybersecurity, IT support, software engineering, and more. When their admissions team realized that email alone wasn’t enough to keep prospective learners moving through a multi-step enrollment process, they turned to Sakari. The results were immediate. Response rates jumped from single digits to over 67%, dismissed learners dropped by 51%, and the team got back weeks of time they’d been spending on manual outreach.
Per Scholas doesn’t charge tuition. Their courses are free. But free doesn’t mean casual. Their programs run 15 weeks, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It’s a full-time commitment, and the admissions process reflects that.
Before a learner ever sits down in a classroom (or logs into a remote session), they go through multiple stages. They attend an admissions overview on Zoom, complete a 30-question assessment, submit a tech prep work assignment, and then book and complete a one-on-one behavioral interview. At any given time, the New York City admissions team is working with 200 to 300 applicants across different stages of this pipeline.
The problem was that people kept going dark between steps.
Before Sakari, the admissions team relied on email and phone calls to push applicants forward. And it wasn’t working. Email open rates hovered around 2 to 5%. People would open a message, get distracted, and never come back to it. Important next steps got buried in crowded inboxes. Some applicants completed an overview but never took the assessment. Others passed the assessment but never submitted their tech prep. And a significant number of people who had accepted a seat in an upcoming course would quietly drop out the day training started, or the day after, without ever replying to a single email about it.
WHAT WASN’T WORKING
The admissions team understood the root cause. Per Scholas serves a younger, career-transitioning population. Many of their applicants don’t want to sit on a phone call. They’re juggling jobs, family responsibilities, and daily life. Email just wasn’t how these people preferred to communicate. The team wanted to meet learners where they actually were.
“We just wanted to try something different. We understood that in our age demographic, some people just do not want to do traditional means of communication. We wanted to listen.”
—Noel Challenger
Associate, Recruitment & Admissions, Per Scholas
Per Scholas started using Sakari in late 2024, and they were strategic about how they rolled it out. Rather than trying to overhaul their entire communication flow at once, they started by addressing a specific, high-impact problem.
The first use case was an early engagement plan for remote learners who had already accepted a seat in an upcoming course. This was the group that was costing them the most. People would confirm they were starting, and then simply not show up on day one. And because these dropouts happened at the last minute, the team had no time to fill those empty seats.
The approach was simple. Before a course started, the team would send a Sakari text to every confirmed remote learner asking them to reply “yes” or “no” to confirm they were still ready to start. That was it. A direct, low-friction question that took seconds to answer.
“It’s much easier to look at your text message and just say yes or no. Typing out a whole email to say you’re not ready is a lot harder. We wanted to make people feel more comfortable.”
The results were clear. A direct, easy-to-respond-to communication method removed any hesitation. Per Scholas received the immediate feedback they needed to determine interest, address lack of interest, and move ahead with a path to higher conversion.
The team quickly expanded into their second use case: moving applicants through the full admissions pipeline. Now they use Sakari to reach people at every stage. Someone attended the admissions overview but hasn’t taken their assessment? They get a text. Someone passed the assessment but hasn’t submitted their tech prep assignment? Text. Someone’s been qualified for a while but hasn’t responded to email follow-ups? A simple message goes out: “Hi, we saw you’re interested in the IT support program. Are you still interested? Yes or no?”
The team runs 10 to 15 Sakari campaigns per month, each one targeted to a specific segment of their admissions pipeline.
Each campaign is different depending on where the learner is in their journey, but the format is consistent. Short, direct, conversational. The team pulls a Salesforce report, exports the list as a CSV, and uploads it directly into Sakari. From there, they can reach dozens of people in minutes instead of spending hours making individual calls.
And the responses speak for themselves.
The shift was dramatic. Where email was reaching 2 to 5% of applicants, Sakari texts consistently bring in responses from over two-thirds of the people contacted. In a recent campaign of 75 text messages, 47 to 50 people replied. That’s roughly a 67% response rate, on a channel the team had never used before late 2024.
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2-5%
Email Open Rate before Sakari |
67% SMS Response Rate with Sakari |
51% Fewer Dismissed Learners year over year |
The most significant impact was on learner retention. For Per Scholas’s remote training tracks, the dismissed learner rate dropped by 51% between 2024 and 2025. That’s a direct result of the early engagement plan, where a simple text message before class starts surfaces the people who aren’t actually committed so the team can either re-engage them or fill their seats.
Before Sakari, people who were going to drop out just disappeared. They didn’t reply to emails. They didn’t pick up the phone. The admissions team had no way to identify flight risks until it was too late. With a quick text, the team now finds out within hours who’s in and who’s not. Suddenly the team was able to move from reactive, to proactive.
“Some people were too afraid or too stuck to reply to an email saying they weren’t ready. A text message is more informal. It makes people feel more comfortable being honest.”
Before Sakari, the admissions team was reaching out to applicants manually. Individual calls, individual texts from personal phones, one-off emails. The team estimates that Sakari saves them weeks of cumulative time each month. What used to require hours of dialing and typing now takes minutes.
One detail the team noticed is that learners treat Sakari messages like a normal text conversation. There’s no friction, no confusion, no complaints. People just reply. The team gets responses like “Yes, I’m ready to start” or “Actually, I need to defer to a later cohort” without any awareness that they’re interacting with a messaging platform. It just feels like someone from Per Scholas texted them.
This is where Sakari Inbox plays a key role. By centralizing every conversation in one collaborative inbox, the team can respond faster, stay aligned, and maintain a consistent, human experience no matter who is replying.
Per Scholas is already using Sakari across multiple campuses beyond New York City, and the team sees room to go further. They’re currently integrating Sakari with HubSpot and Slack, and are exploring a direct Salesforce integration through Zapier to streamline their workflow even more.
HubSpot workflows are next on the list, which would allow the team to automate some of their stage-based outreach instead of pulling manual reports.
For a program where every empty seat represents a person who could have launched a tech career, the stakes are meaningful. And the admissions team now has a channel that actually reaches the people they’re trying to help.
“Emails get thrown to the wayside. People open them and then go about their day and forget. I would rather prefer a text message than an email any day. I’m looking at it from my own point of view as well.”
KEY RESULTS
SAKARI FEATURES USED