Compliance · 6 min read
The Person Asking About Admissions May Be Fifteen
Open an admissions account in April and the messages look roughly the same as any other business inbox. Questions about eligibility. Questions about fees. Someone asking whether their marks are enough.
The difference is who is typing them. Some are parents. A lot are the students themselves, and at a school that means children. Some are consultants working several families at once. Occasionally it is a current student's friend, asking on their behalf, which is a category nobody plans for.
You cannot tell which is which from a handle and a sentence, and every design decision in this post follows from that.
Three answers that never come out of an automation
A fee. Not the tuition, not the hostel charge, not "roughly what does it cost". Fee structures have components, concessions, categories, instalments and revisions, and a figure sent from an official account is read as the price. Point at the official fee page instead — the page changes when the fees change and the template does not have to.
An eligibility answer. "Yes, you qualify" and "no, you don't" are both determinations, and both will be made by a system reading a fragment of somebody's situation. A student who is told they are eligible and then is not has been misinformed by the institution. A student wrongly told they are not eligible may simply not apply, and nobody will ever find out.
Anything resembling an admission decision. Including the friendly versions. "You'd be a great fit", "with those marks you should be fine", "we'd love to have you" — each of those is heard as an indication, especially by a sixteen-year-old, and especially in April.
An encouraging automated sentence is not encouragement when it comes from an admissions account. It is read as a signal, and the reader will remember it more accurately than you will.
Do not collect what you do not need
The instinct in admissions is to build an intake — marks, board, stream, city, phone number, parent's name — because that is what the counselling team wants.
Do not do it in a DM, and especially not automatically. You may be asking a child for personal information in a public messaging app, and everything they type is then sitting in a lead record and later in a CSV somebody exported to a laptop.
- Ask nothing personal in an automated reply. No marks, no age, no address, no phone number, no photographs of documents. People will send them unprompted because they are being helpful — a template that says "please don't send documents or marksheets here" is worth more than any intake form.
- Send the official link, and let the form do the collecting. Your admissions portal already has consent wording, a parent field and a privacy notice. The DM does not, and cannot.
- Capture the minimum. A handle, the post it came from, what they typed, a timestamp. Enough to route it to a counsellor and no more.
- Decide who may export the CSV before the season starts. Leads leave as a file. There is no CRM sync. A spreadsheet of prospective students is exactly the thing that ends up attached to an email.
- Route anything that sounds distressed to a person immediately. Results season produces messages that are not about admissions at all. Put that vocabulary on the negative-keyword list and make sure there is a human route published in the bio that works when the automation is switched off.
The public reply says more than you meant
A comment automation replies in public. Under an admissions post, a warm, specific reply naming somebody tells their followers — classmates, in a lot of cases — that this person is applying to your institution, or did not get in somewhere else, or is anxious about their result.
The rule is the same one clinics use. The public half says nothing that is true of this person specifically. "Sent you the details" and nothing more. Everything personal moves into the DM where a human takes over.
Hold the unusual ones, because the season is short and loud
Admissions volume is not spread through the year. It arrives in a few weeks, at the worst possible moment, when the counselling team is least available.
Set a rate budget before the campaign post goes up. An admissions reel travels, and an uncapped automation firing at hundreds of comments an hour is how an institutional account starts looking like spam. A comment stays answerable for seven days, counted from each comment, so the queue drains long inside the window.
Set quiet hours too. Students message late at night, and a 2am reply from a university account is memorable for the wrong reason.
Deadline automations expire; the prospectus one does not
Two kinds of automation and they should never share a build.
The evergreen set answers what never changes: where the campus is, what programmes exist, where the official prospectus lives, how to reach the admissions office. Written once, correct for years, free to run forever.
The seasonal set mentions this cycle — the application window, an open day, a scholarship round. Each gets its own automation with a switch-off date written down the day it is created, because an account still promoting last year's open day in November is a bad look that nobody notices until an applicant points it out.
The habit that saves most of this: point rather than state. "The current dates are always on our admissions page" is true on every day of its life. "Applications close on the 30th" is wrong the moment the deadline extends, which it usually does.
Cost, and what it will not do
Templated replies are free and unlimited. An admissions account built the way this post describes runs almost entirely on templates, because the whole point is that the wording is fixed, approved and identical for every applicant. A credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply, one credit per reply. Free tier is 100 credits, no card; packs start at ₹499. Rising credit use during the season usually means the automation is answering things it should be routing.
It cannot check an application status, cannot see any student record, has no calendar so it cannot book a campus visit or a counselling slot, and cannot message anyone who has not written to you first. No CRM sync — leads export as CSV. No WhatsApp.
Official Graph API only: seven days per comment, twenty-four hours inside a DM thread, restarted only when the person writes again. Takeover stands the automation down the moment a counsellor replies by hand, which during admissions is exactly what you want.
If you run a coaching centre or a children's programme rather than an institution, the education-sector post and the one on children's education accounts cover the neighbouring cases. What each check does before a reply is sent is worth reading before the season, not during it.
