NoPaperForms Challenging Old-School Admission

A search concluded that a huge percentage of students are unable to complete the enrolment procedure. The management of enquiries becomes inconvenient and there are a lot of missed opportunities consuming time and a whole lot of money.

“Close to around Rs 3,000 crore are spent by educational institutes on marketing and out of that 20 per cent is for online. More than Rs 600 crore are being spent on online marketing and yet institutes don’t have the system to accept online applications and track ROI (return of investment) of expenditure,” said Naveen Goyal, founder & CEO, NoPaperForms.

Started in 2017, NoPaperForms has been empowering educational institutions by modifying enrolment trends in the admission process – from enquiries to enrolment. The organisation observed a scattered management across the education institutions and chose to improve the input for greater output.

The company took an initiative to disrupt the registration procedure in the country by providing enrolment solutions that are easily adaptable for an educational institute in their admission process.

Goyal said: “We are lagging behind in admission enrolment technology, while rest of the world is already using this technology. This is the time when institutions need to change and meet up the student’s expectations.”

“We are empowering the educational institutes by guiding them about the technology to increase their outreach capabilities, enhance recruitment efforts, expand customer service offerings, and improve end results. We are on a mission to digitise complete enrolment process and it is about bringing the transformation in the way institutes attract, engage and enroll students,” he added.
There is a lack of connectivity in application forms and inquiry system in majority of educational institutes in India. The Delhi-based startup provides SaaS-based enrolment automation solution that is becoming fast in real-time and infallible because of no manual intervention and allows to map the entire and current enrolment cycle.

NoPaperForms has processed around a million applications and transacted 92 crore through its platform and also saved a large amount of paper. The organisation believes in giving a user experience to all the students, who are excited to come to the platform and submit an application.
Stating the benefits on using the technology offered by the company, Goyal said, “The students have more accessibility to check and update the forms on run time basis rather than calling the institutes rapidly. It is also helping in reducing the usage of paper, and empowering the institutes to streamline and scale their admission process and optimise their marketing spent.”

The company competes with IT firms, who provide standalone ERP solutions for multiple stages of admissions in an educational institute. But NoPaperForms sets apart from them as it covers all the stages of admission on a single platform with a holistic approach.

Furthermore talking about the challenges faced, Goyal expressed: “Paper-forms and the mindset was the major challenge that we faced. We had to go and explain to institutes that why they have to remove their paper process. But with the changing technological trends in the country, we were able to change the mindset. The emerging technologies created a push towards institutions via the students that forced them to change their standard approach in enrolment process.”

The company initially invested Rs 50 lakh and has recently raised Rs 100 crore funding from Infosys. The last year revenue for NoPaperForms stands at approximately Rs 13 crore. Talking about future plans, Naveen Goyal said, “We want to digitise the whole enrolment process in tier II, III and IV cities of the country and move from Rs 10 lakh application to Rs 2-2.5 crore application in next two years by enabling more colleges and schools.”

“Once we have masses, we want to work on ‘document management’ by building a large repository that will enable student for streamline process and introduce a ‘Common Application System’ in India. We are also planning a pilot project in South East Asia and further expand globally,” he added.

NoPaperForms currently has more than 200 schools, colleges, and universities across India, including SRM Chennai, Amrita Institute Coimbatore, Shiv Nadar University, OP Jindal University, Manav Rachna School, APJ School, and Delhi Public School, among others. The company is also handling enrolment process for NMAT by GMAC (Graduate Management Admission Council) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT).