salesforce for higher education experts

salesforce for higher education experts

Leveraging Salesforce Solutions in Higher Education: A Comprehensive Guide for Experts

1. Introduction to Salesforce in Higher Education

Many regional players have claimed parts of the higher education landscape. Fortunately, only one player lives at the intersection of higher ed expertise and cloud-based technology solutions: Salesforce. To use Salesforce in higher education is to pragmatically leverage cloud-based back-end components, such as data organization or workflow automations, in order to offer better educational experiences or better support for learners or more efficient business practices. Mass adoption of dozens of Salesforce tools has changed how much of the world’s business gets done. In a higher ed context, moving to Salesforce typically involves creating a unified technology-facilitated experience for various campus constituents (prospective, current, former students, faculty, staff, etc.) supported by a single base that drives many of these interactions. Given the technology’s SaaS platform, adopting Salesforce might also result in fewer upgrades and better interconnections, and most clients of the “Customer Success Platform” develop new competencies related to valuing data, designing engaging experiences, and delivering on mission.

Introduction Leveraging Salesforce solutions in higher education often relies on subject matter experts. This document is a comprehensive, expert-oriented guide. It assumes some familiarity with CRM candidates, business processes, technology possibilities, and higher education practices, weaving them together with an expert understanding of Salesforce solutions. The conveners and co-authors recognize and welcome additional voices, especially end users who can speak to their lived experiences with Salesforce in higher education. We acknowledge that our expertise and experiences are often confined to our own contexts, so this guide is offered as a starting point. Ultimately, it is the wisdom and buy-in of the community that will keep this resource relevant and impactful.

2. Key Benefits and Use Cases in Higher Education

While Salesforce is today applied in areas as diverse as gaming, museum curation, and space exploration, the portfolio of higher education advancement alternatives is particularly rich. Public and professional-facing domains in any Salesforce CRM system, whether developed afresh or hosted in consumer clouds, exclusively offer extensive Salesforce education and use cases, capturing some 12% of all Salesforce.org consultations. Major public-hosted products in the field include the Health & Wellness Centers product created with the entire international 34-campus California State University system as well as the Minnesota State College and Universities (Minn State) system. A potential application is system-wide student service platforms, either as team enhancement or for students dealing with multiple campuses. Other use cases would be the expansion of system or campus internship or employment hubs. Based on the needs identified through the initial experiences within JER, potential use case partners include the 23-campus California State University system, Maricopa Community Colleges, and the University of Washington.

Wildly popular amid the growing number of college and university systems worldwide, Salesforce has amassed a broad suite of solutions beneficial to the higher education enterprise. Salesforce is valued for offerings designed with extensive input from schools and systems, focusing on contemporary needs. Benefits which can be gained below inherently derive from either cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or directly higher education-specific tracks, depths, and capacity. Ultimately, institutions can leverage Salesforce with assured scalability and expansion. Secure data warehousing and holistic views facilitate fast analysis and decision-making across any set of data elements. Layered customization or out-of-the-box compatibility promotes brand or system-wide standardization. Central storage connects academics, recruitment, retention, advancement, marketing, enterprise resource planning, and customer experience. Lack of platform silos and comprehensive single access control exceed the scope of more conventional institutional CRMs.

3. Best Practices for Implementing and Customizing Salesforce in Higher Education

Once the basic principles and aspirations behind Salesforce are sorted, installation is a walk in the park. To be sure, at times it will feel like an impossible project, trying to install Salesforce and still keep the wheels on day-to-day projects. It can be tough, but our advice to people is, if you can possibly lock into a three- to five-year top-down sequence at which you, as a campus or a unit, are describing how you are going to implement it, it’s going to bring you the strength you need to devote that two in the morning. Part of the technique in doing this is to start with one or two manageable use cases. For those new to the tool, this phase will finish being your Kickstarter. Now’s the opportunity to get your “win” on the elevator. Releasing neat little things causes people to go, “Wow! That’s pretty sweet. What’s your next thing?” At this time, the trick becomes anticipating and managing stakeholders quickly. You don’t want to make any huge decisions to the dismay of the individuals that need it and should talk. This is a huge political effort! Recognize the requirements and stakeholders for the reporting, research, and data analytics to recognize what is important in those design decisions. It’s always about the details.

Finally, Salesforce for Higher Ed is extremely customizable and can meet the specific needs of campuses and institutions. What does the world of work look like at your school? What are your dreams and your barriers? Who are the strategic partners on your campus that can help drive your project? Answering these questions is more crucial than knowing your IT resources, even though they are an essential component. Jumping to the execution before developing the vision or theory is like placing software on top of a pile of hay. It’s just going to sink. In addition, when it comes time to choose a vendor, that’s likely where you can puzzle out some of the questions around implementation. It’s at this phase that you can ask vendors how they’re going to ensure data integrity as they lay Salesforce on top of what you already have. How will they map that disaster recovery plan? Facing these questions at the beginning allows you to bring more safety to the conversation.

4. Advanced Features and Integrations for Higher Education Institutions

Push notifications or task scheduler-like functionality could be built into Salesforce to automate tasks. This will save Report Writer or Admin from waiting for a report to be run before they can do the next step in their process. Advanced folders allow for a different type of query grouping. The logical organization is one folder for a record, with one or more steps in the folder based on record lifecycle. Salesforce comes with a set of integration possibilities, primarily with third-party apps. First Party apps are apps hosted and managed entirely by Salesforce and are 100% native to the platform. It means that the app is written in Salesforce’s own programming language, Apex, and uses Salesforce’s UI framework, Lightning. Additionally, First Party Apps can use the core features of Salesforce such as reporting, creating list views, dashboards, and workflow rules. Some examples of first-party apps include the Sales and Service objects. Give an example of a first-party app that administrators can introduce in the BASE system to improve university operations.

One simple yet effectively integrated feature is the ability to enable content in objects via a checkbox field and report. For example, creating an application object for a particular cycle and all records that are associated with this cycle, and by doing so, the admin can enable the reports after the cycle ends without creating a hidden metadata to compare the roll-up summaries. After the features are built on the core, it should have baked-in UI, folders, and reports to support them. Integration with Outlook is a great option that can help to harmonize the various features available to extend university case management support.

5. Case Studies and Success Stories in Higher Education

In this final section of the eBook, I want to provide some case studies and success stories for Salesforce in higher education. It is my hope that by providing these examples of how institutions of higher learning have been able to leverage Salesforce to address some of their unique institutional challenges, readers can conceptualize how to leverage the technological solution in their own contexts. By sharing these stories, I also want to provide some nuanced examples of the outcomes that were achieved so that others who may be interested can think critically about the possibilities that may be available in leveraging these solutions. If you have further questions about how Salesforce could be leveraged on your campus, I would encourage you to read further or reach out to these institutions directly to learn more.

Given the complex and multifaceted needs of institutions of higher learning, as well as their diverse populations of students, faculty, staff, and administrators, attempting to implement one-size-fits-all solutions is both challenging and unrealistic. That is why this eBook has been a comprehensive guide to the wide array of solutions that Salesforce offers, particularly to inspire collaboration and event management, streamline marketing communications, leverage data to enhance student engagement and retention, and develop data governance and dashboards for administrators. Some of these solutions have been utilized as a unique strategy of a single individual institution, while others represent a growing trend for communities, territory leads, or regional groups of institutions to make data-informed, inter-institutional decisions about their programs, enrollments, and territories.

5. Case studies and success stories in higher education