Salesforce Education Cloud is a must-have tool to attract and delight students with end-to-end personalized experiences. As college enrollment rates decline, it will help you attract the right students.
So, what is Education Cloud? And why should you consider it for your institution?
Salesforce Education Cloud is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform designed specifically for schools and universities, and it can help you map skills to courses, engage learners with modern experiences, and fuel student success from admission to graduation. What’s more, you can track all of your constituent relationships, from prospects and students to alumni and donors.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll go over how you can use Education Cloud features, apps, and intelligence to improve your efforts and make lifetime learning a breeze.
Overview of Salesforce Education Cloud
Education Cloud helps institutions engage with potential students when it matters most. For example, when they’re looking for information before enrolling. This creates a significant impact through one-on-one interactions. Here are a few extra benefits you can expect to get:
Get a 360-Degree View of Students
With Education Cloud, you can get a complete view of each student’s academic progress, extracurricular activities, and more. This can help you identify at-risk students and give them the nudge they need to succeed, as well as help top students achieve their goals faster.
Provide Personalized Student Support
Education Cloud uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide personalized support to each prospect, student, or alumni. This includes everything from academic advising to career counseling, making it the perfect hub to make sure every question gets answered in no time – keeping engagement at an all-time high.
Stimulate Alumni Engagement with Salesforce Education Cloud
Education Cloud boosts alumni engagement by centralizing communication and streamlining event management. The platform makes it easy to create targeted fundraising campaigns, thanks to analytics that identify potential donors and encourage participation. Online communities help foster alumni networking and collaboration. Plus, it allows institutions to track and showcase the impact of alumni contributions. So you’re always on top of who did what, and how that contributed to the institution’s bottom line.
Core Features
Admissions Connect
Admissions Connect does all the heavy lifting for admissions. It helps manage applicant information, encourages reviewer teamwork, and speeds up the whole application process. With features like Enterprise Territory Management, customizable app requirements, and Experience Cloud sites, your admissions team will work much better and much faster.
Student Success Hub
The Student Success Hub is a comprehensive platform that helps you support student success from day one. With this tool, you can provide personalized help to each student, from academic advising to career services. You can also track student progress and step in when necessary to ensure that students stay on track to graduation. This tool is perfect if your institution is struggling with low engagement rates.
Education Data Architecture
Education Data Architecture (EDA) is a community-driven, flexible data model that allows you to capture and store all of your institution’s data in one place. You can easily integrate data from multiple sources, such as your student information system, learning management system, and financial aid system. Then, you’ll be able to create a full view of each student, which can help you improve outcomes – whether that’s graduating or simply improving their academic journey.
Implementation Strategies
Choose the Right Consulting Partner
Choosing the right consulting partner is crucial for the successful implementation of Salesforce Education Cloud. Look for a partner with experience in the education industry and a deep understanding of the platform. Make sure they have a proven track record of delivering successful projects and can provide references from other institutions similar to yours (or dealing with similar challenges).
Customize Your Solution
Work with your consulting partner to customize your solution and ensure that it aligns with your institution’s existing processes and workflows. This will help you get the most out of the platform and improve the overall learning experience for your students. After all, adopting Salesforce won’t be as easy if you need to change the workflow your team is already used to.
Train Your Users
Once you’ve implemented Salesforce Education Cloud, it’s important to train your users. Provide training sessions for your staff and students to ensure they understand how to use the platform and take advantage of each feature.
One way to provide user training is through Trailhead. If you’re a dedicated Trailblazer, you know it offers a variety of courses and modules on Education Cloud. The courses cover everything from the basics to advanced topics.
You can also use Trailhead to track your team’s progress, get certified, and ensure everyone is completing the necessary training to confidently move forward.
Another way to provide user training is through in-person or virtual training sessions. These sessions can be tailored to your team’s specific needs and can be conducted by Salesforce experts or your internal trainers.
Without proper training, user adoption becomes a can of worms and reduces the impact that Salesforce Education Cloud can have on your growth, engagement, and revenue.
Integration with Existing Systems
One of the key benefits of Education Cloud is its ability to integrate with existing systems. This means that you can easily connect your student information systems (SIS), learning management systems (LMS), and other tools to create a comprehensive platform that aligns with what’s working for you.
This way, you can seamlessly plug in your SIS to access student data, including grades, attendance, and course schedules.
Plus, the tool integrates with popular LMS platforms such as Canvas and Blackboard, allowing you to easily manage course content, assignments, and assessments.
As a Salesforce product, Education Cloud offers a range of APIs and connectors that allow you to integrate with other systems and tools, such as email marketing platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and more.
Data-Driven Intelligence and Analytics
Gain insights into the performance of your institution and make data-driven decisions at every stage. With Education Cloud’s analytics dashboards, you can track everything from recruitment, admissions, learner engagement, and more.
Stakeholders, including recruiters and leadership, get access to milestone metrics. With this data at their fingertips, they can stay on track and efficiently meet their recruitment, admissions, and student goals.
Salesforce Education Cloud also includes predictive analytics tools that can help you identify at-risk students and intervene early to prevent them from dropping out. These tools use machine learning algorithms to analyze data from many sources, including student records, academic performance, and engagement metrics.
The gold is in the integration. If you get data from multiple sources, use Salesforce Education Cloud to centralize it and kickstart the action.
Success Story: How Salesforce Helped the University of Michigan-Dearborn Boost Success, Retention, and Graduation Rates
If you’re wondering whether Salesforce Education Cloud is right for your institution, you may want to check out the following success story! Facing a fragmented system with siloed technical solutions, The University of Michigan-Dearborn saw success rates falling short of their target.
To turn the situation around, they launched a strategic plan to improve student experience and address challenges in retention and graduation rates. They embraced Salesforce’s suite, (including Sales and Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and of course, Education Cloud).
Thanks to Salesforce, UM-Dearborn now promptly handles student questions across 20 offices. No more confusion or delays – they’ve got it covered. Advisors and students team up for an interactive experience, and everyone’s on the same page about what each student needs.
Retention and graduation rates are looking up as well, all thanks to Salesforce making everything more student-focused. Now, the university can tweak support, messages, and help based on what each student prefers at the time of contact, giving them a personalized roadmap for success.
This is just one of many examples of how Salesforce Education Cloud (as well as other solutions!) has helped institutions improve their processes and outcomes. If you’re interested in learning more, you can check out additional case studies and success stories on the Salesforce website.
What’s Next for Education Cloud?
Salesforce is always on the move to add more helpful features to every tool. Naturally, Education Cloud is part of the mix. In this Winter’s Release, they’ll expand the platform’s capabilities even further, so that you can make your processes more effective, day after day.
Now, what’s next for your institution?
Every touchpoint with a student is a retention opportunity. And if student wins depend on your institution’s ability to attract, engage, and delight them, Education Cloud will help you create a fully personalized experience that leads students exactly where they want to be.
