Written by Gianna Weissensel
St. Francis College is a private four-year college in the heart of Brooklyn, NY rooted in a commitment to academic excellence, compassionate hospitality, and ethical leadership. Founded by the Franciscan Brothers of Brooklyn and inspired by the ideals and teachings of Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi, St. Francis College’s mission is to prepare students to serve and thrive in a global community and help shape a more just society by providing a first-class, high-quality education within the reach of individuals of all racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, with a special focus on working-class New Yorkers.
St. Francis College offers students a comprehensive, personalized education, while staying firmly planted in its Franciscan values of community, collaboration, and connection. Its diverse team of faculty is known for its strong focus on Accounting, Economics, and Finance—with its Accounting program being ranked #33 in the country’s best accounting programs. With a strong focus on career-driven education, St. Francis College offers fully accredited Nursing and Education programs, along with dynamic programs in healthcare, mental health counseling, communications, and criminal justice—equipping students with the skills and knowledge to excel in high-demand fields.
The Opportunity
Following a decision to move away from a standard legacy Student Information System (SIS), St. Francis College invested in and implemented Salesforce to field admissions and applications better and communicate more effectively with students. When St. Francis College’s Vice President of Enrollment Management & Community Relations, Rob Oliva, joined the Enrollment Management team in the Fall of 2017, the initial Salesforce implementation had been completed. However, Oliva realized the College needed a resource to provide additional necessary Salesforce support and expertise.
“At St. Francis College, it is our commitment to be better, faster, and fairer in everything that we do, and the CRM is a tremendous part of that,” said Oliva. “Very early on, I realized that the College needed to hire an expert in Salesforce who could get into the system, understand how it works, and work towards improving internal processes at St. Francis College for better and stronger long-term impact.”
The College subsequently hired a CRM Specialist who had the Salesforce certifications and skills needed to get into Salesforce and then help match the CRM to St. Francis College’s internal processes, improve those processes, and create more streamlined application processes so that students could receive quicker information about the College, quicker admissions decisions, and faster and clearer communications. Eventually, when the CRM Specialist left the College in 2023, Oliva sought to fill that gap in support. Cloud for Good and St. Francis College had collaborated previously in 2019-2020 on an integration and configuration of Marketing Cloud and Oliva was recommended Cloud for Good’s Managed Services.
The Solutions
“Cloud for Good gave us a proposal that ensured that we had an account manager who would oversee the entire program and someone who would do hands-on work with our team on a regular basis,” Oliva reflected when the College signed with Cloud for Good’s Managed Services practice.
Following the departure of St. Francis’ CRM Specialist in 2023, St. Francis College used Cloud for Good’s Managed Services to receive crucial Salesforce Administrator and CRM support to ensure continued delivery of positive user experience, continuity of processes for both internal and external stakeholders, and to continue to provide the College best practices for the use of its Salesforce org. The support provided included:
Updating St. Francis College’s 2025-2026 Application for Admission
Cloud for Good collaborated with St. Francis College business users to do a thorough review of the existing application for admission to ensure that students were having a positive experience, and that the College was collecting the right data points to best serve the applicants.
This process included adding, removing, and updating questions along with the related picklist values to streamline the application. In addition, new sections to the application were included to provide descriptive text and links to help guide a student through the flow with the goal of reducing barriers to applicants completing the application quickly. Another goal was to help reduce inbound calls and emails from students about the application which allowed the enrollment team to focus on other types of student engagement.
Cloud for Good established a timeline for several rounds of testing before the go-live of the new application cycle. The changes to the application were also documented in a way to allow updates and tracking for future admission years.
Revamping and Documenting Lead Import Process
Cloud for Good and St. Francis College collaborated to improve and document the College’s process for importing leads into Salesforce. Cleaning up the import process was an important initiative to help St. Francis College reach its overarching goals of enhanced duplicate management and the ability to have richer data to nurture prospective applicants through the pipeline.
“Cloud for Good worked with us to ensure that any inquiries or leads coming in through an RFI through 3rd party providers come seamlessly into the CRM,” shared Oliva. “This way, we could then put leads through the admissions, pipeline, and moves management. Cloud for Good also assisted us with any updates, reports, anything that was necessary to fix and update records, to improve processes, and some low-level tasks to ensure that we operate much better.”
The documentation Cloud for Good created on the various lead imports provided training for St. Francis College team members to eventually own this process.
International Student Application
Cloud for Good worked on the implementation of St. Francis College’s international student application and integrating that application into Salesforce. This work included providing data tables and codes to the third-party international agency used by St. Francis to bring in international students as well as extensive testing of the integration. Over the past year, the scope of this project expanded from graduate international students to include the undergraduate population as well, which required close collaboration with the College’s various partners to ensure that the appropriate changes were made to account for the nuances between the two groups.
“The success of that project is defined by the students who enroll at the College and the corresponding revenue that those students bring into our institution,” said Oliva. “So ensuring that we created one application for international students, working with an enrollment manager to ensure that the project was managed accordingly, and that the integration of that application happened in the right way was really important.”
Acceptance Letter Project
St. Francis College sought to streamline its freshmen acceptance process to achieve their goal of getting admission decisions in the hands of their applicants sooner. For this project, Cloud for Good created a Salesforce flow that looks for certain key criteria to be met in an applicant who qualifies for admission and uses a matrix to award them a corresponding merit scholarship amount. The flow also generates an acceptance email that is automatically sent to an applicant through Salesforce. This process has reduced the time it takes from application submission to admission notification drastically, which is a positive benefit both for the College in that it eliminates manual work, and for the student who receives the great news that they are officially part of the St. Francis Terrier family sooner.
“Cloud for Good spent an extensive amount of time working on the automation of our undergraduate domestic acceptance process,” said Oliva. “The acceptance letter project has created efficiencies for us and quicker decisions, which aligns with our goal for our admissions processes to be better, faster, and fairer.”
Training a New CRM Manager and Best Practices
St. Francis College looks to Cloud for Good for guidance, best practices, and validation on many of its actions. As such, an important goal of its Managed Services engagement included Cloud for Good partnering with and training St. Francis College’s incoming part-time CRM Manager.
A pillar of Managed Services provides continued enablement for clients, which includes ongoing training and documentation of all the work being done to be able to set up end-users for continued success. Cloud for Good has closely participated in the onboarding of the new CRM Manager and meets weekly to review tickets, set priorities, provide guidance, and serve as a technical resource.
“Part of the work that we are doing right now is to ensure that our new, current CRM Manager is part of every process, every decision, or every review of work that needs to get done,” said Oliva. “It is my vision to ensure that with the best practices, the hard work, the dedication, and the technical expertise of the Cloud for Good team passes directly on to the internal resource that we have.”
The Results
“I initially thought that our CRM Specialist’s departure would set us back,” said Oliva, “but I would say that thanks to Cloud for Good’s partnership, we didn’t take a step back at all. In fact, we took many steps in the right direction. The teamwork, the partnership, and the collaboration is what you want in a partner.”
St. Francis College was so pleased with the work Cloud for Good performed that the College signed another Managed Services renewal to continue the partnership.
“Cloud for Good was an extension of our team and was able to get us through a time when we thought we were going to be stuck with that gap of support. Cloud for Good certainly stepped to the plate for us. And that’s really the reason why we renewed that second time and third time,” Oliva added.
As a result of Cloud for Good’s Managed Services, St. Francis College has:
- Enrollment growth in international student applications and graduate student applications
- Improved its process for importing leads
- Streamlined both its application process and admission decision process
- Built a knowledge base of trainings to ensure cross-team functionality
Oliva had great praise and positive feedback for Cloud for Good and its Managed Services. “I can’t speak more highly of the work that Cloud for Good has done with us. It is clear that they are experts within the CRM space and they are experts in higher education and they understood our need to be a Higher Ed provider of tech support and CRM support. My team had developed such a great comfort with Cloud for Good because they understood basic Higher Ed concepts. And because they understood the basic Higher Ed concepts, they were able to take their Salesforce technical expertise and understanding that even that overlay of enrollment directly on top of Salesforce allowed St. Francis College to be successful and to accomplish the daily tasks at hand, and more strategic things to set us up for long term success.”
Oliva added, “The Cloud for Good team has dedicated countless hours to ensure that everyone on our team who engaged with them, was served the best possible customer service, and was taught the right way to go about doing things,” said Oliva. “Cloud for Good listened to our feedback, took what the dialogue was to make better decisions for St. Francis College as it relates to our process. It is almost as if the members of the Cloud for Good team were employees of St. Francis College. That’s how much pride they put into their work. That’s how seriously they took the work and that’s the type of ownership that you want in a mutually beneficial relationship like this one. The project management, the weekly meetings, the interfacing with other third-party providers that support our applications, our CRM, and our database has been incredible. You don’t have to ask twice. The Cloud for Good team has always been there for St. Francis College.”
To learn more about St. Francis College, visit www.sfc.edu.
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