Cloud for Good partnered with a large community college looking to create the technology transformation necessary for providing prospective and current students, staff, institutional partners, community partners, and parents with exceptional experiences. Before those experiences could be created, the community college wanted to create a robust strategic roadmap establishing intentional steps to success with its technology.
Establishing the Need for a Technology Transformation
Before partnering with Cloud for Good, the community college had already implemented a baseline configuration of Salesforce. The foundation of the implementation began as an integration with their student information system to support subsidized college education, but the solution wasn’t being utilized to its full potential.
The community college engaged Cloud for Good in charting a vision for how Salesforce could support more profound engagement with students, staff, and faculty. The initiative began with interviews with over 500 people across the institution on the functionality required in a new CRM for Recruitment, Enrollment, and Case Management. Across 24 sessions exploring technology needs, the community college and Cloud for Good sought to understand better how to realize a grander vision of a more robust CRM capable of communicating, interacting, and sustaining long-term relationships with students and customer groups.
Tailoring a Roadmap Unique to Client Needs
Because the community college was a multi-college system, the plan had a layer of added complexity. While all colleges have the same common goals, the procedures, methods, and subcultures working toward those goals were disparate in various ways. Separate business processes, location-specific standards, and many data silos created the potential to get in the way of streamlined communication and data unification.
The strategic roadmap would be the first time this institution created business processes that were in alignment across all schools in the system and the first time all colleges and the district were brought together to collaborate at the subject matter expert and management level to create standard processes, functions, and harmonize business processes.
In-Person Working Sessions
Cloud for Good worked closely with the community college to facilitate these processes. This started with working sessions, visiting the campuses on-site and listening to the input of stakeholders across the organization. The goal was for Cloud for Good to deeply understand what the institution needed its technology to do to define what the system would look like, how it would operate, and how the staff and faculty would interact with the solution day in and day out.
Business Capabilities Heat Map
A business capabilities heat map was created to note pain points and rank feature/functionality priority throughout the discovery process. The needs of each school, executive leadership, board members, and strategic engagement management members were clarified through this process. Spread across low, medium, and high priorities, a wide range of departments, services, and focuses, from recruiting, enrollment, and case management to financial aid, marketing, and student success, were mapped in order of urgency of the need.
The Road Ahead
The effort Cloud for Good put into understanding the institution’s needs resulted in a roadmap to Salesforce success. This helped the institution plan phased releases over the next few years, enabling planning for budget and resource allocation.
The community college then worked with Cloud for Good to begin implementing the plan, including:
Release 1
Release 1 would focus on implementing enrollment management to empower the institution’s enrollment coaches to help past, present, and future students. Focus areas of this release would include contact, campaign, and relationship management. This would create flexible processes for dynamic enrollment case-loading, a more intuitive enrollment process, and personalized communication through real-time data connected in an integrated system.
Release 2
Updates and optimizations to the existing Salesforce org would be made at each step, leading toward Release 2, which was prioritizing recruitment and prospecting. Prospect, events, and communications management would be implemented to engage prospective students. Following this, predictive analytics, dual credit course management, and a new partner experience would then help recruit those students and successfully move them through their academic journey from prospect to alumni. In addition, case management capabilities would result in a more efficient call center, better tracking of referrals, and additional communication channels.
Future Releases
Looking further, the strategic Salesforce roadmap will incorporate career readiness and exploration solutions, an enterprise data warehouse Salesforce migration, a migration off of Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge, scholarship awarding and tracking, and donor and alumni management.
The partnership between Cloud for Good and the community college marked a transformative step towards redefining how technology could enhance interactions and relationships within the institution. By laying a comprehensive strategic roadmap, Cloud for Good is helping the college harness the full potential of Salesforce, ensuring that its technology would both support and elevate engagement with students, staff, and community partners.
As the community college moves forward with these implementations, the vision crafted with Cloud for Good promises to not only improve operational efficiency, but to also deliver exceptional experiences for all stakeholders. This ongoing collaboration underscores a commitment to leveraging technology to drive long-term success and support the institution’s mission of fostering educational excellence and community engagement.
Interested in a strategic roadmap engagement? Contact Cloud for Good today.
