Higher education institutions today are receiving more data across more channels than ever. Luckily for these institutions and their constituents, there are even more tools to leverage that data for advanced visualization, analytics, and predictive analysis of an institution’s data.
This data visibility helps institutions connect the data dots, leading to a better understanding of target audiences, more modernized, engaging experiences for constituents, strengthened marketing efforts, and greater advancement proficiency.
When institutions genuinely understand data and see the full, zoomed-out view of constituents, the education space benefits from more efficient identification of pain points among constituents. These benefits lead to more intuitive communication on an individually customized basis, paving the way toward greater impact on the mission.
What is Data Cloud?
One of the most exciting data solutions now available is Salesforce’s Data Cloud, the fastest-growing organic innovation in Salesforce’s history.
Data Cloud can stand alone in its own Salesforce Instance or be added to an existing CRM, providing a safe, secure, and scalable foundation for institutional data. No matter the size of the institution or its mission, Data Cloud is designed to support and scale alongside.
Data Cloud does so through real-time data analysis to transform constituent experiences, allowing organizations to deepen relationships with students, staff, and faculty and create engaging experiences backed by data. Data Cloud unifies constituent data and leverages tools like AI and automation to develop actionable insights. This insight is achieved by connecting data at scale from any app, device, or real-time stream.
Salesforce users can collect, store, and manage all constituent data in one place and achieve a comprehensive view of each individual’s interactions with the institution across different systems in the technology landscape. This level of insight then allows users to create tailored experiences that harmonize data, empower internal staff, and better engage the constituent.
Data Cloud connects seamlessly to the Salesforce CRM, Amazon S3 Storage, Azure Cloud Storage, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Personalization, Intelligence, Google Cloud Storage, and SFTP. Data ingestion streams support bringing in data sources from across the organization and harmonizing them into unified constituent profiles.
What You Can Do with Data Cloud for Advancement
Advancement is the lifeblood of higher education and ensures institutions can provide education to students for generations to come. Finding trends in data through technology helps us better understand alumni relations, plan for effective utilization of incoming revenue, and leverage preferred constituent communication data to reach people mindfully. These benefits of leveraging data trends are effective ways to help increase engagement and advancement efficiency.
Data Cloud empowers an institution’s advancement efforts to better track and analyze key metrics, such as what departments and initiatives are most important to the respective alumni members. Pulling in data from your marketing automation, website, social, and CRM can help define precise segments, recommend funds of interest to prospective sustainers, or identify your next major donor.
Data Cloud’s Higher Education Application
Data Cloud is a data platform powering the entire Salesforce Customer 360 experience. Through this interconnected web of Salesforce solutions united by data, institutions can better utilize data to deliver seamless, highly personalized, adaptive experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce while meeting the often-changing needs of constituents in real-time. As a result, institutions and educators unlock a deeper understanding of data and the strategies driven by that data that help optimize advancement opportunities.
This optimization is achieved on several fronts, notably by driving fundraising productivity, personalizing alumni engagement, and streamlining operations. Data Cloud helps institutions increase donor affinity, participation, and giving through multi-channel fundraising and stewardship campaigns that scale at need and are powered by the clear view of data achieved through the Cloud.
The data is then easily customizable and tracked after pulling in communication preferences and information across traditional email, social, web, and mobile channels. Advancement departments can then create informed strategies using the consolidated data that surfaces insights, measures campaign effectiveness, and tracks ROI across clouds and platforms.
4 Key Reasons to Use Salesforce Data Cloud for Advancement
Unified View of Constituents
Higher education institutions interact with various alumni members and beneficiaries every single day. With Data Cloud, institutions can harness the power of real-time data from any source (website visits, email campaign engagement, social media, etc.) to build a unified view of each constituent’s interests, preferences, and digital behavior. Institutions can then leverage that data in real-time to better understand constituents and inform every subsequent interaction.
Personalized Constituent Engagement
With a unified view of constituents, institutions can use Data Cloud to personalize interactions with ease. For example, in just a few clicks, institutions can send personalized messages to alumni members based on their unique giving history or tailor-crafted marketing messages based on website browsing. Every campaign, journey, and moment shared between the institution and the constituent benefits from Data Cloud’s data connectivity.
That connectivity helps to achieve a sense of identity resolution across an institution’s efforts. Identity resolution creates tangible alignment across various profiles from the CRM, web activity, social media metrics, and more to generate a comprehensive picture of each giving individual.
More Targeted Marketing
Data Cloud can also help build targeted marketing efforts by identifying the right audience for suitable campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor. Say an institution wants to create a segment of high-value donors who have given a certain amount in the last year or a segment of a particular socially active sect of alumni members that might be interested in an upcoming event.
These hypotheticals become realities through Data Cloud’s ability to seamlessly empower users to define, filter, and activate segments. Going a step further, institutions can also leverage Data Cloud’s unified customer data profiles to tailor advancement experiences automatically with Salesforce Einstein.
Deeper Insights and Analytics
Data Cloud unlocks invaluable insights and analytics that can help drive data-driven decisions. These analytics are tracked intuitively across a variety of constituent engagement metrics, such as email open rates, website visits, and social media activity. Having access to these metrics then helps institutions fine-tune campaigns to maximize the effectiveness of marketing efforts over time. Harmonizing and activating data through Data Cloud allows institutions to get more returns from one of their most valuable assets: their data.
Want to learn more about how Salesforce Data Cloud can create quantifiable change for nonprofit organizations? Contact Cloud for Good today.
