Salesforce’s reimagined Education Cloud has made a profound impact on the sector since its unveiling in the spring of 2023. By bringing in best practices from other industries, Salesforce has widened the scope of innovation benefiting education clients to include greater capabilities, such as case management, robust automations, program management, care plans, and more.
Education Cloud is now part of Salesforce industries, which translates to the education space receiving the same access to products and services that healthcare or public sector clients benefit from. New products, like Einstein GPT or Data Cloud, have been made available more quickly and have helped clients stay fleet-footed as the education space continues to shift and evolve.
To better gauge the impact the new Education Cloud is making on higher education institutions today, Cloud for Good reached out to three clients—Babson College, Boise State University, and Old Dominion University—to hear first-hand how these innovations are leading to quantifiable progress.
What pain points associated with your previous technology led you to pursue the reimagined Education Cloud?
Babson College (Nancy Doherty, Deputy Chief Information Officer): Over the past several years, we recognized the aging of our advancement technology [before Salesforce] and noted several common themes that highlighted limitations, many related to manual processes and disconnected data. Our pursuit of advancement with Salesforce supports Babson’s vision for a fully connected campus.
Boise State University (Brian Bolt, Assistant Vice President, Deputy Chief Information Officer and Susan Shadle, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies): We have a lot of people and offices set up to support students, but they are not intentionally or systematically connected. This has required the student to take action and reach out to whatever unit is most appropriate to provide them with support. While we can, and do, use email and other methods to refer students from one office to another, there is no system connecting the student to support across units.
Further, we had no intentional system supporting academic advisors on campus, which meant each college advising office had developed its own workarounds and tech-based solutions. These systems were insufficiently connected to systems that could help advisors be more proactive in supporting students.
Old Dominion University (Kirk Dewyea, Associate Vice President of Administration for Digital Learning):
The decision to adopt Salesforce for recruitment and admissions and student success was prompted by challenges stemming from prior technologies. In 2018, we merged three CRMs into Salesforce/TargetX. By 2022, our focus had expanded towards enhancing student success and retention. While the TargetX add-on facilitated recruitment and admissions, it fell short in scalability and campus-wide functionality. Our objective was to establish a seamless student and external partner experience across their entire journey.
What does the new Education Cloud provide at your institution? How is it helping to rectify those previous pain points?
Babson College: Education Cloud supports collaboration with systems designed for enrollment, and experiences, and soon we will be optimizing advancement operations on Salesforce. Babson’s ability to provide business solutions on a single, powerful platform supports many areas but most important is our ability to foster a collaborative mindset, allowing our campus community to model behaviors in an informed and educated manner that promotes continuous engagement with our constituents in a more personal and influential way.
Boise State University: Education Cloud will eventually allow us to more intentionally and proactively support students across the university. It will give those supporting the students a 360-degree view of the student and allow us to respond to a student’s situation more holistically, allowing for the possibility of “wrap-around” support. Building on the Education Cloud platform will allow us to effectively expand our use of Salesforce over time into new areas.
Old Dominion University: Transitioning to Salesforce Education Cloud will effectively address our previous issues. The transition will provide a comprehensive solution that ensures consistent experiences, common services, engagement centered on outcomes, scalability, a new data model, enhanced data security, and a student-oriented approach.
Since 2018 to today, Salesforce’s impact on recruitment and admissions and student success has been notable, with increased retention rates, improved student engagement, and reduced reliance on manual processes and multiple systems. We’re excited about the future with Salesforce Education Cloud.
What are you most proud of when you think back on your experience with Salesforce? What about the future of Salesforce technology and the new Education Cloud excites you most?
Babson College: Our journey started with a very small population of CRM users (38 staff members) and has grown immensely from that time. The campus growth to date includes supporting Business Development, enhancements to our Graduate Admissions experience, transitioning our Service Center application, adoption of Student Success Hub, and our ability to leverage powerful applications like Marketing Cloud and Pardot.
All this work has been a differentiator, not only for Babson but for the Education Community as well, and our ability to influence and enhance features and functionality with Salesforce is something we take great pride in. Standing back and absorbing the power the new Education Cloud brings, I am excited for Babson College and the ability for us to better know our constituents.
Boise State University: We are about to launch our first efforts with the implementation of the new Education Cloud. We are excited that the system has allowed Cloud for Good to build the functionality that we really need. This should make the adoption and onboarding of new users to the system more straightforward. And that we can continue to build new functionality into the future is also exciting.
Old Dominion University: Looking back on our Salesforce implementations, the institution takes pride in accomplishments since 2018, including reduced processing times, expanded outreach capacity to first-year students, cost savings in event management, and consolidation of three CRM systems into Salesforce.
Anticipating the future of Salesforce technology and the new Education Cloud, we are enthused by the vision of establishing a unified platform, termed “One Monarch Nation,” using Education Cloud. This involves leveraging a flexible data foundation and purpose-built apps to cater to our institution’s evolving needs. The goal is to achieve a consolidated profile offering a 360-degree perspective on various constituent roles, spanning from application to graduation and beyond. Additionally, the potential for intelligence and real-time data excites us, as it empowers teams with automation and visualizes key metrics, such as enrollment predictions and trends in student retention.
What has your experience been like working with Cloud for Good to implement your technology solutions?
Babson College: Our work with Cloud for Good has driven a comprehensive business process review and suggested technical solutions to support our desire to transition from an end-of-life Advancement system to a cutting-edge, modern experience built on Salesforce. The partnership to date has been exemplary—very real, with dedication, understanding, and respect at the forefront—a shining star when it comes to teamwork at all levels of the organization. Each team member, no matter their role, has been engaged and understands the importance of the work we collectively do. At the helm of the ship is Founder and CEO Tal Frankfurt; he leads by example, always, and his level of engagement, contributions, and support of our mission and vision has assisted us in getting to where we are today. Babson College and Cloud for Good joining forces has created a user experience that will revolutionize Alumni engagement like many before have never experienced!
Boise State University: Our experience collaborating with Cloud for Good has been exceedingly positive. Cloud for Good has demonstrated remarkable expertise within the Salesforce ecosystem which has consistently proven invaluable to our team. Another distinguishing attribute of Cloud for Good is their willingness to engage in collaborative efforts throughout the life of this project. Even in instances where the challenges were novel and uncharted within their prior experience, their proactive approach to collaboration has been instrumental in charting successful pathways. Our interaction with Cloud for Good has been both rewarding and impactful for our team and Boise State University. We wish they could stay with us!
Old Dominion University: In our quest for successful implementation, we explored various partners. After careful consideration, Cloud for Good emerged as the ideal candidate. With their deep expertise in higher education and experience transitioning data models, they are poised to guide us through this transformative journey currently underway. We are in the middle of our Salesforce Education Cloud implementation, and we have been very impressed with the support and implementation team.
Contact Cloud for Good today to learn more about what the new Education Cloud can do for your institution.
