Salesforce for education: functionality, solutions & payoffs
August 22, 2024
Salesforce equips educational institutions with industry-specific and generic CRM functionality to facilitate student recruitment and enrollment, provide learners with personalized services and ongoing support, and strengthen relationships with students, alumni, donors, and other constituents.
As a certified Salesforce Partner, Itransition offers comprehensive consulting services to help educational organizations implement this popular SaaS CRM platform to support their business goals and unique workflows.
Capabilities of Salesforce Education Cloud
Education Cloud is a CRM solution based on the Salesforce Platform aimed at K‑12 and higher education institutions or other educational service providers like language schools, which includes an industry-focused data model and specialized features to streamline the student lifecycle end to end. Its capabilities are split into thematic groups of features covering different aspects of education.
Recruitment & Admissions
Recruitment and Admissions includes marketing automation tools to target prospective students with personalized messages across multiple touchpoints, along with a scoring framework to prioritize those more likely to apply to your institution based on their engagement. You can also create dynamic application forms with auto-fill functionality or set up self-service applicant portals and equip them with AI-powered chatbots. Furthermore, this solution enables admissions officers to set up automated workflows for application review and keep track of each student’s application process.
.webp)
Communications, Marketing & Engagement
This solution helps your organization deliver personalized ads and communications (emails, SMS, etc.) to specific segments across students, alumni, and other constituents, boosting applications, enrollments, or donations. You can also personalize the browsing experience of your website visitors in real time with automated content recommendations and web messages. Moreover, your marketing specialists can track campaign performance to continually optimize your advertising initiatives.
.webp)
Student Success
Student Success consolidates student data into unified records to track learning performance and notify educators of learners requiring additional support via triggered alerts. Other features to assist students include ready-to-use components for building learner portals, automated student communication tools, an appointment scheduling system to book counseling services, and an AI-powered question generator to prepare personalized student questionnaires. You can also create personalized care and action plans defining goals and tasks tailored to each learner. Additionally, the solution includes a case management system, a knowledge base to facilitate support case resolution, and a tool for student support program management to help students discover available support initiatives and supervise program utilization.
.webp)
Advancement & Alumni Relations
This set of tools offers specialized functionality to strengthen relationships with your graduates and donors. You can create online portals for alumni and donors with the help of standardized templates and use them to establish mentoring programs and manage schedules and interactions. You can also launch fundraising campaigns targeting potential donors based on personal data, manage your portfolio of donors, and track incoming pledges and donations.
.webp)
Academic Operations
This group of features enables educators to design courses and structure program plans using drag-and-drop functionality, define prerequisites and recommendations for enrollment, and schedule related academic activities. The solution can also analyze program and course information to identify market-relevant skills students will acquire, helping create personalized and career-oriented paths to graduation. Furthermore, its degree planning capabilities enable education advisors to build tailored program plans based on how quickly each student would like to graduate and other factors.
.webp)
Lifelong Learning
Lifelong Learning provides dedicated tools to deliver ongoing learning experiences and maximize student lifetime value. These include analytics features to get a full picture of each learner, target them with personalized marketing ads and communications, and monitor student engagement metrics. You can also generate course and program catalogs for their online storefront, fully digitalize course or program search and registration, and monitor education market trends to optimize their offering. Furthermore, the solution helps strengthen corporate partnerships by tracking all touchpoints with your partners.
.webp)
Implement your Salesforce solution with Itransition’s guidance
Upcoming Salesforce features for education
In May 2024, Salesforce announced new AI and data management tools for the education sector launching in October 2024:
Data Cloud for Education
will draw on the capabilities of Data Cloud (Salesforce’s data management platform) to consolidate student information from your LMS and other systems into a unified storage. This data will also fuel Education Cloud’s AI-powered functionality, such as enrollment rate prediction or the identification of students at risk of not graduating.
Einstein Copilot: Recruitment & Admissions Actions
will enable your organization to provide prospective students with a conversational AI assistant to answer their questions on your course offering or even generate course summaries.
Einstein Mentorship Summaries
will facilitate mentoring program management, using AI to match mentees with the most suitable mentors based on learners’ educational needs and mentors’ expertise and availability.
Choosing between Education Cloud & EDA
While Education Cloud is the main education-oriented solution within the Salesforce product suite, it’s not the only option for tailoring the platform’s capabilities to the requirements of this industry. Education Data Architecture (EDA) is a potential alternative to Education Cloud worth considering.
Education Cloud
This product doesn’t function as a separate application on top of Salesforce but it’s an integral part of the core Salesforce Platform. Before its introduction, educational institutions had to rely on managed packages like EDA that provided useful custom objects but required extensive customizations. Education Cloud, on the other hand, is a ready-made, industry-oriented solution that can provide users with access to all the capabilities of Salesforce, including those offered by other Clouds. That said, you can further configure and customize Education Cloud to better align it with your company-specific needs.
Pros
- Easier adoption and access to more comprehensive capabilities for education
Cons
- Higher licensing costs
Education Data Architecture
Available for free on the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, EDA is an open-source managed package developed in collaboration with the Salesforce community. It provides out-of-the-box objects, logic, and automation capabilities to configure Salesforce CRM in line with the needs of the education industry. Unlike Education Cloud, EDA isn’t an actual part of the Salesforce Platform, but sits on top of Salesforce CRM, adding custom metadata to your Salesforce org. Since it’s a separate solution, adopters can access more limited functionality and face additional implementation complexities.
Pros
- Free package
Cons
- More challenging implementation and limited capabilities
Searching for an experienced partner for your Salesforce project?
Industry-agnostic Salesforce products for educational organizations
Along with Education Cloud’s industry-specific functionality, Salesforce offers generic but more feature-rich CRM solutions to address the needs of your marketing, sales, and service departments. Furthermore, companies can mix Education Cloud users and generic Cloud users. Here are the main Salesforce products covering these three customer-oriented business functions.
This product equips marketers with a comprehensive toolkit to launch targeted campaigns, engage prospective learners with personalized web or in-app journeys, and track campaign KPIs or even receive AI-powered recommendations to optimize their marketing initiatives. The solution also features marketing automation capabilities, including automated lead segmentation and engagement messages sending.
Sales managers can leverage this solution to enhance their engagement strategies with features like lead ranking or virtual buyer assistants, track sales pipeline progress via real-time deal alerts, and monitor opportunities or sales KPIs through analytical dashboards. Furthermore, they can use Sales Cloud to automate key workflows, including account management and revenue lifecycle management.
This solution provides customer support specialists with extensive capabilities to automatically distribute support cases, receive AI-based knowledge article recommendations, and interact with learners in need of assistance via embedded telephony or live chat. Service Cloud also facilitates the deployment of multi-channel chatbots to assist students 24/7.
Success stories of Salesforce adoption in education
10.6%
increase in student enrollment
Salesforce solution for student recruitment & support
University of Nevada Las Vegas implemented Marketing Cloud to segment students and engage them with automated, fully personalized recruitment journeys, including proactive communications encouraging them to complete their applications. The institution also built a self-service portal based on Experience Cloud, enabling students to access key information (such as class times and locations), apply for scholarships, communicate with academic advisors, or ask for support through a live chat. As for future developments, UNLV plans to leverage Education Cloud to optimize its processes further and ensure more meaningful interactions with students and alumni.
20%
increase in alumni membership retention rates
Salesforce for alumni communications & campaign automation
The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan adopted Sales Cloud to unify data on current alumni, donors, and volunteers and tailor communications to each constituent's preferences, including the type of events they're interested in. At the same time, the organization used Marketing Cloud's campaign automation capabilities to facilitate the acquisition of new members by providing personalized content across multiple channels.
The benefits of Salesforce adoption in education
According to a study conducted by research and consulting firm Forrester and commissioned by Salesforce, educational institutions adopting this platform can achieve the following business outcomes within three years:
+15%
retention rates thanks to more effective student communications and support
+5.5%
student enrollment through prospect engagement visibility, timely follow-ups, and seamless application processes
+12%
administrative and academic team productivity via centralized data storage and process automation
+10%
fundraising contributions thanks to improved alumni and donor relationship management
$1.6 mn
savings on legacy environment licenses and support by replacing redundant systems with a unified CRM solution
Our Salesforce services for the education industry
- Audit of your existing CRM solution, if any
- Definition of functional and non-functional requirements
- Salesforce edition and feature set selection
- Implementation roadmapping and budgeting
- Configuration, customization, and integration consultancy
- User training and ongoing support
- Salesforce configuration and customization
- Integration with your software ecosystem (LMS, ERP, etc.)Â
- QA and user acceptance testing
- Salesforce deployment to the production environment
- Data migration from the legacy data storage systems to Salesforce
Turn to Itransition for seamless Salesforce adoption
Empowering educational institutions with Salesforce
With a growing number of higher ed and other academic institutions experiencing financial challenges, educational institutions are looking for ways to boost student retention and enrollment while optimizing operational costs.
As the market-leading CRM platform, Salesforce can help achieve these outcomes with a full-spectrum toolkit to automate administrative processes and provide more personalized student experiences. Team up with an expert partner like Itransition to adopt your Salesforce-based education CRM solution seamlessly across your organization.
Service
eLearning software development services
Explore Itransition’s eLearning software development services, along with key application types, features, integrations, technologies, and guidelines.
Insights
Salesforce deployment best practices, key steps & useful tools
Discover Salesforce deployment best practices from expert Salesforce developers, along with key steps, tools, and environments to complete this process.
Service
CRM services and solutions
Hire CRM service providers with 10+ years of experience in CRM consulting, implementation, and development to get a 360-degree view of your customer data.
Insights
AI in CRM: top use cases, best platforms, and guidelines
Explore the major use cases, real-life examples, and implementation best practices of AI in CRM, along with the top AI-powered platforms on the market.
Insights
Machine learning in education: 10 use cases, examples, and benefits
Explore the value of machine learning in education. View its top use cases and real-life examples and consider implementing ML into your educational process.
Service
Salesforce integration: common options, types, steps & considerations
Learn what apps are commonly integrated with Salesforce and explore the key integration patterns, steps, and best practices.