Blog
March 5, 2025
Attain Partners celebrates 20 years of empowering colleges and universities to invent the future of education in partnership with Salesforce
As our experts prepare to share insights and client successes at Education Summit 2025, we’re reflecting on an important milestone for our Salesforce practice—we have been creating transformation for higher education and nonprofit institutions for 20 years!
Our company has evolved through a few names, but our Salesforce practice has stood the test of time (and branding!).
- 2005: ACF Solutions first registered as a partner with Salesforce.
- 2015: ACF Solutions named HEDA Design and Launch Partner
- 2016: Attain acquired ACF, absorbing and investing in the growing Salesforce practice.
- 2021: Attain sold its federal division and rebranded as Attain Partners, doubling down on our service to higher education and nonprofit institutions by leveraging the power of Salesforce.
- 2022: Attain Partners leads the first implementation of Admissions Connect.
- 2022: Attain Partners named Salesforce Consulting Partner of the Year – Education.
- 2025: Attain Partners’ Salesforce practice celebrates 20 years as an official partner.
Celebrating 20 years of impact!
To celebrate the 20-year anniversary of our Salesforce partnership, seven of our longest-tenured employees reflect on their careers specializing in Salesforce technology and the tremendous impact they have created partnering with organizations to innovate and optimize their operations.
We’re also having a party at Education Summit—make sure you’re on the list as we reflect back and plan how we will continue to Invent the Future over the next 20 years!
Deepa Bedi, Principal
It’s been an amazing journey in the Salesforce ecosystem implementing Salesforce solutions for nonprofits and higher education institutions for over 18 years. Having supported over 50 clients in their digital transformations, I have witnessed firsthand the power of the Salesforce platform, its commitment to continuous innovation, and our ability to adapt the platform to each client’s unique needs. This has allowed us to help organizations accelerate change, amplify their reach, and drive meaningful social impact.
I have seen tremendous growth in Salesforce from the early days of CRM in 2007, the evolution of personalized portals, an enhanced user experience with Lightning, and now more recently with AI (Einstein AI, Generative AI, and Agentforce). Leveraging this technology allows us to equip our clients with predictive insights, real time intelligence, improved decision making, and automated recommendations/ responses.
One project that stands out as a success is our recent collaboration with a major education institution to implement a Salesforce Student Success Portal. While the work was done with speed in eight weeks, the initiative streamlined student engagement, resulting in a 15% increase in retention rates just within the first-semester change and improved overall student satisfaction. We provided students with a personalized experience; actions they needed to take all on their mobile devices. Faculty were able to submit mid-term related early alerts to the advisors for early intervention for at-risk students. Now, with the support of AI-driven analytics, advisors can focus on personalized, timely interventions, ensuring students receive the guidance they need when they need it most.
Another project I am really proud of is working with the ALS Association as they work to create a world without ALS and with the ice bucket challenge (first participated with my kids and later the CEO Soak with Phil Agee, COO of Attain Partners). As the ALS Association embarked on its digital transformation journey, it was an incredible experience to work with highly motivated teams at the association as we implemented an enterprise fundraising, event management, email marketing solution, and new website for the Association and its 40 chapters to drive this transformation. Helping our clients achieve their important missions makes our work worth it!
Salesforce implementations are truly unique—every project is a Rubik’s cube—complex, challenging, and rewarding. I am grateful to work alongside brilliant colleagues and an exceptional team, tackling intricate challenges and delivering meaningful impact despite constraints. Attain Partners has provided an incredible environment where I can deeply care about our clients and their success so they can focus on their missions.
Virginia Berkenkotter, Director of Higher Education Delivery
From a project management and client engagement perspective, I love partnering with our clients to help them realize their vision for digital transformation and achieve efficiencies to better serve their constituents. I also love the friendships that have evolved with so many of our clients throughout the years.
I have spent my entire career serving higher education and very much believe in its mission to educate the next generation and support the opportunities it provides so many for a better future, especially first-generation college students.
Salesforce continues to reimagine the student experience and provide what once were seen as private sector products to the public sector—AI, Agentforce, and Data Cloud—to name a few.
I am particularly proud of the projects and relationships I have forged with one of our Ivy League clients. I appreciate that they are always wanting to try the latest technologies—they were one of the first to use OmniStudio to such a full extent.
Anne Early, Principal
I love that every Salesforce project feels like a puzzle, offering the chance to explore Salesforce’s diverse tools and features to craft innovative solutions that align with the client’s mission. It’s a perfect blend of analytical thinking, creativity, and collaboration—bringing together strategy and teamwork to deliver the best possible outcome.
In the past 20 years, I’ve seen incredible improvements in Salesforce’s technology. The level of customization now possible with Salesforce’s ‘Clicks, Not Code’ approach is truly remarkable compared to 13 years ago when I first became a Salesforce Admin. Tools like Flows, OmniStudio, Lightning Pages, and Experience Cloud empower us to build sophisticated solutions that previously would have required custom code. The ability to create powerful, tailored experiences with minimal coding provides our clients with greater flexibility and scalability. This approach empowers clients to adapt their solutions as their business needs evolve, make quick adjustments without heavy development costs, and maintain their systems with ease—ultimately fostering long-term success.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have found my career working with Salesforce and educational institutions. It’s a true blessing to have discovered something that I’m not only good at but also genuinely love doing. Getting to collaborate with inspiring institutions to support their mission of educating the next generation is a meaningful and rewarding experience.
The projects I’m most proud of are those that include an Experience Cloud site to support applicants, students, faculty, or alumni. I love the ability to create visually appealing and highly functional sites that enhance engagement by delivering tailored experiences based on constituent needs and integrated CRM data. It’s incredibly satisfying to bridge the gap between technology and meaningful user interactions in a way that truly supports the institution’s goals.
Chris Pifer, Principal and Four-time Salesforce MVP
I love the flexibility Salesforce offers our clients. I’ve personally seen the platform meet the needs of one of the top-tier world marathons to track race operations, an international NGO tracking millions in fundraising, while also meeting the needs of a small 30-person nonprofit to track program operations. It’s almost never a question of, “Can I?” but rather, “What’s the best way to?”
The biggest change I’ve seen in 20 years has been the shift to AI and AgentForce that Salesforce is undertaking today—it is truly striking, like watching an ocean liner turn on a dime.
Earlier in my career, I had to make a choice, I was dabbling in both Salesforce and web development at a small nonprofit, and I had three job offers in front of me: 1) Continuing my web development work on a bigger scale but shifting to work with big commercial clients; 2) Continuing to blend web development with Salesforce in-house in a corporate setting; 3) Take a job with ACF Solutions, going all-in with Salesforce and continue working with nonprofits. I’ve often looked back at that decision as a major turning point in my career. The web development tools I worked with have since fallen by the wayside, but somehow, Salesforce continues to be the tool of choice in the sector. While there may be some criticisms of Salesforce, every time I’ve looked at the alternatives, Salesforce keeps coming up on top.
Salesforce continues to evolve. It is in the middle of the process of bringing a set of industry-specific solutions into their core platform. It’s a technical shift, but it’s a big shift. It changes what we build and how we build when we customize the platform for clients. It has huge risk and huge potential to allow us to provide functionality to clients faster with lower overall effort.
When I think back over two decades of project successes, I’ll always remember my experience implementing Salesforce for the Boston Athletic Association (the organization that runs the Boston Marathon). It was a unique and exciting challenge knowing that nobody in the world had done what we were being asked to do—to customize Salesforce to support one of the major world marathons. I’ll always remember during discovery one of their staff saying, “Fundamentally we are in the data business. If we make a data mistake, you’ll read about it in the Boston Globe.” It asked a lot from me, but I’ve had a lasting relationship with the BAA team and have had the joy of hearing how each piece of the build has worked through many years of successful operations.
Leidy Smith, Business Development Director
In the past 20 years, Salesforce has shown tremendous transformation as it repositioned its offerings for the Education and Nonprofit markets. It began as the Salesforce Foundation that offered discounted licenses as part of Salesforce’s 1:1:1 model of giving back. The Foundation was then spun off as a .org nonprofit that could create tools and build the necessary sales and marketing team to serve the Education and Nonprofit industries.
Salesforce.com then purchased Salersforce.org and followed a proven successful path of supporting unique client needs by creating two new industry Clouds serving Education and Nonprofits. While that new organization and the product offerings have had their growing pains, things have stabilized and it now assures these industries have the full support of Salesforce resources to address their unique needs. Salesforce has also maintained its dedicated team of Account Executives and Solution Engineers supporting these markets across the Salesforce platform of products, which is critical given the market’s unique nature and relationships with clients and partners like Attain Partners that have developed over the decades.
Some of my proudest work includes an Executive Education project where we helped them see the capabilities of a Salesforce-based solution and then we worked closely with their team implementing Salesforce as we migrated them from a legacy CRM and Email tool. We then continued our work with this Ivy League institution in another project, supporting their efforts to bring their Centers into Salesforce, which they led with our support as they expanded their team and capabilities. Now we just stay in touch as they continue to expand on the platform using their own internal team, helping if and when needed. This example is a true success story of our goal to help clients realize their objectives of digital transformation on Salesforce and then become self-sufficient as they move forward.
Kathy Starr, Business Development Operations
For the past 15 years, I have loved working with an incredible group of talented, dedicated people who work tirelessly to help nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions transform the way they operate. What I love most is knowing that our work with clients happens behind the scenes, but the impact is felt in the real world. A donor engages more deeply with a cause or a university. A student gets the right support to stay on track. A medical nonprofit allocates resources more efficiently. I love the focus of our work because it’s about more than just technology—it’s about empowering organizations to create lasting change in our communities.
My entire career has been focused on the nonprofit sector. Before I crossed paths with Salesforce, I worked with the Close Up Foundation, a civic education nonprofit dedicated to informing, inspiring, and empowering students to become more active in our democracy. From there, I worked in international development, where I observed elections in Bosnia and supported small business development initiatives in Central & Eastern Europe. I have always looked for ways to give back in a way that drives meaningful change.
When I transitioned into the Salesforce ecosystem, I appreciated the focus of the 1:1:1 mode of Salesforce.org and its commitment to leveraging technology, philanthropy, and employee volunteerism to support nonprofit and higher ed organizations. Salesforce & Attain Partners are great examples of how the private sector can work hand-in-hand with nonprofit organizations to increase impact.
Over the past 15 years, we have had so many memorable and compelling projects – developing a case management system for a library’s televisit and literacy program, creating an incident response system to report anti-semitism, helping a nonprofit manage playground builds, and supporting national medical organizations with their fundraising efforts. Also, with my own son in college at the University of Colorado, I love our projects on campuses that focus on helping students succeed through improving student advising or more effective student engagement. Seeing technology play a direct role in helping these types organizations extend their reach is why I love this work.
Alanna Steffens, Managing Director and Salesforce Implementation Capability Lead
I love that we bring fresh and creative new ideas to education and nonprofit clients that truly allow them to transform not only how they do business but also how they engage with their constituents. From students to donors, we bring to life tool sets to support their business processes and allow them time to focus on what’s important, their mission. I started as a business analyst learning the clicks not code base and from there fell in love, moving into more hands-on work designing solutions to meet business needs, then creating those solutions, finding third-party add-ons from the app exchange, and eventually moving to project management. It’s been an awesome 14 years starting at ACF Solutions, then Attain, and now Attain Partners. That transition really allowed me to see how important relationship building is for clients, many of whom I’d consider friends, and how we can help them to solve challenges that they face every day, almost always isn’t technology related.
Fourteen years ago, I stumbled into the Salesforce ecosystem having started my career at Northrop Grumman as a software engineer serving commercial and state government agencies. I knew that I needed to establish my technical chops before moving into more functional domain expertise, and finding a business analyst role with ACF Solutions allowed me to do just that. I love serving the underserved business functions that we find in education and nonprofit organizations—knowing that our work has a profound impact on these missions is rewarding.
Salesforce continues to evolve. Three times a year Salesforce has a new release. They’re continually looking for ways to improve their declarative platform and offer ways that allow less technical people to build really great solutions. The education and nonprofit clouds are just one example in the last two years that have enhanced our clients ability to innovate quickly, incurring less tech debt relying on outside third-party vendors to complete a whole solution.
In my work, and the work of our growing teams, I’m proud of not only supporting the traditional student lifecycle use cases, but also those less traditional ones like executive education and faculty management. These are critical areas of institutions that often get overlooked when we think Salesforce solutions and there are a lot of great options that exist to help them run their part of the organization. I think I helped to write all of the early exec ed shop roadmaps, many of which we then turned into fully functioning solutions that still exist today. I love seeing that work continue to make an impact.
Let’s Connect at Education Summit 2025
Mark your calendars for March 10-12! Attain Partners is proud to be an official Groundbreaker sponsor of Education Summit 2025! Our experts will be at booth #7—please stop by and say hello. We’re collecting predictions on what the next 20 years will look like for higher education and would love to hear your thoughts!
Additionally, we have two sessions, a breakfast panel, and a networking happy hour which we are hosting at Edu Summit. Check out the details below and register for the ones you’d like to attend.
Our happy hour will be an anniversary party as we celebrate 20 years of empowering colleges and universities to invent the future of education in partnership with Salesforce.
Transformation at the Speed of Trust
Tuesday, March 11 | 4p – 4:40p CDT
Stage 4 (Campground, Level 3)
Learn how UT Dallas is transforming student experience with Education Cloud, from building cross-functional consensus on an enterprise vision to making technology & process decisions to scale impact.
Role: Partner, Administrator | Industry: Education | Institution: Public | Product: Education Cloud | Topic: Student Success | Session Type: Breakout | Session Level: Beginner
Speakers
- Jason Belland, Higher Education Executive in Residence, Attain Partners
- Courtney Brecheen, Interim Dean and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, The University of Texas at Dallas
- Dawn Owens, Associate Dean, The University of Texas at Dallas
Happy Hour: Celebrating 20 Years of Partnership with Salesforce
Tuesday, March 11 | 6:30p – 8:30p
We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary as a Salesforce partner. Join us at The Chicago Firehouse in the Blue Room Cellar to raise a glass to 20 years supporting innovation and digital transformation for higher ed organizations together with Salesforce.
Breakfast Panel: Leading Digital Transformation in Higher Ed
Wednesday, March 12 | 7:45a – 9a
Join us for this breakfast discussion and hear how leaders at prominent institutions are delivering outcomes with Education Cloud across the student experience; from getting aligned on a vision for transformation, to the process of building trust and making decisions, to how data and AI factor into their current work and future aspirations.
Speakers
- Boston University
- Tim Cerato – Assistant Vice President, CRM, ERP, CRM & Integration
- Reena Reddy – Director, IT CRM & Admissions, Boston University
- Marshall University
- Jodie Penrod – Chief Information Officer
- Cody Hall – Manager, CRM Solutions
- University of Texas Dallas
- Courtney Breechen – Interim Dean of Undergraduate Education
- Salesforce
- Margo Martinez – VP and GM of Education
From Legacy to Leading Edge: The Journey to Education Cloud
Wednesday, March 12 | 1p – 1:20p CDT
Room West 375A (Stage 1, Level 3)
Learn about Boston University’s comprehensive migration to Education Cloud, including strategies for balancing innovation with operational stability, and their project to unify the student experience.
Role: Consultant | Industry: Education | Institution: Public | Product: Education Cloud | Topic: Data | Session Type: Theater | Session Level: Beginner
Speakers
- Jason Belland, Higher Education Executive in Residence, Attain Partners
- Reena Reddy, Director, IT CRM & Admissions, Boston University
- Tim Cerato, Assistant Vice President, CRM, ERP, CRM & Integration, Trustees of Boston University on behalf of the Student
Attain Partners – Salesforce Experts
No matter if your organization is beginning its Salesforce journey or 10+ years into development, Attain Partners is here to help you achieve your goals. Contact our team today to learn how we can help your organization advance its mission by harnessing the power of Salesforce.
To learn more, check out our Salesforce Innovation services, read case studies about our transformative work, and explore blog posts from our Salesforce experts.
