Blog
January 31, 2020
As Salesforce spreads throughout higher education, its place in advancement, admissions, and advising offices is clear. However, part of the strength of Salesforce is the platform’s ability to support and streamline the business processes that are unique to each school, in particular, the processes for faculty and staff.
Inter-departmental Agreements
Colleges and universities are often complex organizations with no departments or office standing alone. Interdependence and reliance on others are often sources of frustration, grinding bureaucracy and inefficiency with a heavy reliance upon blunt tools like emails, spreadsheets, and shared documents.
Salesforce shines with this kind of process tracking and automation, combining EDA (the Salesforce Education Data Architecture) with Service Cloud to track quality of service, and Sales Cloud for transfers of funds and grants.
With Salesforce as a single source of data, departments can create and maintain informal and formal agreements. A tailored Salesforce solution can help ensure that standard levels of service and support become a seamless part of the faculty and staff experience.
Managing Accessible Education and Adaptive Course Materials
For many schools, the office of accessible education or disability services manages the substantial and complex task of generating, distributing, and tracking courseware adapted for students with specific disabilities. EDA can work with standard Sales Cloud and Service Cloud functionality to help the disability services office understand the full picture of adaptive courseware across campus, and provide ongoing support.
Streamlining Faculty Search, Including Demographics and Hiring Trends
The faculty search process is another potential area to reduce friction on campus. Using EDA and Sales Cloud, institutions can track and report on the composition and progress of search committees.
Adding to the complexity of the search process, faculty diversity is currently a hot-button issue in higher ed, with recent studies from Pew and the National Center for Educational Statistics highlighting the low numbers of professors who do not identify as white. Salesforce can help institutions gain a complete understanding of current faculty demographics and hiring trends.
Course Design
The expanded role of online or blended learning provides a unique opportunity for streamlining. As faculty prepare a course to move online, they follow a defined process to make sure the institution is prepared to support the course. From inquiry through development, Salesforce standardizes the process. Any course in development can move through stages with the Sales Cloud Path, which highlights key fields and provides rich text guidance to help professors understand what to do next.
Faculty Review and Planning
The faculty review process is full of data—review forms, keeping track of who’s up for tenure, events, and more. Salesforce provides a detailed look at faculty involvement on campus, including ratings from peers and students, faculty awards, and strengths and weaknesses in teaching or research. And the Salesforce security model ensures that only the people who need access to this data can get to it.
About the Authors
Allison Letts is a Principal Consultant in the Salesforce Services Group. After four years as a nonprofit fundraiser and Salesforce admin, Allison joined Attain Partners to help nonprofits and educational institutions streamline their data so that they can spend more time on their missions.
Chris Pifer is a Principal Consultant serving higher education and nonprofit clients as a senior leader providing subject matter expertise on the technical implementation of Salesforce and relevant third-party tools. His specialties include solution analysis and design, data analysis and migration, and test and quality assurance.
