Blog
February 26, 2015
What a wonderful time I had in sunny Miami attending Salesforce Foundation’s 2015 Higher Education Summit hosted by the University of Miami. This year’s theme was “Community Reimagined.” The Summit brought together over 700 staff from Higher Ed institutions looking to engage their constituents at every point in the lifecycle. Participants enjoyed two days of great presentations on how peer institutions are using community and communication solutions to engage their constituents. Here are my highlights from the Advancement Track at #HESummit2015:
Get Internal Buy-in for Alumni Engagement Success
As Kim Egan from the University of Colorado and Emily Morris and Mickey Mossaidis from Columbia University shared in their presentation “Alumni Communication and Community”, the idea of reinventing a single enterprise alumni engagement approach did not emerge overnight. Both institutions shared about their efforts from getting buy-in to selecting the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and Sales Cloud, to creating the right internal team. Considerable time was spent to get the necessary support from all the affected players to build a unified and engaging solution. The speakers stressed that they needed to remain flexible in their approach and consider the structure of the organization to get results.
Be Transparent
In “Innovating with Advancement Connect,” Tracey Vranich and Al Checcio from the University of Southern California shared their experience leveraging the Salesforce and Advancement Connect platforms to support their aggressive $6 billion campaign. As part of their onboarding and change management strategy, USC reached out to the advancement offices of its different schools, to communicate vision and secure buy-in for this enterprise advancement solution. This early work helped to create transparency in the process, as well as create trust with the advancement officers and other users in the long-term benefits to them of the solution. The key message here: engage your community openly and often to support effective change!
Make A Plan!
With so many areas to consider when starting a Salesforce project, the session led by Georgetown University on building a roadmap to support your implementation was instrumental. Jennifer Walker described this process as most often starting with a “Coalition of the Willing” to:
- identify the pain points
- establish objectives
- document key processes
- prioritize against University objectives
- and define success metrics.
The session went on to highlight the three key areas needed to start building a roadmap: (1) creating a governance structure; (2) building the roadmap, and (3) developing a resource plan. The audience was asked to then rate their organization’s preparedness in each of the three categories. This hands-on activity allowed participants to start generating a plan of action for use upon returning to their institutions. There was a lot of energy and participation in the room. It was clear this was an important topic for all.
I’m looking forward to more great moments like these at next year’s Higher Ed Summit, March 30-April 1, 2016 at Tulane University.
