At the 2016 Higher Ed Summit, held this year in New Orleans, colleges and universities joined together for a 3-day conference to learn from each other as well as industry experts and partners on how to transform constituent engagement and solve real problems in Higher Ed. Several of our clients were featured speakers at the Summit and ACF led two sessions, on Enterprise CRM and Marketing Automation. View some of the sessions below:
Building out a campus-wide CRM is hard work! There are technical considerations for sure ― establishing data governance, adding and retiring systems, consolidating data, etc. But most important are the people considerations. The introduction of a CRM may represent a major shift in how teams and departments work with each other; from a traditionally insular model to a highly collaborative and transparent one. The whole process is disrupting to the status quo.
So why do it?
Consider the alternative. Today, higher education institutions face challenges on numerous fronts, including: (1) declining enrollment, (2) the need for greater accountability for student outcomes, (3) unsatisfactory student experiences, (4) lackluster alumni engagement and support, and (5) the need for new revenue sources. These are challenges that are difficult to fully comprehend, let alone solve, especially in silos.
With an enterprise-wide CRM, there is the opportunity to unify and automate business processes, improve constituent experience across the lifecycle, and better monitor and measure outcomes. A single system of constituent engagement creates the ability to interact holistically, fostering the right touch points with the right person at the right time, while increasing satisfaction, loyalty, and support.
And for your staff, the hard work of building consensus and implementing enterprise-wide CRM will pay off in your team’s ability to drill down and solve issues more efficiently, faster, and with greater transparency.
In short, the rewards of achieving campus-wide CRM are more than worth the effort required to get there, and may very well transform institutions.
So how do you get there?
The keys to a successful enterprise CRM implementation include strong governance, a clear roadmap, and well planned change management.
Learn more about strategies and tactics to prepare your institution for campus-wide CRM at Salesforce.org’s Higher Ed Summit 2016 during ACF Solutions session “Boldly Go: Preparing for a Successful Voyage with Salesforce in the Enterprise,” Wednesday March 30th at 2:00pm CT.
Today, Salesforce.org announced the launch of Salesforce HEDA (“Higher Ed Data Architecture”), which standardizes the Salesforce data model specifically for higher education. With HEDA, higher education institutions now have a core data architecture laying a more consistent foundation for Salesforce both within and across schools. As ACF Delivery Manager Jeff Cowgill comments in Salesforce’s HEDA launch video: “HEDA offers this incredible opportunity for schools to jump start their world into Salesforce.”
“Schools today are looking for solutions that scale, support their unique business processes, and are delivered quickly at reasonable costs,” Cowgill adds. HEDA helps address those needs by providing a constituent data model, designed to support data requirements across the student lifecycle, as well as an application framework, making it easier for multiple third-party apps to work together.
ACF President Kristin Sharpe is “thrilled about HEDA” and describes it as a “big leap forward in Salesforce.org’s commitment to the higher ed sector.” As a result, Sharpe has pledged ACF’s commitment to make its services compatible with HEDA. This commitment doesn’t represent any great change for ACF. “The HEDA design is very consistent with the best practices we have developed in our work with more than 55 schools,” explains ACF Delivery Director for Higher Ed Virginia Berkenkotter. ACF Solutions has been involved with planning for HEDA since the outset, providing feedback to Salesforce.org during its development.
HEDA is focused on the core constituent relationship model which is common to the majority of higher ed use cases. “It does not dictate or define specific business processes, such as advancement and admissions” explains CTO Doug Sharpe. “Instead HEDA provides a framework for implementation partners such as ACF Solutions, as well as for AppExchange product developers, to more quickly develop solutions and ensure greater interoperability across the enterprise.”
“Bottom line,” adds VP of Business Development Susan Tobes, “With HEDA, schools can be confident that they can start their Salesforce deployment anywhere – recruiting, student services, fundraising, corporate engagement – and have a foundation that will enable them to expand everywhere.”
“We have implemented Salesforce with 100% clicks, not code, and it has become the technological backbone of our school.”
-Joanna Iturbe, Senior Software Applications and Project Manager, CU Leeds School of Business
The Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder is the eighth oldest business school in the United States and is the top-ranked Colorado business school with renowned programs in entrepreneurship, real estate and social responsibility. It is nationally recognized as a “Hot Spot” for entrepreneurial education. The school serves over 3,300 undergraduate and graduate students and over 200 faculty and staff.
The Leeds School of Business is the premier business school in Colorado and ranked 71st for MBA programs and 97th for undergraduate business programs by Bloomberg Businessweek, the pre-eminent ranking publication. To remain competitive and improve the school’s efficiencies, Leeds wanted to improve a variety of factors such as recruitment, retention, satisfaction, and placement numbers. The challenges were numerous:
Measurement
New aggressive recruitment, retention and placement goals highlighted lack of a central repository of supplemental academic and engagement data for Leeds students. Student data was a collection of Excel sheets, Access files, emails and people’s memories, none of which was easily or widely accessible. This made it a challenge to assess progress toward those goals across silos of data.
Recruitment
Centralized recruitment efforts proved to be inefficient and time-consuming, on occasion taking weeks to produce a segmented recruitment list for an email campaign. With aggressive goals to improve admissions numbers of both high-achieving and under-represented students, the Leeds recruitment office needed to have some autonomy, but it did not have the tools to manage an independent student admissions and recruitment process.
Advising
Career and academic services appeared impersonal. Students were meeting with the wrong advisors, or not meeting with advisors at all and there was no way to readily identify students being missed in the process. These gaps in customer service negatively impacted student perception and therefore rankings. Scheduling and advising notes were paper-based and inefficient. Advisor access to student data was limited or non-existent.
Placement
Career placement data collection and reporting were scattered and inefficient. Leeds, like other business schools, has 90 days from the date of graduation to collect student data in order to report to Businessweek for ranking purposes. The process to collect that information was time-intensive and incomplete with no holistic way to capture information or identify those students for whom information was not available.
Corporate Relations
There were silos of activities in the school involving shared corporate partners and prospects, which negatively impacted the school’s reputation among external partners and resulted in missed opportunities.
Faculty Management
There was no way to accurately predict staffing needs for academic courses. It was anyone’s guess and, more often than not, courses were either under- or over-staffed, which could negatively affect student satisfaction and funding. Historical data on course enrollment was not easily accessible. In addition, the calculation for a faculty member’s summer pay was complicated and confusing. Leeds needed a system to better manage faculty pay and be alerted to any compliance issues in advance, as opposed to in arrears.
It was clear that Leeds needed a multi-functional and flexible constituent relationship management tool to address the several challenges confronting the school. After considerable research, Leeds chose Salesforce as its CRM over Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle CRM, and partnered with ACF Solutions for implementation. After a thorough discovery process and over three phases, ACF designed and executed a Salesforce-based solution that used both standard and custom objects, took advantage of Nonprofit Starter Pack packages like Affiliations and Relationships, and leveraged other integrated apps to tailor Leeds’ Salesforce instance to fit its specific needs and challenges. Leeds also took full advantage of Process Builder once it was released in Spring 2015. Most significantly, this highly customized solution was delivered without the need for costly and time-consuming custom development. Joanna Iturbe, Sr. Software Applications and Project Manager at Leeds adds, “We have implemented Salesforce with 100% clicks, not code, and it has become the technological backbone of our school.” ACF implemented the following functionality as part of the solution:
The implemented Salesforce solution has had a profoundly positive impact on Leeds’ insight, and business processes as follows:
Measurement
Because Salesforce compiles all of its student data in one place, Leeds is now able to correlate student retention, job placement and student satisfaction to key touch points including visits to career advisors, attendance at job fairs and program involvement.
Recruitment
The time it takes Recruitment staff to send targeted recruitment messaging dropped from between 1 to 3 weeks down to a 30 second report, a 99.995% reduction in effort. The results of such messaging can be seen in its improved profile of incoming students. High school GPA, SAT scores and ACT scores have all improved.
Advising
Salesforce has enabled an improved advising experience for students and staff alike by centralizing all student data and interactions in one location easily accessible by career and academic advisors. This allows advisors across all Leeds departments to view relevant data and notes, which provides a more customized, personable experience for the students.
Placement
Leeds has 84% participation in student placement surveys as compared to 67% for the prior year’s graduating class and 99% knowledge rate of all student’s placement status due to collaborative efforts between advisors, faculty and social media. The school uses Salesforce to determine who has not responded to surveys and is able to target their reminder emails to those individuals. With this greater participation, Leeds was reporting a 94% student placement rate to Businessweek, compared with 84% in 2014. Better student reporting mechanisms and easier and more accessible reporting, through Salesforce, has (and will continue to) save 100 hours annually in staff hours.
Corporate Relations
Departments are now better able to have insight into all interactions with corporate partners, and better coordinate their activities.
Faculty Management
Salesforce has made faculty management more efficient by hosting all faculty information in one place. The compilation of information for purposes of faculty annual evaluations went from 3 staff members and 1 to 3 weeks to 1 staff member and 1 day, a 95% reduction in effort. With the aid of Salesforce, the school intends to use predictive analytics to properly staff courses. Leeds will harness the historical course enrollment and incoming student data within Salesforce to forecast 3 years of staffing needs. Also, Salesforce now allows real time tracking of faculty summer pay providing early detection of potential policy violations and therefore immediate corrective action, resulting in 100% compliance.
Bonus
Joanna Iturbe has used Lightning Process Builder extensively to create automated workflows and provide great efficiencies in otherwise time consuming tasks. She reports, “In the course of six months, we have built 15 active processes that are running over 67 million times per month — all automatically — without us lifting a finger.” Using Process Builder, Iturbe estimates that they have saved an estimated 200 internal personnel hours, at least $75,000 in implementation fees, and improved data quality. In the coming year, Leeds will add more functionality and users to their Salesforce implementation and believe the results from the upcoming projects will continue to improve the school’s recruitment, reputation, retention, student satisfaction, placement and rankings.
As anyone who has been around the Salesforce world knows, you don’t get far into a conversation about Salesforce before theAppExchangecomes up. This is certainly true for the work ACF Solutions does in the nonprofit and higher ed sectors. We have completed over 500 Salesforce implementations for nonprofits and higher ed clients and, with few exceptions, they have all involved at least one app from the AppExchange. This week, as the AppExchange turns ten, we are reflecting on the positive impact that the AppExchange has had on our customers.
The AppExchange, of course, is the vast marketplace of Salesforce-compatible applications that enhance and extend the capabilities of Salesforce. Yes, Salesforce in and of itself is a fantastic application for managing data and engaging constituents. And yes, it is possible to build customizations or integrations for Salesforce to get it do things it does not natively do. But creating and maintaining such one-off customizations and integrations would be cost-prohibitive to the majority of our customers and would greatly increase the length of an implementation. That’s where the AppExchange comes in.
Thanks to the AppExchange, there are a wide variety of tested and approved applications designed specifically to work with Salesforce. These applications can be delivered much more quickly than customizations, and can do so more cost-effectively while also including benefits like upgrades, a product roadmap, documentation, customer support, and a community of users.
Here are some of the key categories of applications on the AppExchange that our nonprofit and higher ed clients frequently rely on. In each of these categories, there are multiple options for apps that enhance the native capabilities of Salesforce, connect Salesforce to external systems, and in some cases, both:
That last category is a broad one. It includes an array of different tools that make Salesforce more functional – and even more fun – for day-to-day users. Examples here include apps for plotting and analyzing data on a built-in map, generating sophisticated merge documents, and connecting Salesforce with your inbox.
Happy 10th birthday, AppExchange! Thank you – and all the innovators at Salesforce and partner software companies who make you possible – for helping nonprofits, colleges, and universities do what they do better.
As the holiday season fades and we ramp up into the new year, one exciting event on the horizon is Salesforce’sHigher Ed Summit (HED Summit), scheduled for March 30 – April 1 in New Orleans.
I have attended both Dreamforce and the Summit for several years now. While Dreamforce is exhilarating due to the shear enormity of it and all of the new and wonderful things Salesforce is introducing, the HED Summit is equally exciting for those of us who work with Salesforce in Higher Ed. It is at HED Summit where we see and hear specifically about how Colleges and Universities are using the Salesforce platform (and all those new and wonderful developments) to transform constituent engagement and solve real problems in Higher Ed.
HED Summit is a great resource for any school (and definitely worth the time, effort and cost to attend) regardless of your stage in the process. If you are still evaluating Salesforce, you will learn the big lessons from those who are further along the journey. If you are presently involved in an implementation, you will pick-up best practices and create good peer contacts for ongoing support and dialogue. And, if you have completed an implementation, you can offer sage advice and discuss plans for growth and innovation. Even better, you canshare your experiences in a session, giving back to your peers while showcasing your team’s success. No matter where your school is in the process, there are huge benefits to networking with colleagues and partners who can add perspective to new possibilities when leveraging the world’s leading system of engagement.
This is the 4th HED Summit in as many years and if growth is a testament to value received, then the HED Summit must be delivering on its promise. The first summit saw 250 attendees, and last year there were 700. Early indications are that this year will double 2015. So get on board, register soon and please considersharing your story – the holidays are past, but it could be the best present you give in 2016!
In Muddle in the Middle, Part 1, we learned about the value of mid-level donors to your long-term fundraising strategy and the reasons for nurturing those relationships. In this follow-up post, we show you how you can use Salesforce to identify, target and ultimately grow your mid-level donors, in the context of your year-end push.
When it comes to nurturing your mid-level donor — or any donor, timing is key. According to Network for Good, in 2014, 30% of all giving occurred in December and 10% occurred in the final three days of the year. Hopefully, this year-end push is something your organization has been planning for all year. But just in case you are a little behind schedule, grab your Salesforce administrator, roll up your sleeves, and read on.
With only 42 days left in the year, how do you maximize those year-end donations? You automate your ask through drip email campaigns because, face it, who wants to be in the office between 12pm and 6pm on December 31 when online giving is at its most concentrated? Using Salesforce’s email marketing platform — Marketing Cloud — you can easily create a series of highly targeted messages that are triggered by a prospect’s behavior and/or response. If you don’t have a tool like Marketing Cloud you can still execute these strategies it will just require more manual work on your part. Here’s the plan:
ACF Solutions is excited to celebrate the rebranding of the Salesforce Foundation to Salesforce.org. The name change reflects Salesforce’s continued corporate commitment and leadership to making philanthropy an integral part of its business, offering Salesforce technology, people and resources to improve communities around the world. And this new branding reinforces its deep support for the Nonprofit and Higher Education communities.
As a member of the Salesforce Foundation ecosystem for more than 10 years, the ACF Solutions team has witnessed the organization’s remarkable evolution. When we first became a partner in 2005, the Salesforce Foundation was a small group of people dedicated to doing good, mainly through a nascent program that provided donated or deeply discounted Salesforce licenses to Nonprofits. From that early start, we saw the Foundation’s commitment to doing good evolve and expand in so many meaningful ways:
With such a list of accomplishments, it makes perfect sense that the Salesforce Foundation take on the mantle of Salesforce.org as a more appropriate reflection of its contributions to date and perhaps more importantly, as a leader for impactful corporate philanthropy.
As we approach Thanksgiving, I’d like to give thanks for the insight and impact that the Salesforce Foundation, now Salesforce.org, has made to so many lives. And congratulations on your fitting new identity – Salesforce.org.
Here’s what we learned and heard yesterday:
Here’s what we’re looking forward to today in the Foundation Zone:
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