Increase Student Engagement with Salesforce Education Cloud

Educational institutions are today faced with the challenge of meeting the changing needs and expectations of students, and fostering alumni and donor relationships. With the rise in student expectations, educational institutions need to provide a connected, personalized experience throughout the entire student lifecycle.

Just like traditional marketing customer experiences, educational institutions can use the tools and capabilities of CRM to support that journey. However, the data model and user experience must be aligned to meet the needs of institutions. Many educational institutions have a multitude of student data but very few have the means to use it to manage student engagement. Salesforce Education Cloud provides the tools that enable institutions to increase productivity and student engagement, coordinate activities across departments, and adopt a more data-driven approach that ensures student success.

The Salesforce platform empowers educational institutions with the technology needed to manage the entire student lifecycle. However, technology is just one component of student success. The right Salesforce Consultant can help your institution obtain great value out of the Salesforce platform, bring practical Salesforce skills to your classrooms, and empower educators to drive innovation across the industry.

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Increase Student Engagement with Education Data Architecture

EDA: The Cornerstone of Education Cloud

Education Data Architecture (EDA) is the cornerstone of Education Cloud. It allows you plenty of customizable features and functions to allow you to meet the needs of your student engagement staff. EDA comes with pre-configured automation and objects specific to education to enable you to answer key questions about members of your campus community: who is this individual, where have they been in their educational journey, where do they intend to go, what their interests are, and who do they interact with?

EDA empowers institutions to customize solutions that are personalized to their unique needs and processes.

Get a 360 View of Students

A 360-degree view of a student gives you insight into their daily life and allows you to understand the various ways in which they’re engaged with the institution. While staff who engage with students always aspire to know each of their students well, it may be impossible for an individual advisor to memorize this level of detail about each and every student they work with. That’s where the relationships and affiliations feature of Salesforce offers support.  

Relationships and affiliations are customary EDA objects that facilitate a complete view of a student. Relationships in EDA display contact-to-contact connections. While creating a new relationship, you can choose its type (friend, spouse, parent, and so on) and its status (former or current). And every time a new relationship is created in EDA, Salesforce creates a reciprocal relationship, mirroring the same relationship in the opposite direction.

Create Custom Apps for Specialized Service

The obligations that fall under the purview of student services run from career counseling to the registrar, academic advising, financial aid, and so on. Custom apps empower advisors and staff to unlock the real value of Salesforce to serve students. Custom apps can be created to serve multiple objectives and can work for any team. In order for a custom app to be a success, staff, leadership, and your Salesforce Consultant all need to be on the same page about app requirements before they begin building.

Personalize Student Outreach

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What is Marketing Automation?

Forging strong student engagement depends upon clear and coherent communication. Some of this communication usually happens in person. But the truth is that a lot of that communication is digital. As staff workloads grow and the students continue to prefer communicating digitally, the task of monitoring back and forth messages becomes challenging.

Salesforce’s marketing automation tools let you automate standard activities like social media posts, emails, forms, among others. These channels of outreach are key to maintaining student engagement. Marketing automation trims the manual component of outreach tasks.

Salesforce comes with 2 options for marketing automation: Marketing Cloud and Pardot. Either of them has its own unique qualities and empowers you to stay engaged with your contacts.

More Dynamic Student Interactions with Marketing Automation

Irrespective of the tool you choose to use, interactions with students can become more personalized and dynamic with Salesforce marketing automation. The beauty of marketing automation is that it allows your teams to utilize the benefits of both efficiency and personalization. 

Maximize Outreach by coupling Marketing Automation and Campaigns

We have covered the aspect of impact marketing automation can have on the efficacy of engaging with students, but what about the content it delivers? This is where Education Cloud users unlock the power of campaigns.

A Salesforce campaign is an engagement activity you plan, manage, and track within Salesforce. Campaigns can be used to track any outbound marketing initiative that requests a contact (for eg a student) for a response. The campaign hierarchy feature allows you to connect multiple related outreach initiatives to a single campaign. Once your campaigns are created and linked with the associated campaigns, you can use the campaign reports feature to run reports on your initiatives.

Strengthen Campus Connections with Experience Cloud

Salesforce Experiences for Greater Connectivity

Salesforce experiences are customised digital spaces for your students, staff, and faculty to connect, collaborate, and engage. Salesforce Experiences is a powerful tool that can transform the way members of your educational community interact with each other and share ideas and information.

Connect Students to their Peers

Peer-to-peer connections are key to establishing strong student engagement, especially for new students. Experiences provide a background for connections to sprout and grow. They also give staff the data and information they need to better understand what kind of support students need most so they can offer the right resources and assistance.

Using experiences, students can self-organize themselves into relevant affinity groups. They may connect based on courses they have taken, departments they belong to, sports teams or clubs they’ve signed up for, or just general interests they have in common. Faculty and staff can engage with student groups to respond to queries, share links to resources, and provide real-time assistance.

The reporting capacity of Salesforce Experiences provides valuable information. Staff can run reports to monitor popular topics in the experienced community enabling them to better understand prevalent issues and identify the resources that are most sought-after.

Keep Your Campus Informed

Experiences allow community members to become independent by connecting them to vetted, searchable resources. Community members can easily access answers to their questions without an email, a phone call, or an appointment thereby drastically improving the user experience and freeing up valuable time for all involved.

Onboard and Train Staff

Salesforce Experience can also be used as a training tool for staff by providing access to information resources. Users can create file repositories and groups within an experience. These repositories hold relevant documents and information about a particular topic. The Groups feature allows students to self-organize and connect based on shared interests or organizations and can also be used by staff to create private spaces for training and onboarding purposes.

To sum it all up, Salesforce Experiences provide an environment for students and staff to gather and collaborate, even when they are at different locations. They foster the relationships and connections that are the cornerstone of true student engagement. When combined with the 24/7 access to informative resources, it nurtures a campus community that is invested in each other’s success and empowered to self-educate.

About Author

Indranil Chakraborty

Indranil is a technology enthusiast with over 25 years of experience in project management, operations, technology and business development. Indranil has led project teams in egovernance, business process re-engineering, product development and worked with Government and Corporate customers. Indranil truly believes in the power of technology to drive productivity and growth for teams and businesses.