Salesforce.org Education Cloud Basics

November 14, 2022
Indranil Chakraborty

Today the key constituents of educational institutions namely learners, faculty and staff expect more from their institutions than ever before. With Education Cloud, educational institutions of all sizes can drive institutional and student success from anywhere. Recruitment and admissions teams, marketing, alumni and operations teams can use a single integrated platform to get 360 degree views of every student across the entire education journey. With Education Cloud, institutions leverage purpose-built education products and solutions from the Salesforce platform as well it’s latest innovation that can be customised at scale to meet ever evolving dynamic needs in an agile framework.

Education Cloud can help create a student 360 from recruitment and admissions to alumni engagement. And the key aspect is to create a strong first impression with students. That’s why Education Cloud supports each stage of the recruitment funnel, from prospects to enrolment. Understand your pool of applicants with actionable Tableau dashboards, then perform targeted campaigns to engage prospective students on the channel they prefer. With admissions connect your staff can create meaningful and engaging experiences with applicants and streamline the entire application process in one unified view. Automated chat bots and customised communities assist applicants to get the support they need at the right time. And dynamic checklists help your staff to keep applicants on track. They can review applications easily with an innovative scrolling reader. Once admission is complete, onboarding of students is the next critical step in driving success. Students can get access to personalised success plans with Student Success Hub right on their device and can easily collaborate with their advisors for tailored degree plans. With Education Cloud you can empower advising teams with tools like flexible scheduling and smart alerts to support multiple students throughout their graduation journey. And you can easily streamline student services with a unified experience to help students get answers to their questions quickly and from anywhere.

Education Cloud transforms your learner data into important analytics that eventually helps administrators push more meaningful and impactful alumni and corporate engagement. Marketing teams can deliver personalized communication to foster long term relationships with key stakeholders with automated journeys.

Accounting staff can bridge the financial data in your CRM with finance with accounting sub ledger. This ensures consistent financial insights across teams. With MuleSoft integration capabilities and Tableau powered enterprise analytics, you can convert insights into actionable data to drive success for your institution. And irrespective of where your staff is working from- whether home or campus, they can get assistance and collaborate from anywhere.

Education Cloud is a new way to manage all operations at educational institutions with purpose-built tools and features to facilitate every aspect of constituent engagement. It empowers you with the right digital infrastructure so that your institution can transform at scale.

Salesforce.org Education Cloud Basics

Leveraging the world’s #1 CRM, Education Cloud connects recruitment, admissions, student experience, advancement and marketing on a unified platform for a 360 degree view of every constituent.

Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

Unify data from all constituents in a single place and deliver engaging and personalised experiences across the entire learner journey at scale.

Customize to Your Needs

Customise Education Cloud based on your institution’s dynamic needs and take advantage of over 3,000 apps from Salesforce’s leading enterprise marketplace – AppExchange.

Join a Flourishing Education Cloud Community

Participate in conventions and learn from other institutions in the Trailblazer Community, or connect with a Salesforce partner to get started.

Education Cloud products for the entire education journey.

Education Data Architecture (EDA)

Education Data Architecture (EDA) helps in configuring the Salesforce instance for education.

EDA Features

Learner Lifecycle

Out of the Box Features: Leverage tools, objects and components tailor made for education
Lifecycle Relationship Management: Manage constituent relationships at every stage of the learner lifecycle from prospect to student to alumni.
A Unified View: Connect students with affiliations, relationships, courses, and academic programs in one single view

Easy Configuration

Flexible for Institutions of any size: Add objects, fields, and custom page layouts with custom and dynamic business models
Custom Apps & Insights: Build and deploy apps with drag and drop components and deliver personalized experiences with AI-powered insights
Seamless Integrations: Seamlessly connect EDA to your student information systems or any other third-party systems with clicks not code

Connect

Best Practices and Insights: Get support from the Trailblazer Community and leverage best practices
Strong Partner Ecosystem: Find EDA compatible partner apps & certified consultants on the AppExchange
Community Sprint Events: Connect with institutions using EDA at Salesforce.org sprint events through the year

Admissions Connect

Admissions Connect allows teams to engage with applicants meaningfully and empowers them to streamline the entire admissions process.

Admissions Connect Features:

Manage

Application Reader: View all applicant documents in a single view that supports dynamic feedback.
Document Management: Store all documents in one single platform. And search easily.
Application Form Builder: Create custom applications and forms with clicks not code.
Workflow Automation: Customise and automate routine tasks and application review.

Engage

Applicant Portal: Deploy portals fast and give applicants one place to track their applications.
Dynamic Application Checklists: Create custom checklists to give applicants a real-time view into complete and incomplete items in their application.
24/7 Chatbot: Deliver instant recommendations with AI powered chat, freeing up staff.
Document Uploads: Give applicants easy access to upload, view, and track documents from anywhere, from any device.

Analyze

AI-Driven Recommendations: Get recommendations to personalize communications, schedule follow up, and deliver timely applicant support.
Analytics and Reporting: Get a complete view of your enrolment funnel at any time with trends and projections.
Scalable Platform: Leverage Tableau Dashboards to visualize trends across multiple parameters.

Salesforce Student Success Hub for Higher Education

Student Success Hub helps colleges deliver complete and unbiased student support.

Student Success Hub Features:

Engage

Mobile Student Portal: Give students one place to manage their entire journey, manage appointments, and see upcoming tasks.
Appointment Scheduling: Connect students with the right staff with real time appointment scheduling with advisors and counselors.
Conversational Chatbots: Send automated text messages for reminders on important tasks.
Sentiment Surveys: Discover how students are feeling about their learning experience in a measurable way.

Understand

Unified Student Record: Give your staff a 360-degree view of every student with insights.
Alerts & Mass Actions: Intervene individually or at scale to identify students that need additional support.
Advising Notes: Share notes across teams, track student progress, and take action.
Pre-built Analytics: Get insights into student success metrics to support retention and graduation.

Collaborate

Flexible Appointment Booking: Centralized appointment scheduling tool, with complete flexibility for dynamic scheduling.
Case Management: Provide help to students quickly using best-in-class omni-channel case management functionality.

Empower

Success Plans & Templates: Empower students to reach their academic and personal goals with scalable templates, and provide ongoing support.
Success Teams: Bring staff together around students with access to the right information.
Pathways: Empower students and staff to collaborate to plan the courses and stay on track to meet graduation requirements.
Resources to Get Started Fast: Leverage Tableau Dashboards to get insightful reporting and analytics.

Connect

Collaborative App: Work smarter and faster with data integration across the learner journey.
Automation: Convert Student Success Alerts to actionable items in Student Success Hub and streamline the assignment to an advisor.
Notifications: Faculty stays updated with notifications in Slack as soon as an advisor takes action on an alert.
Personalized Faculty Experience: Simplify alert management by populating a faculty member’s courses directly in Slack.

Accounting Subledger

Accounting Subledger ensures a single source of truth for revenue and payment

Accounting Subledger Features:

Customize

Accounting Subledger supports mapping to virtually any accounting system from Salesforce. It comes with pre-built templates for commonly used accounting systems.

Fundraise

Accounting Subledger enables fundraising teams to easily manage reporting and audit requirements associated with gifts and grants across multiple programs, projects, and fiscal years. Not only that, it also saves time by automating the reconciliation of fundraising information with finance’s general ledger.

Flexible Views

Fundraisers, finance and accounting teams can access a user-friendly interface to work faster and more efficiently.

Track

You can connect all revenue and expense transactions with Accounting Subledger. This increases flexibility and transparency.

Elevate

Elevate is an integrated suite of fundraising solutions for education and nonprofits.

Elevate Features:

Giving Pages

Launch Giving Pages in Minutes: Easily launch mobile-friendly donation forms with custom fields that are designed to maximize donations. Publish multiple pages easily on your website, social media pages or standalone pages.
Maximize Donations: Boost donations by allowing donors to cover fees, enable fund designations by allowing for gifts in honor of someone, and allow for one-time or recurring gifts.
Customize Ask Ladders: Utilise pre-built ask ladders or set the number of asks, frequency and amounts.
Integrate Google Analytics: Identify top-performing Giving Pages with just a few clicks and optimise your campaigns.

Payment Services

Process Payments End-to-End: Connect your existing gateway to accept online donations via multiple payment methods.
View All Data in NPSP: Track and ensure accuracy, get a unified view of all donation data to streamline accounting.
Strengthen Security and Scalability: Payment Services meets all industry-leading compliance standards: PCI compliance Level 1, GDPR, and CCPA.

Recurring Donors

Manage Recurring Donations: Easily manage single or recurring transactions in NPSP.
Save Your Staff Time: Process recurring donations automatically and send automated alerts n case of payment failure.
Import Existing Donors: Consolidate recurring donors in one place using the import functionality.
Notify Staff and Donors: Customize and brand receipts, and have the flexibility to have them sent automatically. Manage receipts and gifts directly in NPSP.

Personalized Asks

Integrate with Your Marketing Platform: Use Marketing Cloud Engagement for Nonprofits to integrate with NPSP.
Offer Ladders for Individual Donors: Create personalized ladders for individual donors based on prior giving history.
Prefill Donation Fields: Boost donation form conversion by populating fields like name and email ID.
Leverage Elevate-Specific Email: Leverage Marketing Cloud email templates for Nonprofits to personalize the donation page and boost conversion.

The last 2 years have witnessed a paradigm shift in how education is delivered. Study and work from anywhere are a norm today. And while this is true, every institution has its unique set of processes. Only the best Salesforce Consulting Companies like Girikon can unlock the true potential offered by Salesforce Education Cloud. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help digitally transform your institution.

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.

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