Spring ‘21 Release Helps Schools Maximize Impact

Salesforce.org Elevate is in the process of being retired, and will no longer be sold as of April 3, 2023. See more information in our communication, or find one of our many partners on the AppExchange if you are searching for a digital fundraising solution.

For existing customers, Elevate will be supported through the end of existing contracts.

The education landscape continues to evolve as students and faculty spend more and more time teaching and learning online. Technology is at the core of supporting this new age of remote learning, admissions, virtual student and faculty services, advancement, and wellbeing support for both K-12 and higher education.

Our Education Cloud innovations and enhancements, which are part of our Salesforce Spring ’21 Release, help support this shift and enable institutions to reimagine their experiences and thrive in this “new normal.”

Students have engaged in learning virtually for nearly one year.

Connect Application Reviewers in Admissions Connect

In our winter release, you learned all about Admissions Connect — our purpose-built product for recruitment and admissions, which helps admissions teams meaningfully engage with applicants and streamline application management. Admissions Connect enables efficient decisioning and application management with a rich application reader experience and a navigator for staff to see which application items are complete and which items are still in progress. This release enhances the Reviewer Experience to allow for more dynamic feedback and to support document verification. Watch the Admissions Connect demo.

Enhanced Reviewer Experience in Admissions Connect is a new feature in the Spring ‘21 release.

Admissions Connect Integration with the Common App

Common App member institutions can now seamlessly bring their applications into the Education Data Architecture (EDA). In this package we provide an Extract, Transform, and Load (ELT) approach, batch script process, and mapper from staging table to the EDA objects. In this release, we’ve added more robust error handling to help admins resolve incorrect application data, including an error mapper, error logger, and batch email service to record and surface errors that were encountered while importing and converting applicant data. 

Engage More With Advisor Link

Advisors, we’ve got some great news for you as well! We’ve enhanced Advisor Link with an eye on efficiency, so that you can spend more time supporting students face-to-face or virtually. We hope you’ll find web meeting automation as a helpful tool to better support virtual appointments. With web meeting automation, advisors can enter their individual web meeting link as a meeting location, enabling students to join with one click! Group appointments is also a great new feature designed to give advisors the ability to create availability for group appointments, and allow for students to book spots in groups. 

Students can book appointments and join virtual meetings with their advisors with one click.

Keep your Salesforce Org in Top Condition with Settings Health Check

The Education Data Architecture (EDA) Settings Health Check is a new feature that helps administrators routinely check, identify, and fix potential issues in their EDA settings and configurations. The Settings Health Check notifies admins if their settings and configurations need to be updated to optimize their EDA instance and take full advantage of the EDA.

An EDA Settings Health Check informs Education Cloud system administrators on what configurations need attention and how to fix them.

Convert Visitors to Donors with Salesforce.org Elevate 

In an additional Salesforce.org release, we’ve made some exciting enhancements to Salesforce.org Elevate, an integrated fundraising platform that allows you to manage payments directly in Salesforce. These new features allow organizations to add custom fields to Giving Pages to gather additional information that flows directly into Salesforce for future stewardship. We’ve also added the ability to import recurring donations into Elevate and Salesforce so you can manage all of your sustaining donors in one place.

Also, you’re now able to engage donors in new ways — they can select a designation for their gift and provide an option to cover fees on Giving Pages. Elevate also includes a donation widget that allows organizations to embed Giving Pages on their websites for consistent branding.

Allow donors to determine the destination of their gift with Giving Pages.

To learn more about these announcements, watch our Release Readiness Live recording and see these features in action. 

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About the Author

Nathalie Mainland

Nathalie Mainland, senior vice president and general manager of Education Cloud at Salesforce.org, has over 15 years of senior-level experience working at technology and education organizations, including Blackboard, Autodesk, and Pearson. Follow her on Twitter @nmainland.