Innovating Together to Shape the Future of Education

Institutions across the globe are leading through change in unprecedented ways. Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen universities quickly shift to virtual campuses and K-12 schools come together to provide meals to students in need. There’s no doubt that education institutions are the heart of our communities, serving as centers for lifelong learning and providing critical networks for student and family support.

In talking with our education customers, we’ve heard how digital engagements are connecting every part of the institution. Through tailored communications, virtual advising appointments, and online communities, higher ed and K-12 schools have been able to widely accelerate learner and institution support. The shift to always-on digital engagements is increasingly important as we emerge from this crisis and shape a new path forward in education.

We spoke about this new digital imperative in our virtual event “Innovating Together on the Path to Higher Ed Summit.” If you missed it, you can now access the on-demand recording to hear from Westmont College and the University of Colorado Boulder, and learn about our latest Education Cloud innovations focused on helping you drive digital transformation across the entire student lifecycle.

Keep reading for an overview of our community-driven innovations for recruitment and admissions, student experience, and advancement.

 

Foundational Recruitment & Admissions Product

 

While recruitment and admissions has always been top of mind for us, we’ve listened to your feedback about expediting innovation in this area and are excited to announce our intent to build a foundational product for recruitment and admissions. This new product will be built on our Education Data Architecture (EDA) to support all types of institutions and will empower prospective students, families, and admissions teams with a seamless experience.

Our first step in creating this foundational product is to build a data model and application reader natively within Salesforce. This will provide admissions teams with a single place to view all applicant data and documents for streamlined decision making. Make sure to stay updated on this latest innovation here.

Supporting and Advising Students for Long-Term Success

To make it easier for advisors to connect with students virtually, we’ve extended Advisor Link to include fields for video conferencing. Now, advisors can resolve students’ questions and concerns quickly while also using virtual one stops. We’ll be there when your students and advising teams return back to campus with the newly-released Student Self Check-In feature. This addition streamlines walk-in appointments by configuring digital waiting rooms and kiosks for students to self register for a queue. Advisors and staff can verify students on the check-in queue with contact lookup and connect the case to a contact in Salesforce, saving time for students and staff.

Intervention Management for K-12

We’re building on our intervention management work with Oakland Unified School District and expanding Advisor Link to support the needs of K-12. This intervention management solution is an exciting product milestone that will help K-12 counselors and student support staff visualize student progress, intervene early, and measure key outcomes. The first release of this K-12 product will be delivered at the end of this year. Make sure to stay updated on this latest innovation here.

Engaging Alumni and Donors to Make a Lasting Impact

Whether you’re reimagining giving days or refocusing year-end campaigns, we understand how important it is to be able to capture annual gifts quickly and easily online. With Giving Pages and Payment Services*, advancement teams can create out-of-the-box giving pages and then process and track donations using Salesforce through Gift Entry Manager (GEM).

To further streamline fundraising and accounting operations, we launched Accounting Subledger. With the ability to integrate with ten widely-used accounting systems directly within Salesforce, this new product prepares fundraising information for your accounting system, ensuring a single source of truth for revenue and payment data.

Education Data Architecture (EDA) Readiness Initiative

 

Finally, we announced the Education Data Architecture (EDA) Readiness Initiative. This new initiative helps institutions evaluate which apps on the AppExchange integrate easily with EDA. To learn more about the EDA Readiness Initiative, you can visit the EDA collections page and make sure to visit the Education Data Architecture Group in the Power of Us Hub to connect with others in the community who are also using EDA.

 

*Salesforce.org Payment Services, Engagement Hub, and Giving Pages (known together as Salesforce.org Elevate) and Supporter Data Integrity (part of the Insights Platform) will be made available to United States–based customers transacting in U.S. dollars. Salesforce.org Elevate is scheduled to be released later in 2020. Prices subject to change.

For payment services and online fundraising tools in global currencies, please see the Salesforce AppExchange.