Let’s Stop Asking Schools To Do More With Less

Non-cognitive factors are having their moment in K-12.

• Geoffrey Canada’s much-lauded Harlem Children’s Zone, has demonstrated the profound impact that wraparound services can have in supporting student achievement.
• Angela Duckworth’s research on grit, has given birth to Character Lab and helped spark a national conversation on the importance of social-emotional learning.
• And, the passage of ESSA, has opened the door to using multiple measures in our definition of accountability and student success.

The examples above are illustrative of the many ways that we are now asking our schools to take on more. But, even as the demands on K-12 expand, schools across the country continue to face a onslaught of budget cuts at the federal, state, and local levels.

This often leads to a tired question: How can we get our schools do more with less?

We’d like to reframe the conversation with a more optimistic question:

How can we help schools do more — with more?

Starting with more: At Salesforce.org we believe that everyone who wants to change the world should have the tools and technology to do so. We believe that technology is can be one of the most powerful equalizer of our time, providing access to data, knowledge, and — above all — connections. That’s why we’ve been providing schools and nonprofits with access to 10 donated subscriptions and deep discounts on additional subscriptions, products and/or services through the Power of Us Program.

In the time since, we’ve seen K-12 schools build on the Salesforce platform to track student interventions, drive parent engagement, improve fundraising outcomes, create more family-centric admissions and enrollment processes, manage student internship programs, and more.

Continuing with more: Inspired by these K-12 innovators, we built the K-12 Fast Start, which makes it easier for schools to get started on our platform. And, given the growing need for K-12 organizations to raise more funds to do more, we configured a Fundraising and Grants Management solution right into the K-12 Fast Start!

More more: We recently hosted our first-ever K-12 fundraising webinar, which you can watch in this recording. In the webinar, you can hear from the Menlo School, a small private school that provides over $6M in financial aid to 22% of its student body. To support these efforts, Menlo recently made the switch from Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce. Hear them describe the technical and change management challenges they faced, explain their implementation process, and share some early wins.

The webinar also features the Austin Independent School District (AISD), which serves over 80,000 students in Austin, Texas. Since adopting Salesforce, AISD has more than doubled their annual grant revenue and integrated an innovative, new crowdfunding initiative to empower their schools’ fundraising efforts. With the help of their fundraising and grants management efforts, AISD is now implementing a groundbreaking social-emotional learning program for their students — they are doing more, with more.

Recommendations and Resources:

• Sign up for the 30 day free trial to explore the Salesforce for K-12 Fast Start
• Watch the on-demand fundraising and grants management webinar
• Apply for 10 free, Salesforce for K-12 user licenses through the Power of Us Program
• Try challenging the status quo question of “How can we do more with less?”