Salesforce Spring ‘20 Release Features for Education Institutions

Big news! The groundhog did not see his shadow and predicted an early spring! There is so much to look forward to: warmer weather, blooming flowers, and, of course, the Salesforce Spring ‘20 release. This release is packed with features that will help make your teams more efficient so that they can focus their energy on students. From queues and cloning objects (and related records!) to field-to-field filtering and permission set groups, these new features are sure to get you excited. Here are our five top feature picks for education institutions.

1. Assign Tasks to a Queue

Serving a demanding student body means that educational institutions are busy all the time. Salesforce has come up with a way to help out advisors and staff to get work done efficiently, effectively, and as a team. Tasks can now be assigned to a shared queue. Assigning tasks to a queue means that staff can now share their workload and pick up additional tasks from the queue’s list view when they are ready and have the time. Now all members of the team can pitch in without waiting for work to be delegated or reassigned. Woo hoo, shared work!

2. Clone objects and related records

So many of the processes and activities that happen in education are cyclical – they repeat every semester, every campaign cycle. The Clone with Related action is designed to simplify the management of repeating business processes. Advancement teams, think of the possibilities for donor retention! With the Clone with Related action, you can now clone campaigns AND campaign members statuses to ensure that outreach campaigns reach the right alumni year after year! With the Clone with Related action, no one falls through the cracks.

Note that to use this feature, you will need to add the “Clone with Related” button to the Mobile & Lightning Actions section of your campaign and opportunity page layouts.

3. Filter a contact list

Account Criteria is a neat new feature that allows education teams to get specific with identifying and emailing the right people. This feature was previously available in Classic and has now been fully integrated into Lightning Experience. Let’s talk through the value of filtering a contact list through the lens of student experience. We know that Financial Aid advisors can serve hundreds of students within the course of a year. Highly involved in the financial success of every student, advisors want to make sure that when an application for a scholarship for Canadian students opens, the right individuals are notified. From a Contact List view, they can now filter on account criteria, identify contacts for List Emails, and advertise the scholarship to all of the students whose address contains Canada.

4. Permission set groups

Permission set groups allow administrators to consistently and reliably manage the permissions of a group of users. Permission set groups are a great option for recruiting and admissions, where staff might be organized into sub-teams based on function –some users might need to access alumni records to coordinate alumni interviews, while others require access to current student records to organize a mentorship program between current and prospective students. In this example, instead of applying multiple permission sets to individual users across the recruitment and admissions team, create two permission set groups for the sub-teams that contain all of the permissions that each team needs to do their job. Next: assign users within the recruitment and admissions team to the appropriate permission set group. With Permission set groups, you will be able to decrease the number of profiles with combined permission sets and even mute permissions within a group. Just like that: permission management made easy!

5.Field-to-Field Filtering

This is an exciting new feature that allows users to compare the values of two different report fields. Advancement teams can now target alumni who gave more money this year than last year and follow up with those donors who (based on year-to-year patterns) may have the ability to give more.

Time to spring into action! (Pun intended.) Make your teams more efficient and productive with queues, build efficiencies with the clone related action, build precision in emailing by filtering contact lists with account criteria, and manage permissions with ease with permission set groups. Check out the full list of new releases and watch the release webinar on March 3 for nonprofit and education customers.

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About the Author

Jenna Ross is a Success Content Specialist and focuses on building helpful resources for education customers, including webinars, workbooks and blogs. Jenna has 10 years of experience advancing K-12 education both in the classroom and with nonprofits. A previous Salesforce customer, Jenna is passionate about the value of Salesforce tools (in the hands of thoughtful, dedicated people) to transform the education space.