Salesforce Announces New Features in Education Cloud, Helping Educational Institutions Better Connect with Students, Alumni and Donors

The higher education community is coming together like never before to support students, families, faculty and staff during this unprecedented time. Institutions around the world are re-engaging alumni networks, supporting student advising in new ways and cultivating a sense of belonging virtually for newly admitted and prospective students. Advancement teams are reimagining giving days as community outreach campaigns to support those in need. Faculty and staff are pivoting to manage student wellbeing and online learning, while advisors are going above and beyond to serve students wherever they are around the world.

At Salesforce.org, we have the privilege of empowering institutions across the globe with our Education Cloud, a CRM-based set of solutions that enable institutions to drive student success across the life cycle from prospect to alum. Today, we are announcing new innovations in Education Cloud designed to help institutions drive always-on digital engagement in recruitment and admissions, the student experience and advancement. This is especially relevant today as institutions everywhere adapt to the current challenges in the industry.

Introducing new features in Education Cloud—engaging alumni and donors to make a lasting impact while empowering administrators and streamlining operations

Alumni engagement has become a pivotal part of higher education success. With new features in Education Cloud, advancement teams have access to new payment and accounting capabilities, making it easier to process donations and provide consistency of giving across platforms. In addition, with Education Cloud’s new fully-integrated fundraising suite called Elevate launching this summer, institutions can enhance online giving and better manage their alumni and constituent network with a centralized hub, making volunteering and giving more streamlined and personalized.

• Giving Pages allows higher education institutions to launch branded fundraising campaigns at scale in just a few clicks. This helps increase the speed to market for targeted giving campaigns while rallying alumni and donors to support their schools in times of need.
• Payment Services enables advancement teams to accept payments using Giving Pages or their own custom web donation forms. They can also process and track donations using Salesforce through the Gift Entry Manager module.
• Engagement Hub for Education is a branded portal that helps drive stronger constituent engagement by integrating volunteer opportunities, impactful alumni stories, giving and payment processing in one place. With Engagement Hub, it’s easier to digitally connect, organize and recommend alumni volunteering and giving opportunities, while using data to provide more personalized donor experiences. For example, alumni can now learn how to engage with peers from their graduating class or from specific clubs to support opportunities for giving or volunteering.
• Accounting Subledger helps advancement teams maintain consistency in financial records, pledges and payments across fundraising and finance systems, helping to increase trust and transparency.

Supporting and advising students for long term success

We are also unveiling Student Self Check-in for walk-ins as part of Salesforce Advisor Link. This feature will help streamline the in-person advising experience when students return back to campus. Student Self Check-in configures digital waiting rooms and sets up kiosks for students to self register for a queue before coming into an advising office. Advisors and staff can easily verify students on the check-in queue, saving time that is typically spent gathering student data across various systems.

Foundational recruitment and admissions product

Within the current climate, it’s important to empower student applicants with the proactive support they need to move through the application process. As part of our recruitment and admissions solution, we’re building a foundational product that will provide admissions teams with a single place to view all applicant data and documents for streamlined decision making, which will be available later this year.

We are in this together

This is an incredibly important time for higher education institutions. Salesforce.org is humbled and grateful for the continued opportunity to support our educational customers and to drive digital engagement across the entire student lifecycle during this time. It’s our vision to make learning a lifelong experience guided by institutions and leaders who believe in quality education for all. We are innovating together in this shared vision.

More information

• Salesforce.org Elevate will be released this summer and made available to United States–based customers transacting in U.S. dollars. Learn more about Elevate here.
• Student Check-In and Accounting Subledger are available today.
• Stay up-to-date about the Recruiting and Admissions product, click here.
• For more information about Education Cloud, click here.
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• Any unreleased services or features referenced in this post are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Please contact Salesforce for more information.