Salesforce.org Education Cloud

A game changer for higher ed recruiting and admissions

Pros:

We use a customized 3rd party version of Salesforce within the Higher Ed space - primarily for graduate recruiting and admissions, as well as marketing. Salesforce, while a sales platform, is versatile enough to allow us to completely customize our org the way we need it to function. We keep track of prospective applicants, run our info sessions as campaigns, and have even built our application using Salesforce site pages. The amount of flexibility and potential for integration is staggering. We are not full on the HEDA model, yet, but are moving in that direction. In addition, the products being rolled out for Higher Ed such as Adviser Link are very intriguing, and have us considering how we could roll out Salesforce to other units in our grad school.

Cons:

Salesforce in general is a huge platform, and can be a bit challenging for new staff to learn. In addition, because of the customization and natural deviation away from a sales-based mentality in order to get it to work for Higher Ed, Salesforce can quickly accumulate layers and layers of settings, permissions, etc.

The Premier CRM, Set up for Higher Ed

Comments: Our university used Salesforce to communicate with students and track those communications. The ability to create custom solutions to meet that needs of our admissions team makes Salesforce the easy choice.

Pros:

Salesforce is a very powerful, customizable platform that allows companies and admins to set up an environment/instance that meets almost all of their communication and tracking needs. Salesforce for Higher Ed takes that powerful platform and directs its power towards recruiting and communicating with students. Creating and managing objects and views is very easy. Can be used to support and communicate with a student throughout their whole time interacting with the university (prospect to graduated alumnus). Customer service, as with all Salesforce products, is excellent and abundant documentation exists.

Cons:

The native reporting functionality in Salesforce is severely lacking. Outdated graphics, clunky reporting structure, and limitations make reporting in Salesforce less than ideal. If possible, I would recommend completing reporting in an external software that connects directly to your Salesforce data.

A fantastic all-around system for tracking and managing any stage of the student lifecycle

Comments: Salesforce for Higher Ed has revolutionized our enrollment practices, and continues to open new avenues for data-collection, enrollment management and prospect engagement. It's become the hub that our entire enrollment services operation runs from. Our main problems tend to be a result of our own inexperience, or lack of knowledge in navigating the truly vast potential of Salesforce. The learning curve is real, but we've found it worth it to stick it out.

Pros:

I love the flexibility of Salesforce and the tailored customization of HEDA. It can do anything we need, and more. Salesforce also works hard to make sure every user has the training and documentation they need to make implementation successful.

Cons:

The sheer size and flexibility of Salesforce imposes an enormous learning curve on users. Without proper guidance, some functions will be left idle, or even misused. Other functions are theoretically possible, but difficult to implement without extensive training and/or expensive add-on products.

A steep learning curve

Pros:

SalesForce gives the potential to be a company-wide CRM, rather than a CRM just for Admissions. This is something we would like to do and have started working toward. This is SalesForce's largest benefit over many other popular Higher Ed CRMs. There is a lot of potential here and I am pleased with a lot of the features, though there are some ones that feel basic that are missing.

Cons:

The data architecture is very convoluted and there is a very steep learning curve. It is clear when using SalesForce as a CRM tool for Higher Ed, that it was not built for Higher Ed. Despite that, it is still a strong solution. The other biggest pain point is responsiveness and slowness. The UI (ironically called Lightning) is incredibly slow which makes working on configurations very time-consuming for System Admins.

Great Platform; Detailed Reporting Capabilities

Pros:

I appreciate how clear and easy the layout of everything is. Users are able to categorize each prospective student by the stage they're in. The reporting capabilities are incredibly helpful. Users can generate specific reports on basically anything regarding prospective students. Additionally, the platform has attractive visuals (graphs and more) to track each recruiter's progress.

Cons:

While the capabilities of the report-making are great, the initial creation of the report can be tricky. I sometimes feel like I'm writing algebraic equations when creating a new report. This isn't always the case, but training new hires how to create new reports is probably the most time-consuming part of our CRM training.

Salesforce CRM

Comments: We had a long learning curve because the axiom did not function at all with our SIS and data had to be manually implemented for 5 months. To be fair the implementation was also not handled the best. Once we got all the components speaking between the software program it is a powerful tool. Again the way it is arranged is better as a communication tool and trying to adapt it to applications for university is not as user friendly.

Pros:

I like the ability to track all the student data from inception as a prospect through to alumni and potential donor.

Cons:

How it is structured to be student centric. When using it to look up data as application, attachments etc it is cumbersome with many steps.

Easy to use

Comments: Ease and volume of work I am able to accomplish because the software is so productive to the work we do.

Pros:

Once you learn how to use it~ it is so easy. Being able to access a student page and knowing all information is there for the student on his contact or application page helps with ease. Report building is relatively easy too.

Cons:

Usually when I get "tripped up" it is my own error. Knowing the language of the reports is where this usually happens.

Brilliant tool for Higher Education Enrollment Teams!

Comments: I would recommend to those institutions that are interested in supporting high call & email volume enrollment advisors. I am not sure how much our system cost, but I would recommend as someone who uses the software daily.

Pros:

The simplicity as a Enrollment Advisor was simple. Emails, tasks, calls, etc. were easy to execute. I know the setup was intense because we had a 2-week training session with SalesForce. I was much more effective with my daily outreach & followed up with the right prospects due to the software.

Cons:

I wished that my softphones & marketing would work better with the SalesForce database. It was just not a very effective all in one platform.