Education Cloud Tools and Benefits
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe some of Education Cloud’s purpose-built solutions.
- Explain how Education Cloud’s tools benefit institutions and learners.
Salesforce for Education
As we said in the previous unit, Salesforce for Education is a configurable technology suite that provides solutions to drive learner and institution success. It essentially encompasses any Salesforce product that an educational institution uses. That includes popular Salesforce apps, thousands of AppExchange apps created by partner organizations, and even custom apps and integrations. All of these work together–or even, if you prefer, on their own–to form a digital foundation that empowers tomorrow’s institutions today.
Education Cloud is the cornerstone of the Salesforce for Education universe. It’s a suite of solutions specifically designed for education, and it lives on the same core platform as flagship products like Service Cloud and Sales Cloud. This allows us to bring Salesforce’s power, innovation, and scalability to institutions of all sizes.
Education Cloud runs on a powerful data model that supports the complete learner journey, from their time as a prospective student all the way to becoming an engaged member of your alumni community.
The Foundation of Education Cloud
The Education Cloud data foundation is a flexible, scalable data model that Salesforce designed in close collaboration with our education partners and customer community. It supports the entire learner experience, giving you a holistic, 360-degree view of students at every stage of their relationship with your institution.
With the Education Cloud data foundation, you can easily see the relationships students have with advisors and family members, and affiliations with clubs, departments, and more, from day one. It also includes early warning management for things like attendance, term grades, and prospective employers.
Beyond providing tremendous insight about your learners, the Education Cloud data model supports the ways in which a person can have multiple roles and relationships with one institution. It’s even customizable to apply to parents, employees, partner organizations, and others.
And it doesn’t stop there. The Education Cloud data model supports faculty, staff, and learning with the ability to define and map multiple types of learning programs with varying objectives and outcomes. You can associate learners with specific requirements and track their progress toward their goals.
Recruitment and Admissions
Education Cloud’s recruitment and admissions functionality streamlines application review, drives applicant engagement, and facilitates collaboration across teams. It helps teams meaningfully engage applicants and effectively manage admissions processes. Recruiters and admissions officers spend less time on manual processes, and more time building relationships.
Requests for Information facilitate the first interactions between prospective students and recruitment and admissions teams. An OmniScript provides a customizable application form that steps students through the application process. Document requirements let the applicant upload letters, transcripts, personal essays, or any other files required for their application.
The Application Review Workspace in Education Cloud makes it easy to review the entire application. Reviewers have a complete, accessible view of each applicant and can submit comments and recommendations, all on one page. No need to toggle between multiple tabs or click out to different programs or windows to view application sections or documents. Appointment Scheduling allows applicants to self-schedule admissions interviews.
User Consoles harness the power of the Salesforce core product platform by embedding CRM Analytics dashboards on home pages for recruiters, admissions officers, or department directors. With CRMA, your institution can:
- Keep tabs on your entire recruiting class.
- Customize your dashboard with the reports that are meaningful to your school or specific program.
- Track application trends, stay up to date on application status and make informed decisions based on metrics.
Student Success
Protecting students’ well-being and connecting them with the resources they need, when they need them, is important and complex work. When caseloads are daunting and student information is siloed, even the most dedicated support staff can miss signs that intervention is needed. Education Cloud empowers institutions to create connected support processes by providing deep visibility into the student experience. Its purpose-built tools bring stakeholders together quickly to deliver the holistic support students need.
Education Cloud brings the latest innovations to your teams to support the whole student, visualize their progress, intervene collaboratively, and measure outcomes. It helps educational institutions deliver holistic and equitable support by connecting students with the services they need to thrive.
Extending the Power of Education Cloud
As we mentioned earlier, the Salesforce ecosystem includes a wide range of apps by Salesforce and our partners. You can use them to build out a tailored, comprehensive technology suite to fit the needs of your entire institution–from students to employees to alumni. Account Engagement can help you take your recruitment outreach efforts to the next level. Service Cloud provides the tools you need to implement an advanced call center. And there are AppExchange solutions for everything from document generation to payment processing to student wellbeing and beyond.
However you decide to build out your Education Cloud solution, the first step is to open a trial org. Head to the next unit to find out how to get started.
