Get to Know Education Cloud

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Identify the main challenges education institutions face in delivering quality experiences.
  
• Define the foundational Salesforce terminologies and products.
  
• Explain how Education Cloud and Salesforce for Education power more connected, data-driven experiences at every stage of the learner lifecycle.
  
• Describe the importance and benefits of the Salesforce for Education ecosystem.
  

Learning is a journey, one that requires dedicated guidance, support, and encouragement to succeed. That’s why educators, administrators, faculty, and staff at educational institutions strive to build an environment that fosters growth and supports learners along their own unique journey.

Throughout the years, learner expectations have evolved, and educational institutions are faced with mounting pressures to attract, retain, support, and engage students.

Take a look at some of these challenges through the lens of a typical learning journey.

Recruitment and Admissions

As prospective students explore options to pursue their education, they’re prioritizing flexibility, cost, and personal fit, rather than traditional factors like location and rankings. To make a positive first impression, institutions need to showcase what sets them apart, offer prompt and personalized responses to inquiries, and maintain a strong digital presence. Unfortunately, many schools face challenges when it comes to effective marketing, timely communications, and efficient application processing. These pitfalls can lead learners to look elsewhere and cause the institution to fall short of crucial enrollment goals.

Student Success

Enrolled students need holistic support to reach their academic, career, and life goals. In fact, staff say 82% of students need more proactive and personalized support from their institution than they did 5 years ago. With siloed systems and limited digital tools and resources, institutions struggle to meet the demand for essential services, such as degree planning, advising, wellbeing, and mentoring. Without these resources, students run the risk of underperforming in their coursework and are left without a clear path towards graduation.

Academic Operations

Due to data silos, manual workflows, and the inability to collaborate in real time, institutions encounter bottlenecks when managing their catalog over time, and are unable to provide clear guidance and needed support to students. As a result, learners lack clarity on requirements and struggle to make timely progress toward completion.

Advancement and Alumni Relations

Even after graduation, institutions need to maintain strong engagement with their former students to build community and encourage alumni participation and support. Meaningful, emotionally supportive experiences are critical to strengthening student loyalty and word-of-mouth advocacy. A disconnected alumni network can result in missed opportunities for fundraising and other strategic initiatives, such as mentorship programs.

Today’s learners expect a seamless experience and proactive, personalized support throughout their journey. Students who feel a strong sense of connection, belonging, and purpose are significantly more likely to report a great university experience.

Meanwhile, new technologies like agentic AI are transforming the way we operate and engage–and not just in areas like better service, but across the board. Institutions need to adapt to this evolving landscape to deliver solutions that enhance student outcomes and drive long-term success.

All of this starts with unified data. The better you understand your students, the better you can support them throughout their education journey. And without unified data, you can't use AI effectively.

That’s why institutions of all sizes are turning to the deeply unified Salesforce CRM platform to create connected experiences at scale across their campuses. With unified data, intuitive apps, and purpose-built AI and automation, you can reimagine the entire education lifecycle–from recruitment and admissions, to the student experience, to advancement and alumni relations.

In this module, you discover what Salesforce Education Cloud is, exlore its data model and features, and learn how it helps you enhance your daily operations and the educational journey for learners.

The Fundamentals

Before digging into the details of Education Cloud, take a look at some key terms to help you understand how this solution works.

CRM

This acronym stands for customer relationship management–or, in education, constituent relationship management. It’s a system that keeps your constituent information in one place, so your team can get a 360-degree view of each person, including interactions and relationships, to provide tailored services and support. This single source of truth helps to cultivate more engaged learners, families, alumni, faculty, and staff.

Salesforce

Many years ago, Salesforce became the first company that took CRM to the cloud, enabling companies and organizations across all types of industries to access all of their information online, from any device, anywhere in the world. From the beginning, Salesforce has been committed to the education industry and supporting institutions of all sizes with CRM. A common capabilities framework and flexible data model make it easy to get started with Salesforce fast.

Trailhead

Where you are right now, is the Salesforce online learning tool. Trails are guided learning paths that chart your course through Salesforce skills. And badges introduce you to a wide variety of topics, including Education Cloud, broken into bite-sized units. Trailhead is a free and fun way to learn Salesforce.

Now that you know the basic terminology, you’re ready to explore Salesforce’s premier, education-focused solutions.

Education Cloud

Education Cloud is an integrated platform built for academic institutions of all types and sizes. It includes CRM, an adaptable data model, next-gen student information system (SIS) capabilities, and agentic AI and analytics to drive learner and institution success. Unlike point solutions, Education Cloud is configurable, flexible, and designed to support multiple use cases across the education journey.

Education Cloud combines the best of the Salesforce Platform to connect your campus, simplify your academic processes, and bring about positive student experiences. With purpose-built Education Cloud AI, apps, features, and tools, your institution can capture a complete, 360-degree view of learners at each stage of their relationship with your institution, and come together across departments. With a single platform for education, you can transform learner engagements into lifelong relationships.

Education Cloud operates on its own flexible data foundation within the core Salesforce Platform, and is built to support lifelong learning. Its common capability model for things like scheduling, case management, and application form-building helps reduce total cost of ownership and expand impact institution-wide. Education Cloud brings the power, innovation, security, and scalability of Salesforce to your institution, no matter the size.

Our dedicated product team continuously meets with customers to inform new feature development, and with three releases per year, you can have the latest innovations at your fingertips to future-proof your institution.

Education Cloud is the cornerstone of the Salesforce for Education universe.

Salesforce for Education

Broader than Education Cloud, Salesforce for Education is a configurable technology suite that drives learner and institution success. It encompasses any Salesforce product that an educational institution uses, including Slack, Tableau, and MuleSoft. It also includes popular Salesforce apps, thousands of AppExchange apps created by partner organizations, and even custom apps and integrations. All of these work together–or, if you prefer, on their own–to form a digital foundation that empowers tomorrow’s institutions today. 

Powered by Agentforce, Salesforce for Education helps you with many aspects of the education journey: recruitment and admissions, academic operations, student success, advancement and alumni relations, research and innovation, faculty and staff experience, institution operations, and marketing and communications. It’s based on a foundation that includes Education 360, Data Cloud, the Trust Layer, MuleSoft integration, and the Salesforce Platform. And with the Salesform Platform, you get custom apps and agents, Einstein AI and models, flow automation, the Omnichannel user interface, security and privacy, and analytics. In other words, Salesforce for Education brings your data, apps, and teams together in one place to drive higher ROI, improve efficiency, and enhance the entire education journey.

Next, take a moment to explore two important layers of the Salesforce for Education ecosystem.

Agentforce for Education

Agentforce for Education is an AI solution designed to support the entire learner lifecycle. Customizable agents carry out specialized tasks based on user input and the unique needs of each institution, making life easier for learners and staff. It provides pre-built agent skills for 24/7 resolution of student inquiries, personalized responses, comprehensive student summaries, and more.

Agentforce integrates with existing systems, activates your data in new ways, and offers data-driven insights to enhance processes and staff productivity. Low-code tools and built-in data security ensure easy customization and compliance with regulations.

Data Cloud for Education

By integrating Data Cloud with your Education Cloud org, you unify data from external sources, such as your LMS (learning management system) or ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, to provide a single source for all your institutional data. This harmonized data gives you a holistic view to help you make informed decisions and accelerate operations.

With this powerful combination of agentic AI and unified data, your institution can support students with an always-on digital workforce. Answer prospective student questions at any time, help current learners identify career interests, boost advisor productivity, or even help your advancement teams quickly narrow in on the right donor. Get more out of your data by surfacing actionable insights and key metrics to inform your strategy and meet your goals, without the help of a data scientist.

You’ve just learned what Salesforce for Education is all about and how it simplifies your institutional processes. But this is just the beginning. In the next unit, you dive deeper into the Education Cloud data model, apps, and features that propel success for both learners and institutions.

Resources 

• Website: Education Cloud Demo
• Website: Education Cloud
• Salesforce Help: Learn About Education Cloud
• Salesforce Developers: Education Cloud