Hi everyone,
We’re exploring best practices around bringing parent information into Salesforce in a higher-ed context so our marketing team can better engage parents via Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Current state / use case:
- When a student applies, they provide parent information (name, email, etc.) as part of the application.
- This data currently creates a relationship record associated with the student in Salesforce (rather than a standalone parent Contact).
- Separately, our marketing team collects parent interest via lead forms, where parents self-identify and submit their own contact information.
What we’re trying to achieve:
- When a parent submits a marketing form, we’d like to:
- Match them to an existing parent record (if one exists), and associate them to the correct student, or
- Create a new parent record and associate it to an existing student, or
- Create both a new parent and a new student record if neither exists.
Challenges we’re running into:
- Duplicate student records are fairly common (as is typical in higher ed).
- A single parent may end up associated to multiple duplicate student records.
- This introduces complexity around:
- Identifying the “correct” or “winning” student record
- Preventing over-creation of parent records
- Maintaining clean, usable data for downstream marketing and engagement
What we’re looking for from the community:
- How are other institutions modeling parents/guardians in Salesforce (Contacts vs. relationships vs. hybrid)?
- What matching strategies have worked well when parents come in through marketing channels?
- How do you handle duplicate students when associating parents?
- Are there governance or architectural patterns you’ve found helpful for balancing marketing needs with data quality?
HI we have a similar situation although we don't get as many duplicates. We are a research organisation and when a patient is diagnosed in the hospital they receive a pack from us and a form is completed which is sent back to us and then input into SF. It creates the child record and then links the corresponding parents that are on the page to that child (via the relationship field and also adds the child to the same household as the parents. If the secondary parent is at a different address it adds them to their own househould but still puts the relationships in) This is all done by flows. It does look at data already in SF (Last name and email) in an attempt to match them but as you know students may have different emails (as might parents) we then merge them if this happens. There is less merging of parents as usually email address stay the same. We have a duplicate report in SF and we check that regularly to merge contacts/households
