I’m going to start this post with a strong statement. I believe that New Education Cloud is evidence of Salesforce’s sustainable development strategy for empowering the educational industry around the globe. I think the pivotal point of that strategy was the creation of the Salesforce.org foundation and a special pricing model for educational institutions, including K-12 schools, colleges, and universities, a few years back.
It’s important to know that Salesforce.org foundation was created with the main goal of leveraging Salesforce’s technology and expertise to empower educational organizations to better serve their students, constituents, and stakeholders. It was achieved by developing a range of products, tailored to the needs of the education industry, such as Salesforce EDA, Admission Connect and Student Success Hub, among others.
The New Education Cloud represents the next level of support that Salesforce brings to educational institutions by providing a new, powerful enterprise-class solution. It was built based on years of experience with the education market as well as best practices taken from many other sectors like healthcare or Public.
What does the New Education Cloud offer?
Recruitment and Admission insight
The recruitment and admissions pre-built app is one of many capabilities currently available on the new Education Cloud.
It provides a smart feature to the organizations to help with:
- prospect targeting and segmentation for campaigns
- significantly improves applicant experience with a new tailored Applicant Portal
- supports a full candidate-to-student lifecycle with features like streamlined admission workflow or document generation (both PDF and Word!)
- quick application processing with a new Admission Console
- support for Interviews and Exams with a Video calls
- Improved analytics with a set of well-designed dashboards
- and many others….
In the near future, Salesforce plans to introduce a smart prospecting tool that uses AI and ML algorithms to analyze data from various sources, including social media, to assist recruiters.
Student success support
Salesforce plans to introduce pre-built apps for Student Success on the new Education Cloud in a near future. Even though it was not released yet (ETA Summer ‘23) knowing the previous Student Success Hub app and Salesforce announcements, we can expect features like:
- Alert Framework to ensure notifications and reminders about incoming deadlines
- Advanced Case management, an enterprise grade support centre for students to help with their day-to-day inquiries
- Actionable Lists to help progress with tasks by providing dynamic action lists
- And my favourite easy appointment scheduling with a student’s dedicated Success Team members
Talking about Appointment Scheduling, we can’t miss another great tool included in the New Education Cloud – Lighting Scheduler. Individuals who worked previously with other Salesforce products (f.e. Field Service Lightning) probably have already heard about that great solution. In a nutshell, it is a tool designed to automate appointment scheduling in a fast and smart way. For educational institutions, it means improving communication and cooperation between lecturers, administrative staff, and students at any place and time. That always helps to build stronger relationships and improves communication and cooperation, which leads to higher student satisfaction and thus increases retention rates.
Oh, and it supports video calls, neat right?
Care Plans for Students
Another thing that we should pay attention to are Care Plans, which enable organizations to create a blueprint of tasks, once instantiated provide a personalized student path to success. A great example would be an onboarding process, which can be quite long and stressful. With a Care Plan, each student gets personalized actionable steps, to ensure a smooth onboarding journey and reduced stress – increasing student’s satisfaction.
Learner life cycle – Advancement
So far we have attracted great minds to our educational institution, we helped them onboard and became students, and we also supported them throughout their course, making sure we respond to all their needs at the right time, in the right place and with the right people. Now we got to the graduation day. That’s it, the end of a long journey full of adventures, right? No, it’s just another beginning…
Alumni experience
In modern days, Alumni become a very important part of the educational institution ecosystem, and they can impact our organization long after they leave the walls of lecture halls.
This is why Salesforce offered a set of tools supporting Alumni Advancement and Engagement. It had a great set of tools to support fundraising, campaign management, fund allocation, cooperation, personalized communication, and many others
So far there is not much information on a new Advancement module and we don’t know its release date. However, based on a previous product we can predict (with a small portion of guessing) what is coming up:
- strong emphasis on communication – the idea will not change, well-designed alumni (customer) journeys, personalized communication, ensuring that alumni are up-to-date with what happens to our organization
- Driving fundraising productivity – to help maximize donor participation and affinity
- Managing campaign effectiveness with smart segmentation
- Managing funds allocation – make sure that all these donations are assigned to the right cause
- and most likely much more
It is worth to remember that even though Advancement app is not released yet, the New Education Cloud, together with products like Marketing Cloud, can still be a great value and help to work with Alumni. It just requires some more customization.
How will the educational institutions benefit from OmniStudio?
It was a surprise to me that the New Education Cloud uses OmniStudio, at first. However, after a second thought, it makes a lot of sense. OmniStudio is commonly used in other industry clouds for retail, healthcare, or finance sectors. It has a proven track of supporting entreprise-class solutions, it is scalable and efficient and most of all a lot of development does not require coding, just a configuration. Knowing that I can definitely say that OmniStudio has many capabilities that can help educational institutions better care for their candidates, students, employees, and all the other people affiliated with an organization.
Automated administration
One of the key benefits of Salesforce OmniStudio for education is its ability to automate different types of mundane administrative tasks. For example, it can automate tasks related to student admissions, enrolment, and financial aid. Having that automation in place is definitely going to improve productivity and simply save a lot of time.
Integrated data cloud
Building Customer 360 View (or Student 360 in our case) means the world to every organization. It can help not only to personalize communication but also to predict what could happen in a future. Does the student have a decrease in attendance and GPA drops by a lot? That’s a signal that we have to act! This is another area that OmniStudio can help with. We need is an OmniStudio FlexCard with an Integrated Procedure and we can start collecting data from various sources such as SIS for student attendance and latest grades.
Custom applications
Even though New Education Cloud delivers, or will deliver in a near future, a lot of out of the box applications it can be also used to create custom application that are taliored to the specific needs of education institutions. You need an application to support student’s exchange program or build a cool one-stop shop for financial aid? No problem! You already have all the data in one place, you have all the tools to building automation and reporting. It just requires some more configuration and you are ready to go!
This will definitely improve engagement and create a more dynamic and happy student experience.
Education is now in the Salesforce Family of Industries
At the end I can clearly say that I’m happy Salesforce brought together previous experience and products, created with educational institutions for educational institutions, and mixed it with already mature best practices coming from other industries (Healthcare, Public etc.) This mixture gave us a well baked capabilities such as virtual appointments, case management, program management, or care plans in a single product – Education Cloud.
And don’t get me wrong, I still think EDA, Student Success Hub and Admission Connect are cool products, but with New Education Cloud it all finally feels complete as it should be in a Connected Campus environment.
If you want to know more about New Education Cloud cool capabilities, or you are considering migration from Salesforce EDA to Education Cloud, or if you just want to talk about what the future brings, let me know!
I’m more than happy to talk and share my experience with you.
