Salesforce for Higher Ed combines the Salesforce Lightning Experience with HEDA (Higher Ed Data Architecture), providing a cloud platform supporting student management and engagement, admissions and academics, and other higher ed administrative support functions.
At our college, the admissions team also uses Cadence. I think it's particularly useful for back-and-forth interactions in real time (or through an AI chatbot) My department focuses only on donors and alums. These communications are much less likely to be back-and-forth. They're more informational in nature which makes some of the features un-necessary. It's easy for a recipient to opt-out, but not easy to set up scenarios where they can opt out of specific types of texts - all-or-nothing is more likely and it's difficult for them to re-subscribe once they've opted out.
It is most suited for those within the education industry. For students and staff in particular, the Education Cloud allows seamless connectivity between each person and helps students stay on task. It can be very overwhelming as a student to have so many responsibilities in different areas, so Salesforce does a great job of offering many features that ease this process.
There is built-in connection with Raiser's Edge NXT but the field mapping is overly complicated and setting it up requires action both on customer end and Cadence end
Cannot update a bad email address without deleting the record and re-importing it
Cannot simply add records - must be done through import from a spreadsheet
assigning a record to a user can only be done during initial import
It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report.
Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem.
Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task.
People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.
We are currently evaluating Mailchimp's SMS option to see if the price for adding that feature is less than what we are paying for Cadence. Currently we are ONLY using Mailchimp for email communications, but the interface is much more user friendly. We have not yet had a chance to demo the SMS feature to compare it to Cadence, but we plan to check it out.
I have not used similar products and I am new to this role. Salesforce has been very easy to learn and I appreciate the support and ability to access the platform when I need to. I was able to easily learn the program and become skilled in what I needed to do. It also made the transition to digital forms quite easy
Too early (one year) to have hard ROI info, but we have had constituents who have indicated a preference for text as their primary means of interacting with our organization.
Even with the integration with Raiser's Edge NXT it takes time to update the database with opt-outs.
We have fewer constituents with mobile numbers than those with email addresses. We will have to appeal to our constituents to share mobile numbers with us
Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions.
Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA.
Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us.
