Salesforce Education Cloud

Salesforce Education Cloud Reviews

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Reviews
(1-6 of 6)

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March 20, 2020

A good foundation for a personalized higher education solution

Verified User
Vice-President in Professional Services
Internet Company, 1-10 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We consult with clients on their CRM needs and implement Salesforce EDA if it is a good fit for their needs. Other options may include the other nonprofit offerings from Salesforce (formerly Salesforce.org).

Pros and Cons

  • Extensibility - Implement your custom needs in the database.
  • Scalability - Your database grows with your student/alumni population.
  • Integration - Integrate with your SIS via many middleware.
  • Reporting - All of Salesforce's reporting capabilities.
  • Reports - Comes with no out of the box reports.
  • OOB functionality may be limited - important to have folks with experience customizing EDA to an organization's needs.
  • Upfront cost - Implementation services (either a hired team or consultants) is imperative to make it work.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for larger or mid-sized institutions willing to invest to have all of their student services needs to be fulfilled by a single platform. It would be less appropriate for non-traditional universities i.e. smaller schools, or nonprofits that have education/curriculum but also have other programs/fundraising, etc. since it may not be positive ROI for them, or the nonprofit solutions might be more valuable for them.

Support Rating

6
Dealing with Salesforce tech support can be challenging, depending on the agent you get.
October 30, 2019

Great platform for higher education

Verified User
Executive in Sales
Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SFDC is a cloud-based platform that helps educational institutions with recruiting, admissions and student engagement. I have used it when managing our portfolio of active and possible accounts. Particularly strong if the university or organization is using it for admissions and recruiting purposes. It is a fantastic platform for this use case and the sales and marketing department overall.

Pros and Cons

  • Completely customize our org the way we need it to function.
  • The amount of flexibility and potential for integration is staggering.
  • The consistent new product is very intriguing and has us considering how we could roll out Salesforce elsewhere.
  • The platform is massive making it hard to make decisions at times.
  • It can be a bit challenging for new staff and team members to learn.
  • Creating reports can be challenging the first time around.

Likelihood to Recommend

The software allows us to have one platform that scales across the organization esp when it comes to recruiting and admissions. This allows us to build a real-time view of the student across all departments. This improves communication across the school which ultimately enables us to provide a better experience to the students both current and future.

Support Rating

7
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.
January 15, 2019

Salesforce HEDA - Liberal Arts College

Nathan Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Nathan Baker
Director of Recruitment and Analytics
Taylor University (Higher Education, 201-500 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce for Higher Education is the primary CRM for enrollment management, student retention, academic support services, and residence life staff. It functions as the primary one-to-one student communication tool for revenue generation reliant on incoming student tuition to fund 90% of the university budget. Built to serve the entire institution, Salesforce for Higher Education has gradually been rolled-out to areas of the university needing a CRM tool.

Pros and Cons

  • One-to-one communication for all higher education constituents.
  • Relationship networking to identify potential contact and organizational affiliations.
  • Data collection and analysis of student engagement history.
  • Lack of university advancement data architecture.
  • Data storage needs to grow exponentially as the database size grows quickly.
  • Salesforce development is so rapid it is difficult to keep up on new features and opportunities to maximize efficiency.

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce for Higher Ed is well-suited for a higher education institution with an existing ERP but without a full-scale CRM tool to communicate one-on-one with constituents. It is ideal for de-centralized IT operations to quickly upscale operations across multiple departments and institutional functions. Salesforce for Higher Ed may be difficult to implement without university governance on data and communication strategy.
July 18, 2019

Salesforce for Higher Ed is superior student management

Verified User
Account Manager in Sales
Higher Education Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SF for Higher Ed is used at my former employer to manage incoming leads throughout the sales cycle. New student inquiries would come in through SF and then move through the enrollment process. They would then be managed by their academic advisor and SF housed their grades and attendance throughout their time as a student.

Pros and Cons

  • Manage grades.
  • Manage leads through enrollment cycle.
  • Manage attendance.
  • Provide more insight into leads.
  • When something is modified by another while you're modifying it, it will not save.
  • Requirements to move on with opportunities can be confusing.

Likelihood to Recommend

This is the best application on the market to manage students enrolled in college through their enrollment process, with financial aid, and then as a student. You can follow the student's attendance, grades, and participation in one easy snapshot area and also create and monitor tasks. This gives advisors clear ways to start conversations when reaching out to students for engagement.
January 18, 2019

Salesforce for Higher Ed: highly customizable, but that means you need a team to develop it right.

Verified User
Director in Quality Assurance
Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Who uses it and for what:
  • Enrollment: for tracking leads, recording all conversation information/notes, and ensuring their applications are complete.
  • Student advisors: once students are enrolled, they use the Contact and Opportunities objects to track student success in their programs, also recording all conversation information/notes.
  • Account management: our account managers track holistic student success data to track account health.
  • Management/leadership: we are a company driven by our student's success. We use Salesforce for Higher Ed to know how we're performing as a company. Our students' success is directly our success.

Pros and Cons

  • Track groups of students via an individual object: via lead or contact, but not by tracking students via both.
  • Compare the performance of your team members via reports and dashboards.
  • Limit permissions of people or groups of people.
  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited:
  1. Groups that need to integrate their CRM with other partners: many education institutions use Salesforce!
  2. Groups with huge student populations now, or expected in the future.
  3. Groups that have resources for custom Salesforce development, like an in-house Salesforce Developer role.
Less appropriate:
  1. If you expect your company/school will have a limited number of students.
  2. If you set up Salesforce to use ONLY Leads or only Contacts, not both. What happens if you have a student re-enroll? How do you handle losing data when converting a Lead to a Contact? If you don't have good answers for these in advance, you'll want to use only Leads or only Contacts to track each student.
January 08, 2019

Salesforce for Higher Ed is the Industry Standard in CRM

Verified User
Manager in Marketing
Higher Education Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce for Higher Ed is currently being used for all of our enrollment management needs across both our undergraduate, graduate and adult education departments. This is being used for enrollment and marketing services for all of these programs. We were previously using another CRM, Hobsons, but discontinued that in late 2015 and haven't looked back.

Pros and Cons

  • Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment.
  • Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals.
  • Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce.
  • All of the Apps in the App Exchange.
  • The administration is a full-time job for one or more people.
  • Can be somewhat confusing for non-technical staff members.
  • Expensive when you factor in other components and all that goes into the CRM.

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce for Higher Ed is great for any sized school based on the price model where you only pay for the number of users that are actually using the product. They also provide 10 free licenses to all non-profits. The other aspect where it is useful is if you are going to tie in your advancement side of the house for fundraising. This can be very helpful and popular with that side of the university.

Salesforce Education Cloud Scorecard Summary

What is Salesforce Education Cloud?

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.

Salesforce Education Cloud Pricing

Salesforce Education Cloud Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Salesforce Education Cloud?

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.

What is Salesforce Education Cloud's best feature?

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 6.3.

Who uses Salesforce Education Cloud?

The most common users of Salesforce Education Cloud are from Mid-size Companies and the Higher Education industry.