Salesforce.org Extending Education Cloud Platform Across the Entire Student Lifecycle, Provides Advisors with New Tools for Personalized Student Engagement

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce.org, the philanthropic arm of Salesforce, today announced advancements to the Salesforce.org Education Cloud platform. Specifically, Salesforce Advisor Link 2.0, innovations with alumni and donor relationships, new Higher Education Data Architecture (HEDA) capabilities and expanding Education Cloud for K-12 will transform the student journey and connect the entire education lifecycle.

Today, higher education institutions aren't only serving students who are on traditional pathways. Student demographics are shifting, with three-quarters of students classified as "non-traditional"¹, such as adult learners, part-time students, primary caregivers and those lacking a traditional high school diploma. Higher education institutions are also preparing students for the future workforce ? 65% of students entering primary school today will ultimately work in jobs that don't yet exist².

Salesforce.org's Education Cloud is reimagining the student experience by providing innovative tools for educational institutions to focus on student success, and giving every student the foundation to drive their own success and prepare for the jobs of tomorrow. 

"Since its founding, Salesforce.org has been dedicated to listening to customers and understanding the greatest challenges of the education space," said Rob Acker, CEO, Salesforce.org. "With the newest innovations under Education Cloud, institutions can have a complete view of each student and improve their outcomes across the entire educational journey."

Doubling Down on Student Success in Higher Education
Last year, Salesforce.org introduced Salesforce Advisor Link (SAL), focusing on streamlining advising operations and providing a unified record of every student. With SAL, advisors can easily engage with students individually or in groups, and identify and address their specific needs.

Announced today, Salesforce Advisor Link 2.0 adds new tools for personalized engagement and proactive outreach. Now, advisors can put every student on a pathway to success, and with Einstein, Salesforce's AI, advisors can glean the insights they need to make more informed decisions. New innovations include:

• Individualized Success Plans allows advisors to create holistic student success plans with goals, assignments and related tasks to help keep students on the graduation track. For example, whether it's first-semester onboarding, studying abroad, or getting off academic probation, success plans give students a clearly defined path to follow and advisors can keep an eye on their progress.
• Flexible Scheduling Management supports multiple appointment types, such as walk-ins and advising pools, and scheduling models for departments outside of academic advising. This makes it easy for Career Services, Financial Aid, Tutoring Services, Health Services or other departments to schedule appointments with students in a single view.
• Einstein Case Management uses machine learning, where cases will automatically be classified and escalated as they come in. In addition, relevant information required to resolve cases, such as articles or videos, are automatically surfaced, saving advisors valuable time and improving the student experience.
• Einstein Bots for Digital Engagement provides an additional channel for institutions to engage with students. Bots can handle routine questions, giving advisors more time to help students with more complex issues.
• Einstein Next Best Action leverages rules-based and predictive models to provide advisors with intelligent, contextual recommendations for students. Einstein Next Best Action makes the resources students need easy to find and automatically suggests relevant experts, groups, and content based on interests, needs, and behavior from their activities.

"Salesforce Advisor Link has been a trusted tool for our advisors and we're looking forward to implementing the new features of SAL 2.0," said Scott Adams, Director or IT, UVA Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. "Before, we were drowning in small tasks and chores like sending spreadsheets back and forth, and now we have a unified record for the student that shows all of their information and all of our past interactions. Now it's really easy for any advisor to understand who the student is and what the next steps are."

Transforming Higher Ed Alumni and Donor Relationships
Higher education institutions are finding that they must evolve the way they engage with alumni to meet evolving constituent expectations and connect with a new generation of donors. Creating and maintaining high-value relationships are challenged by disconnected business processes, data silos and missing or inaccurate data. New Education Cloud advancement features enable institutions to connect with their global network of constituents intelligently and effectively to build lifelong, trusted relationships and donations that will provide the resources needed to help students succeed. New innovations in advancement include:

• Personalized Journeys enable alumni relations staff to breakdown a constituent base of thousands into groups as small as one through segmentation and omnichannel communications.
• Social Insights, such as sentiment analysis and topic profiles, support online engagement and build campus brand awareness with key constituents during critical time periods, such as 24-hour flash fundraising events.
• Mobile-first Constituent Management gives development and major gift officers on-the-go ability to manage their portfolios from their mobile devices.
• Gift Processing helps advancement services better track and process large and small donations to an institution and handle pledge accounting, all on an app built on HEDA.
• AI-Driven Fundraising provides opportunity scoring for leads, next best action recommendations and announced today, the ability to verbally enter prospect visit notes using Einstein Voice.

"What we liked about Salesforce.org Education Cloud is how the platform is intuitive and easy to use," said Tom Neuburger, Associate Director, CRM Center of Excellence, Smith College. "We didn't have to ask our advancement staff to do anything new; we were simply enabling them to do their jobs in a much simpler and streamlined way."

Building Upon a Strong Foundation
Higher Education Data Architecture (HEDA) provides the foundation for becoming a Connected Campus?empowering institutions of all sizes to connect with students, alumni, faculty and staff in new ways.

Built in collaboration with the education community, HEDA now has two new objects, Program Plans and Plan Requirements, which allow higher education institutions to organize and track their academic programs and view the requirements needed to attain degrees across terms, years and cohorts. 

HEDA is compliant with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and now available in French and Catalan languages. Since the launch of HEDA in March 2016, there have been over 800 installations.

"With HEDA, we can see all of the interactions with our prospects, from applications to letters of recommendation to communications," said Scott Adams, Director of IT, UVA Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. "And because our advisors are on Salesforce Advisor Link, which is built on HEDA, all of this great information we're gathering in the recruiting stage is going to be available to our advisors once an applicant becomes a student."

A Complete Platform for Student and Institutional Success
When we first introduced Education Cloud in March, it addressed only higher education. Now, we're expanding Education Cloud to K-12, enabling 360-degree views of every student, from their first classroom to the university campus and post graduation.

The new K-12 education data architecture for Education Cloud, currently in development, will be built on HEDA and leverages Salesforce's leading CRM platform to help unlock each student's full potential and streamline critical activities that drive school and student success, including:

• Student Management allows schools to collaborate with holistic views of student data and progress.
• School Communications & Family Engagement enables collaboration with parents through targeted communications and secure portals.
• Admissions & Enrollment improves the school selection, application, and registration experience.
• Fundraising & Grants Management builds donor relationships and easily tracks and manages grants.

"At Dallas County Community College District, we are building a last-dollar, tuition-free program to serve our students because we know that 80% of our graduates come from underserved populations," said Joe May, Chancellor, DCCCD. "This is a complex operation, and we know that Salesforce.org Education Cloud is the right platform which we can use to close the gap between K12 and higher ed. As a result, the program ultimately focuses on student success."

Availability and Pricing

• For more information, please visit: http://www.salesforce.org/educationcloud.
• Salesforce Advisor Link 2.0 will be generally available on 9/26/2018.
• An initial Gift Processing build will be made available at the end of January 2019.
• New HEDA features are available now.

About Salesforce.org
Salesforce.org was founded on the idea that the business of business is improving the state of the world. Founded on the 1-1-1 model, Salesforce.org is now both a non-profit and a social enterprise that gives back to the community to invest in education to make sure youth are future ready.

Everyone who wants to change the world should have the tools and technology to do so. Technology is the most powerful equalizer of our time, providing access to data, knowledge, and--above all--connections. Salesforce.org gets technology in the hands of nonprofits, education institutions and philanthropic organizations so they can connect with others and do more good. As a social enterprise, the more missions the technology supports, the more the company invests back into technology and communities, creating an endless circle of good.

About Salesforce
Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit https://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

¹ https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cha.asp 
² http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/chapter-1-the-future-of-jobs-and-skills/

SOURCE Salesforce.org