What to know about Salesforce Education Cloud: Guide & FAQ

Schools and higher education institutions handle data from thousands of students across multiple departments—and they can’t afford for this data to be siloed. To give students the best educational experience possible and ensure you’re addressing their needs, you need a unified software solution that gives faculty and staff easy access to the full picture.

Salesforce Education Cloud offers all of these benefits and more. If you’re on the fence about whether to invest in Education Cloud or just want more information about its capabilities, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’ll cover the following:

• What is Salesforce Education Cloud?
• Salesforce Education Cloud FAQ
• Exploring the new Salesforce Education Cloud
• Education Cloud’s impact on schools and universities

Updating your technology is an exciting moment for your school, but the process warrants careful consideration of your options. To help you make the best decision about Education Cloud, let’s dive right into what this solution can do for you and your students.

What is Salesforce Education Cloud?

Salesforce Education Cloud is a unified CRM platform and system of engagement that enables schools and universities to house data, streamline administrative processes, communicate with students, and more. Built specifically to address the needs of today’s schools and universities, Education Cloud leverages industry knowledge and the Salesforce platform’s advanced capabilities to help schools facilitate and improve every aspect of the student lifecycle.

By using a centralized platform, faculty, staff, and administrators can get a better understanding of students’ holistic experiences and guide them toward successful outcomes. Plus, applicant portals and scheduling tools make it easy for students to quickly access the resources they need.

Like other Salesforce products, Education Cloud can be customized and configured to serve your school’s exact needs. However, the solution was designed exclusively for schools and universities, so the platform comes equipped with plenty of impactful tools out of the box.

Salesforce Education Cloud FAQ

If you’re learning about Salesforce for Education for the first time, the amount of information available can feel overwhelming. We’ve compiled a list of the most common questions and answers:

What are the top Salesforce for Higher Education features?

Salesforce is more than just a CRM for your school. Beyond tracking data in a centralized location, Education Cloud’s features can help you improve constituent engagement, operations, and outcomes across all departments.

The top Salesforce for Higher Education features include:

• Recruitment Console: With a streamlined recruitment dashboard and advanced segmentation capabilities, your team can create actionable lists of student prospects and engage with them in the right ways, at the right times.
• Applicant Portal and Admissions Console: Quickly set up an application portal that makes it easy for students to apply, then track and review applications from one central homepage. You can even schedule interviews within the platform and support admitted students by creating individualized outreach plans.
• Unified Student Records: With all student records in one place, staff can easily access actionable insights and create personalized care plans that address each student’s unique needs.
• Support Program Management: Program management tools allow you to improve service delivery, manage cross-departmental scheduling, and even set up automated alerts for students in need.
• Alumni Portal and Directory: Provide alumni with a hub to effortlessly connect and engage with other former students.
• Streamlined Gift Management: Leverage fundraising features that help you process gifts, record alumni donations, and get a comprehensive view of your donors’ information. Additionally, view real-time insights about donors’ giving histories to hone your engagement strategy.

Ultimately, these features can help your school or university improve the student experience, boost recruitment success, streamline admissions processes, and so much more.

Education Cloud can transform your university and offer a more proactive and engaging experience for your constituents. Seamlessly lead students from application all the way to graduation while ensuring that teachers and staff stay informed of their most important needs.

What are the benefits of Salesforce Education Cloud?

One of the biggest draws of Education Cloud is that it gives you a full, 360-degree view of every student. 

By hosting all of your student data in Salesforce, any relevant staff member can quickly view the full picture of a student. View not only their academic status, but their personal interests, career goals, financial needs, and documented mental health struggles. Seeing all of these aspects together enables teachers and staff to get a better understanding of students as individuals and tailor their approaches accordingly.

Along with providing this comprehensive view of students, Salesforce Education Cloud gives you the tools and reporting capabilities to build relationships with students through highly personalized outreach and services. The solution can also help you connect with alumni, track fundraising progress, manage corporate relationships, and more.

Who should use Salesforce Education Cloud?

Salesforce Education Cloud is designed to help education institutions of all kinds improve their operations and offerings, such as:

• Colleges and universities: With Salesforce, small colleges and large universities alike can centralize their data and reduce administrative burdens to provide better experiences for their students.
• Business and graduate schools: Business schools and other graduate programs provide personalized learning experiences for students of different educational and professional backgrounds. Salesforce’s 360-degree views and intelligent insights for every student help these schools offer the best education for their diverse student bodies.
• K-12 schools: K-12 schools educate students from the beginning of their lives all the way to high school graduation. Salesforce Education Cloud helps these schools provide seamless, personalized student journeys.
• Executive education programs: Whether you offer continuing education or short-term programs for business executives to hone their professional skills, you can use Salesforce to recruit and manage program participants with ease.

A variety of stakeholders within any of these institutions can benefit from using Salesforce. From admissions staff to administrators to alumni, Education Cloud offers features to meet the needs of all your most important constituents and stakeholders.

What is Salesforce Education Data Architecture?

In your research, you may have run into the term EDA, which stands for Education Data Architecture. EDA is a pre-configured data model that was originally used as the foundation for Salesforce Education Cloud. It’s the architecture that took the base Salesforce CRM and tailored it for education institutions. You can learn more by exploring the resources available in the EDA course on Trailhead, Salesforce’s online training resource hub.

With recent updates, Salesforce has shifted to a new data model with the new Education Cloud. Instead of functioning as a managed package that adds EDA and other various products onto the base CRM, the new Education Cloud is a single native solution. We’ll dive deeper into what this update means below.

What if I’m already using Admissions Connect or Student Success Hub?

Great news! Many new Education Cloud features and components are automatically available to all Admissions Connect and Student Success Hub customers. New features such as Salesforce Scheduler, OmniStudio, and the Business Rules Engine are available to enhance and extend current Admissions Connect and Student Success Hub functionality.

With these new features, you can:

• Leverage Salesforce Scheduler to schedule meetings with admissions counselors.
• Utilize OmniStudio to create curated digital experiences across the student experience.
• Simplify complex workflows and even perform GPA and standardized test score conversions with the Business Rules Engine.

Since you’ll have access to these new components, you’ll reap many of the same benefits as users of the new Education Cloud.

Exploring the new Salesforce Education Cloud

In the spring of 2023, Salesforce rolled out a new version of Education Cloud that aims to give universities a more streamlined experience. This is a major change that takes a new approach to how Salesforce products can serve universities, in line with Salesforce’s recent shift in their nonprofit offerings with the introduction of the new Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.

There are three key takeaways from the change:

1. The new Salesforce Education Cloud is now a standalone solution built on the core platform, not a managed package. This means that schools are now able to use more native features without having to purchase add-ons, expanding their capabilities and supporting additional use cases.
2. This new iteration of Education Cloud doesn’t leverage Education Data Architecture. Instead, it relies on a new education data model and architecture designed to meet the needs of learners and educational institutions. Additionally, Education Cloud includes bespoke operating applications specifically built for Recruiting and Admissions and Student Success.
3. Salesforce now offers two new Analytics and Intelligence products as optional add-ons to Education Cloud. CRM Analytics for Education provides pre-wired dashboards and templates to easily view the full picture of your constituents. The Education Cloud Intelligence product combines CRM analytics with the power of AI-powered insights.

Along with these product changes, tthe move from managed package to core solution means that Education Cloud users will also receive faster access and native compatibility to the newest Salesforce products, like Data Cloud and EinsteinGPT. As AI moves to the forefront of the higher education sector, these new products will help your university stay ahead of the curve.

While Salesforce is excited about the rollout of the new Education Cloud, EDA and legacy packages remain available for the time being. If your school already uses EDA and wants to weigh the benefits of switching to the new Education Cloud, consultants like Redpath can help you evaluate your best option.

Education Cloud’s impact on schools and universities

Wondering what adopting Salesforce Education Cloud really looks like? A 2023 Forrester study analyzed the impact of Education Cloud on universities across the US, Canada, and Australia. The study found that participating schools saw an average of:

• 15% increase in student retention.
• 12% increase in staff productivity.
• 10% increase in fundraising contributions from alumni and donors.
• 153% total return on investment.

To see these benefits in action for universities like yours, read our higher education success stories. We’ve seen up close the major impact Salesforce Education Cloud can have on students, staff, and administrators.

Getting started with Salesforce Education Cloud

If you’re ready to dive in and experience the benefits of Education Cloud for yourself, reach out to a certified Salesforce Consultant like Redpath. Our experts have worked with plenty of higher education institutions and know exactly how to guide your team through every step of the process to transform your university with Salesforce.

Want a little more information to inform your decision? Check out these additional resources:

• Set yourself up for Education Cloud’s digital transformation. Implementing Salesforce Education Cloud for your university is an exciting endeavor, but it is a major one. Read this guide before diving in to make sure you’re ready for implementation.
• 5 higher education fundraising trends to be aware of in 2023. Keep up to date on the latest trends in higher education and how Salesforce can help you tap into them.
• Your complete Salesforce for Nonprofits implementation guide. Adopting new software can be a complex process. Learn from the experiences of nonprofits in this step-by-step Salesforce implementation guide.