At Enrollment Rx, we specialize in helping colleges and universities replace their legacy admissions systems with Salesforce for admissions. We thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the oft-seen challenges we encounter in older admissions software products and compare those limitations to the inherent, out-of-the-box benefits that higher ed receives with Salesforce’s Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) platform.
Common Problems Facing Recruitment and Admissions Operations
The following are three common problems that colleges and universities face daily in recruitment and admissions operations. These are critical to enrollment success and are best addressed by the native CRM capabilities in the standard Salesforce platform for admissions.
1) Salesforce for Admissions – Listviews, Reports, and Dashboards
Problem: “We cannot easily create reports from our current legacy admissions systems.”
Imagine the following scenario: The Director of Admissions wants to generate a list of applicants applying to the nursing program, living in California, and who like to play tennis. Can your staff quickly create a report that would provide that information? What skill set would be required to comprehensively extract that type of data from your current system(s)? Is this something that Salesforce for admissions could solve?
Unfortunately, too many colleges and universities with outdated admissions software struggle when trying to create reports to analyze their enrollment data. Thus, they cannot effectuate positive changes to their current enrollment processes. The skill set required to generate such a report from their legacy admissions software is beyond the capabilities of a standard system administrator.
The time, labor, and cost required to create each query, or “bucket of data,” often requires the involvement of an advanced administrator or software developer. Administrators often do not fully anticipate these configurability limitations and accompanying technical development expenses during their system purchasing process.
Once implementing popular legacy admissions software, many colleges and universities complained that they did not realize the lack of configurable data management tools available. Additionally, they did not adequately anticipate the need for an FTP/professional “report creator” in their annual budget. Often the result is that schools are forced to struggle without insightful data that would make a positive impact on their organization.
Solution: Salesforce for admissions enables general users to manage their population data in a myriad of ways, including real-time listviews, reports, and dashboards, which can be configured with simple mouse clicks and made available to users based on their permissions in the system. With Salesforce’s CRM for admissions, colleges and universities can readily analyze their enrollment data and extrapolate the necessary information to maximize operational efforts. These data management and pipeline tools are configurable with drag-and-drop capabilities, thus allowing non-technical personnel to generate the data they need. The listviews, reports, and dashboards capabilities of the Salesforce CRM platform are transformative for colleges and universities that have been struggling with antiquated systems that do not include powerful, real-time reporting functionality. Empower your staff with Salesforce for admissions data management tools and experience what a real CRM platform can do for visibility into your enrollment pipeline!
2) Salesforce for Admissions – Automated Marketing Communications
Problem: “We cannot send out automated, personalized marketing communications from our current admissions systems.”
Another common challenge in higher ed with legacy admissions systems is the need for marketing automation. Even if you can generate a list of segmented prospective students, can you easily send them automated, personalized marketing communications, track recipient behavior, and control additional automated messaging based on configurable logic? Can you automatically send emails about the nursing program to all people who have expressed interest in that area of study? Can you see who opens the emails, clicks on the links, and automatically send follow-up emails in the days ahead? As applicants provide additional information about themselves, can you control the messaging of automated marketing communications with dynamic content blocks and images based on configurable criteria such as applicant type, program type, or campus location?
Solution: Outdated admissions software may support the application process in admissions, but most products lack the marketing automation that is a critical component for effective recruitment, which just so happens to be a vital component of Salesforce for admissions. By leveraging Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud as part of their enrollment software strategy, colleges and universities can ensure automated communication campaigns targeted toward configurable populations with personalized and dynamic messaging. As applicants inquire or register for events, even applying through external centralized systems such as the Common Application, the CRM marketing engine will continuously engage with those prospective students in a personalized and measurable way. Marketing automation cannot be overlooked when trying to maximize recruitment and admissions efficiencies in enrollment management and Salesforce for admissions is the solution!
3) Salesforce for Admissions – Task Management
Problem: “Our legacy admissions systems cannot assign tasks and follow-up activities to staff users, nor maintain a full history of completed and upcoming tasks for each prospective student and staff member.”
Colleges and universities want to automatically and manually assign tasks and follow-up activities to staff users of the admissions software and maintain a full history of completed and upcoming tasks for each prospective student record. Tasks could include anything from automatically reminding an admissions counselor to call a particular applicant, sending an email, logging a phone call, or scheduling an appointment to meet. Current systems often do not support task management effectively nor contain sufficient reporting capabilities to measure the effectiveness of staff operations.
Solution: By utilizing Salesforce for admissions, colleges and universities can assign and track all tasks among the staff users. Leadership can also manage activities to measure the organization’s health and performance. Real-time activity dashboards and task reports can be generated for users to constantly maintain a transparent insight into the enrollment processes of each applicant.
Additionally, operational administrators can create automation based on configurable logic that automatically assigns tasks to users whenever appropriate. Staff members have real-time access and notifications into open items and previously completed activities. Management can measure virtually any attribute with robust reporting and dashboarding tools to gauge the effectiveness of various activities.
Next Step: Best Practices of Salesforce for Admissions
Does your college or university struggle with antiquated admissions systems that do not adequately support the needs of the organization? Is your enrollment staff forced to manage their day out of multiple software systems without the accessible reporting capabilities needed to measure results and drive recruitment?
Enrollment Rx works with educational institutions to replace legacy, outdated admissions software with our Salesforce-based solution for recruitment and admissions. We believe this formula offers the best future-proof strategy for colleges and universities by blending Enrollment Rx’s ed-tech functionality with Salesforce for admissions at your school. Each new project reminds us why Enrollment Rx chooses to develop our higher ed software products for recruitment, admissions, and decisions (R.A.D.) on Salesforce. Please contact us if we can help make Salesforce RAD for you!
