Facilitating recruitment and admissions is a top priority for institutions as they face an ongoing decline in enrollments. With undergraduate college enrollment dropping 7.5% from 2019 to 2022, even after the return to in-person classes, institutions have worked quickly to reach out to nontraditional (not 18-24-year-old) populations and offer remote and hybrid options that attract new applicants. However, smaller institutions, especially those that don’t have the tools to offer online/hybrid education, have been hit harder and still struggle to overcome pandemic lows. 

“As these complex, persistent issues continue to evolve, organizations need to evolve in lockstep with them,” stated Julia Taylor, Gerent’s Director of Higher Education and Nonprofit Consulting, in an interview. “This ever-present challenge has inspired Salesforce to re-evaluate how Education Cloud previously served institutions – and how it could be improved upon to meet needs as they evolve.”

As such, Salesforce recently relaunched Education Cloud, improving the solution’s customizability with all-new features never before leveraged for education. But change leaders likely wonder – how exactly will this change affect what Education Cloud does for me? To demonstrate the value-add the Education Cloud relaunch provides, we’ll explore the platform’s impact on a crucial department: recruitment and admissions.

Recruiters can leverage Education Cloud’s cutting-edge capabilities to meet ongoing challenges

The factors affecting enrollment numbers are diverse, complex, and unlikely to be resolved quickly. However, higher education institutions can mitigate their impact by leveraging the tools found in the relaunched Education Cloud. No longer relegated to a managed package, Education Cloud now builds on top of Sales and Service Cloud as with other Salesforce Industry-specific Solutions. This simple pivot unlocks feature sharing between industry solutions, allowing recruiters and admission advisors to leverage the same world-class sales and service excellence tools to reduce friction and accelerate admissions.

"The new Education Cloud was designed to give institutions the tools they need to overcome pain points and better serve students, and a core part of the changes made is the ability to feature-share," said Gerent's Senior Vice President of Education and Nonprofit, Jenny Hall. 

"Institutions no longer have to wait for Salesforce to develop a particular feature exclusively for Education Cloud. With Salesforce's shared codebase, adoptees can leverage relevant functionalities from other Clouds and integrate them seamlessly into an Education context."

While not a full list of the features recruiters and admissions users can leverage, the following tools could help admissions secure enrollments when outreach success is all but certain. 

Care Plans

Formerly a Health-Cloud-only feature, Salesforce’s Care Plans can now be leveraged to help students reach individual academic and personal goals.

• Care plans bridge the gap between ambition and practicality, as they provide users with several small, actionable steps that make achieving big goals attainable.
• In the use case of facilitating smooth onboarding, care plans would be used to help students integrate seamlessly into the institutional ecosystem.

Timeline View

Also formerly exclusive to Health Cloud, Salesforce’s Timeline View is a useful tool that allows administrators to view key events relating to each student in one place. 

• Administrators can use Timeline View to get a high-level view of where students are in the application-to-enrollment process. 
• Recruiters can then isolate and track the information they feel is most relevant to their recruitment efforts, enabling them to craft personalized engagement hooks.
• They can also use the tool to detect and guide students through engagement traps, intervening before the student suspends their enrollment. 

Householding Data Model

Securing legacy enrollments is often easier than starting from scratch with a new population – and with Householding Data Model, a tool formerly from Financial Services Cloud, recruiters can better understand and reach out to the extent of their alumni network.

• Householding Data Model allows companies to create records for clients, households, and all associated connections that are unified and displayed in one place. 
• Recruiters can use this tool to facilitate legacy recruiting by identifying and engaging prospects connected to their alumni proactively.

Interaction Summary

Finally, from Financial Services Cloud, Interaction Summary allows users to capture key conversational details, create summaries, and tie those summaries to specific future interactions. 

• Recruiters can use this to conduct more personalized outreach, adding notes to a student’s profile over time that will help them engage and meet that student's needs later. 
• If another recruiter connects with that student, they won’t be starting from square one – the previous recruiters’ entire conversation history and the insights gleaned from it are available to them through Salesforce.

Unlock Education Cloud’s benefits for your institution

This diverse sampling is not meant to represent the full breadth of what the revamped Education Cloud offers – merely to provide a taste. Education Cloud’s newfound status as a full-scale Salesforce Industry Solution has created all-new opportunities for driving value, and educational institutions who jump on board will find a wide array of transformational tools at their disposal.

‍If you’re interested in understanding how Education Cloud can meet your unique organizational needs, give us a call to speak with one of our industry experts or check out our Education microsite.