Salesforce.org Updates Education Cloud with Enhanced Advising Tools, Advancement Features and More

• By Rhea Kelly
• 09/20/18

Salesforce.org today announced a number of updates to its Education Cloud platform, including enhancements to its Salesforce Advisor Link product, new features for developing alumni and donor relationships, new Higher Education Data Architecture capabilities and an expansion to Education Cloud data architecture for K-12 institutions. The updates are designed to give institutions "a complete view of each student and improve [student] outcomes across the entire educational journey, said CEO Rob Acker in a statement.

With Saleforce Advisor Link 2.0, advisers have new tools to engage with students and personalize outreach efforts. Among the updates:

• Individualized success plans, which allow advisers to create student-specific goals, assignments and related tasks to help keep students on track;
• Flexible scheduling management, supporting multiple appointment types in a single view;
• Einstein case management, which uses Salesforce's Einstein AI and machine learning to automatically classify, escalate and gather relevant information for cases as they come in;
• Einstein bots, chatbots that can handle routine student questions and free up advisers' time to deal with more complex issues; and
•  Einstein next best action, a feature that uses predictive models to suggest recommended content and resources for students.

In the area of alumni and donor relationships, new Education Cloud advancement features include:

• Personalized journeys, allowing alumni relations staff to segment their constituent base into groups and send personalized communications;
• Social insights (such as sentiment analysis and topic profiles) to inform online engagement efforts;
• Mobile-first constituent management, allowing development and major gift staffers to manage their portfolios via mobile device;
• Gift processing, for better tracking of donations; and
• AI-driven fundraising, providing opportunity scoring for leads, recommendations for next steps and automated voice transcription for entering prospect visit notes.

Updates to the Education Cloud's Higher Education Data Architecture (HEDA) include two new objects: Program Plans and Plan Requirements. Both provide a way to organize and track academic programs and view degree requirements across terms, years and cohorts.

The expansion of Education Cloud to K-12, currently in development, will be built on HEDA. Planned features include:

• Student management, providing a holistic view of student data and progress;
• School communications and family engagement, for secure, targeted communications with parents;
• Admissions and enrollment, for managing the student experience through school selection, application and registration; and
• Fundraising and grants management, for building donor relationships and tracking grants.

For more information about the Education Cloud, visit the Salesforce.org site.