State of Salesforce for Higher Education Report 2020

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Giving Context: The Importance of Salesforce for Higher Ed

Before diving into Cloud for Good’s report on Salesforce for Higher Education in 2020, let’s widen our lens to view the landscape in which this report emerges. Outside of the Salesforce ecosystem, we find the context that gives this report’s findings great urgency for. As a result, we’ll understand why optimizing Salesforce CRM implementations help Higher Ed stay afloat and thrive.

Higher Ed Needs to Win and Retain Students & Donors

Today, higher education institutions are competing for fewer students. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported that in 2019, 250,000 fewer students enrolled in college than just one year ago! That’s an astonishing statistic. What’s more is that with fewer students attending college and declining student retention and graduation rates, Higher Education relies on alumni and donor relations more than ever before!

All things being equal, how do institutions grab the attention of prospective students and guide them through enrollment, graduation, and beyond? Recruiting and admissions, student counselors, and other internal stakeholders are now compelled to embrace the digital age in new ways. Higher education providers are already using Salesforce to market, recruit, retain, and engage students, alumni, and donors. From the providers surveyed, 38% are using the Education Data Architecture and 76% say that Salesforce makes it easier to do their work.

So, how does Higher Ed supercharge Salesforce to achieve the most success?

SMS & WhatsApp Capture Internal & External University Stakeholders, Globally

The answer entails meeting students, alumni, and donors where they are by going mobile! Your admissions team can recruit and retain students via text by using 1:1 conversations to answer questions, or bulk sends that may include linear onboarding forms or branching feedback surveys. Also, students can easily pay tuition or donors make contributions via a secure text message (SMS or WhatsApp) with MogliPay.

For International recruiting and relationship management, WhatsApp is, also, one of Mogli SMS’s valuable features. You can perform any Mogli SMS function via WhatsApp: vote, pay, chat, survey, and bulk-send.

See Mogli on the AppExchange

An unparalleled high open and response rate (98% and 45% respectively, across all industries) means that your school will have higher engagement over text than traditional digital channels. Emails, web landing pages, handwritten forms, and phone calls have much lower conversion rates and are more expensive.

The average email open rate in Education is 18.9%, while the click-through-rate is 2.28%. Depending on how you qualify a successful telephone campaign, you’ll make contact only 15%-20% of the time. Then, the conversion of that interaction into an opportunity is only 10%. Online forms across industries convert an average of 3%-5% of the time! Finally, while I don’t have conversion statistics for handwritten forms, you might be familiar with the picture below. Mogli SMS solved this problem for Trinity Western University and other colleges and universities:

Where Higher Ed Wants to Take Salesforce in 2020

Implementing SMS

Despite these bleak numbers, “Forty-four percent of institutions are currently utilizing online donation pages, 33% use peer-to-peer fundraising, and 37% use direct mail campaigns. While 48% employ email marketing campaigns.” Furthermore, Higher Education institutions’ primary objectives are to increase fundraising and better use of analytics and reporting, which Mogli does easily.

(See how easy it is to engage students and alumni, and create the analytics reports you need with Mogli SMS!)

Not surprisingly, forty-five percent of institutions that are not already leveraging SMS will do so in 2020.  Just like Nonprofits, Data Collection applications like our partners, Formstack and FormAssembly, are the most popular solutions amongst Higher Ed. These applications neatly gather user-submitted information and donations. Without Mogli SMS, however, institutions are reliant on ineffective ways to deliver these powerful data collection tools.

Finally, sixty percent of Higher Ed Salesforce users that are not already using Communities plan to in 2020. Communities, as I wrote in Mogli SMS 4 release notes, are a pragmatic and cost-efficient way to communicate both internally and externally. You can still use any Mogli SMS functionality within Communities to reach users even when they’re not in front of their computer screens!

Putting the Cloud for Good Report to Good Use

Enjoy diving into Cloud for Good’s insightful report! It will help all Higher Ed Salesforce users prioritize their CRM implementations for the most significant impact in 2020.

Here at Mogli, we suggest that after getting clear on your top objectives for the coming year, check out the Salesforce AppExchange’s curated list of applications that will help you get there, sorted by industry.

Happy 2020 Trails, Trailblazers!