In the last decade, constituent relationship management (CRM) has grown exponentially in both capability and user adoption across higher education. The market is starting to evolve from primarily departmental to enterprise CRM deployment, which requires deeper forethought for institutions, especially during selection and implementation.
Higher education leaders developing a CRM strategy should keep the following advice and insights about the CRM market in mind.
It is common knowledge that CRM adoption started at the departmental level in higher education, with solutions focused on specific functional areas. Today, Tambellini research indicates that approximately 88 percent of US institutions use some type of CRM solution.
Recruitment and admissions represent the largest adopters of CRM applications in higher education, followed by:
Technolutions Slate is the leading packaged solution in the recruitment and admissions space and Salesforce is the leading vendor for marketing.
The market is also seeing an increase in institutions adopting an enterprise-wide CRM (ECRM) approach as part of their digital transformation and modernization efforts.
Institutions are taking a more holistic approach to CRM, with an emphasis on data governance, as they grapple with data continuity challenges caused by multiple disparate CRMs. Institutions are finding value in ECRMs to aggregate disparate data and provide constituents campuswide with a central system of record and a consistent user experience. Moving to ECRM is a phased and ongoing transformation, and institutions generally follow a roadmap starting with the greatest area of need and one that can drive immediate success and value.
ECRMs are on par with enterprise administrative systems, and the selection and implementation of these platforms should be given the same level of due diligence and planning as an institution’s finance, HCM, and student systems. Salesforce has the largest collective CRM footprint in higher education and is most often selected for enterprise-wide deployments. However, institutions are increasingly taking their Slate CRM deployments enterprise-wide.
When campus leaders think of CRM, they often think of packaged solutions for core functional areas. However, CRMs are expanding their offerings to provide higher education with more options and greater value. For example, Anthology Apply, Ellucian CRM Recruit, Enrollment Rx (for Salesforce users), Salesforce Admissions Connect, Salesforce Education Cloud for Admissions, TargetX (for Salesforce users), and Technolutions Slate are all leading packaged solutions for student recruitment and admissions.
While CRM-based solutions are prevalent across all sizes and types of institutions, there is also widespread usage of native CRM products, especially Salesforce. Hundreds of institutions are using native Salesforce products (Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Pardot, and Service Cloud) to support custom recruiting and admissions applications, marketing and communications, unified student services portals and engagement platforms, student onboarding, and more.
Likewise, Slate institutions are expanding their use of Slate CRM to build custom solutions for advising and retention. While institutions may start with a packaged solution, many expand its use at the department level and across the enterprise.
Institutions that want to improve student retention are seeking innovative technologies to support their student success initiatives. Leading advising and retention CRM solutions include Salesforce Student Success Hub and custom applications leveraging Salesforce Experience, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce Service Cloud as well as TargetX Retention Suite.
Institutions currently report functionality gaps in advising and retention solutions, such as early alerts, appointment scheduling, case management, unified advising communications and tracking, and academic advisor portals. Therefore, an increasing number of institutions are creating custom student success applications to support these requirements while vendors work to roll out solutions to meet those needs.
Salesforce CRM institutions also use the product set to extend CRM functionality to support event tracking, communities, communications tracking (web, social, mobile), student services and knowledgebase, reporting, and metrics and productivity dashboards. Likewise, Slate for Admissions institutions are leveraging the Slate CRM to build custom student success applications stored in the same instance as recruitment and admissions and readily support data integration.
Institutions are also evaluating their legacy platforms for advancement. Tambellini research indicates that more than 25 percent of US higher education institutions have selected a modern advancement CRM. Viable advancement options for those institutions seeking to modernize include the following, listed alphabetically:
In addition to advancement CRM packaged solutions, hundreds of institutions and foundations are using the Salesforce Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Sales Cloud, and more to support marketing, personalized communications, alumni portals and communities, alumni engagement tracking and scoring, volunteer tracking, event management, campaign management, and more.
In the earlier days of CRM, institutions often lost sight of the big picture and how CRM data needed to be shared and accessed across the institution. Many colleges and universities have data stored in multiple disparate CRM platforms and other enterprise applications, which makes sharing data challenging. A common example is institutions that use Slate for Admissions and Salesforce for student advising and retention.
Data is one of the biggest impediments to ECRM. Institutions can address data challenges with data governance and integration initiatives to provide accurate and controlled data access and a consolidated view of their constituents.
Some institutions moving toward ECRM use master data management (MDM) tools to facilitate data aggregation and integration across multiple disparate CRMs. Data governance and MDM work hand in hand, and both are key to any digital transformation. Data governance defines and manages the data from a business perspective, including organizational structure, data standards and rules, data privacy, processes, retention, and more. The MDM technology is used to enforce an institution’s data governance by creating a common definition for disparate master data and, hence, a single view of constituents based on defined governance, compliance, and security policies.
To explore specific CRM considerations for your institution, connect with a Tambellini expert.
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