EMD Business School
Delivering a world-class student & staff experience from its inception
EMD prides itself on its “people first” philosophy, delivering personalised touches for every student. Doing so, however, was becoming progressively difficult given the school’s dramatic year-over-year increase in enrollments. The reliance on paper and spreadsheets to manage and keep track of efforts was no longer working. One thing was clear: EMD needed to scale its ability to provide individualised student experiences while limiting the administrative burdens that consumed valuable resources.
EMD’s leadership established that the ideal platform would be cloud-based and offer speed, ease-of-use, innovation, openness and trust in order to facilitate the continuous improvement of its people-first approach while enabling rapid growth. Upon completing a thorough market assessment and gaining input from the business community, EMD’s leadership declared Salesforce their ideal solution.
Building EMD’s connected campus
“The idea was to put everything in Salesforce,” states Xavier Palou, Director of EMD. “We wanted to create a connected campus using a single platform that could streamline all of our business operations. It needed to be able to manage student-related information from accounting to marketing activities, all the way to course management.”
In 2014, EMD began using Salesforce.org Education Cloud for the management of student data and academic learning. Everything was finally centralised in one place: scholarship management, admissions, financial aid, the student information system (SIS), as well as all programme information including programme planning, lectures, assessments and grades.
To ensure students were easily able to make payments, EMD extended the platform to include partners like Stripe and GoCardless. This integrated functionality was also extended to donors and alumni as a means of simplifying the process of gifts and donations.
In 2017, EMD expanded its focus to improving the school’s ability to effectively engage with students, alumni, corporations and the community in a personalised, meaningful way. Using Pardot, EMD deployed marketing automation to all of these individuals, enabling the school to orchestrate end-to-end journeys across various stakeholder groups.
And that was just the beginning. EDM has since expanded its use of the Salesforce.org Education Cloud platform to include powering career services, student activities, facility management and procurement. And in situations where another technology is used, EMD has integrated these technologies to create one EMD ecosystem.
Delivering on its people-first philosophy
Salesforce has enabled EMD to scale its ability to treat every student, alumni or staff as an individual. “It allows us to deliver the best service to our students and manage our entire campus in one single place,” shares Palou. “We are able to collect, manage and access all the information that revolves around our constituents and leverage it intelligently—a powerful combination.”
Salesforce affords EMD a single view of the school’s entire student lifecycle, from prospective student through to alumni. Leadership uses Salesforce’s 360-degree view into their student to understand, assess and analyse all combinations of pertinent information from admissions documentation, to financial aid and scholarships, to grades and academic performance, to career services, alumni and donor engagement and beyond. EMD is able to leverage this information to more effectively engage with students and all constituents—building a tighter, personalised relationship with each individual.
Student success is core to future roadmap
“Student empowerment is at the heart of our roadmap,” explains Palou. “We now have all of the information we need about every student in one place, enabling us to support their personal paths to success.”
Next up for EMD: Roll out of the Salesforce Advisor Link (SAL) to strengthen advising services. The school is also exploring leveraging the Salesforce platform to track student and alumni satisfaction via surveys, sync with Moodle, and use blockchain technology to enable diploma authentication. Palou concludes, “We are excited about Salesforce’s ongoing innovations, as we know they will help us continue elevating our services and putting our students at the centre of everything we do.”