Arizona State University

With one of the largest implementations in higher education, Arizona State University (ASU) has leveraged Salesforce across the student lifecycle to drive learner and institutional success.

At the beginning of ASU’s journey, it turned to Sales Cloud to integrate its recruitment functionality within the Salesforce platform and gained the ability to seamlessly manage the full process, from inquiry through to enrollment.

The insights and efficiencies gained have helped recruiters be more effective and helped ASU deliver personalized and proactive outreach to prospective students. Although many other factors were involved, enrollment at ASU has grown from 80,000 to over 135,000 since 2013.

Salesforce was also instrumental in the launch and growth of ASU’s online learning platform, ASU Online, which has grown to over 80,000 learners.

In conjunction with the enterprise-wide rollout of Salesforce, ASU’s Admissions Services adopted Sales Cloud to unify its data, manage outreach, and boost engagement with prospective students.

“From the student perspective, the admissions process can be overwhelming,” said Lisa Pershing, Admissions Services Information Team. “Our goal is to make sure we understand their needs and how we can best enhance their relationship with ASU and get them into the right interest area at a very early stage.”

Sales Cloud helped the Admissions Servicers team integrate its graduate and undergraduate recruitment functionality for 14 colleges and schools within Salesforce and create a unified front for recruiting and managing outreach activity.

ASU recruiters gained powerful, actionable insights and the ability to easily manage leads and nurture opportunities. They now have one place to view comprehensive prospect information and can engage and address needs on an individualized basis to deliver a seamless recruiting experience.

Over 1.1 million leads are actively managed in Salesforce and in a recent recruitment cycle, ASU had over 83,000 individual outreach recruitment calls and made over 49,000 unique contacts.

With the connected Marketing Cloud, Admissions Services can connect and share information with enrollment partners at ASU colleges and the Academic Enterprise Communications group.

The admissions team has been able to streamline and automate processes and communications and processes and deliver highly personalized and targeted communications based on prospects’ needs and interests. They also used shared data extensions to support segmentation and the deployment of dynamic and interactive content.

“We want to establish a relationship with students and make sure we are communicating correctly at the right stage about their correct next steps,” said Laura Vreeland, Associate Director, Academic Enterprise Communications. “Marketing Cloud allows us to work at scale, increasing the volume of communications we’re sending, but also allowing us to send highly segmented, personalized messages.”

Focusing on the design and scalable delivery of digital teaching and learning models, ASU has launched a range of online learning programs for undergraduates, lifelong learners and private corporations through ASU Online and EdPlus.

To grow its presence — and overall enrollment — in a highly competitive marketplace, EdPlus used Salesforce, and Marketing Cloud to grow its capacity within a flexible, scalable platform and aggressively amplify its marketing efforts.

“The traditional approach of just sending the same message to everybody at a very specific time doesn’t fly anymore,” said Carlos Samano, EdPlus’s Director of Strategic Enrollment. “Student expectations have changed, everything has to be very personalized and these tools let us find the best performance for how we communicate.”

ASU Online now has more than 80,000 students and uses its own Marketing Cloud instance to communicate with prospective learners around the world. It also uses Salesforce to support student success through a unique Success Coaching program that helps online students connect to on-campus services.

The rapid growth is thanks in part to the connectivity between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud and the levels of speed, customization and scalability that allow EdPlus to deliver impactful targeted outreach campaigns. It also allowed EdPlus to constantly test and measure performance and make adjustments based on the data it collects.

“Everything we do and anything we build is always aimed at improving the student experience,” said Christian Fuller, EdPlus’s Assistant Director of CRM Solutions. “And the flexibility with which we’re able to integrate tools and pull information from a centralized data set has really helped us communicate with students on a personal level.”

“We use Salesforce as a rapid application development platform and trying to tie in a CRM database, marketing efforts and reporting on all of those efforts wouldn’t be possible with any other platform,” said Kaleb Anderson, Director, Salesforce Platform Solutions at EdPlus.

Topping the U.S. News & World Report’s list of “most innovative schools” for consecutive years, ASU exemplifies a new prototype for the American public research university. With four campuses in the Phoenix area, an online learning program, and an expanding global presence, the number of ASU’s constituents has been growing at an exponential rate. ASU, however, remains committed to its charter — measuring itself by those it includes rather than excludes; and how they succeed — and continues to devote its energy towards the design of a uniquely adaptive and transdisciplinary university committed to producing master learners