Welcome to our 360° CRM Journey! This site is dedicated to providing information and updates about the progress of the campus-wide Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) implementation.
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Vision for an Enterprise CRM
Background:
Across campus, many departments identified the need to communicate and engage more effectively with constituents throughout the key functions of recruiting, admissions, advising, retention initiatives, and advancement efforts. Our current state involves many stand-alone systems, and in some cases manual processes, that sometimes result in duplicate and inconsistent communications. To facilitate a consistent Kent state message, the group identified a joint vision and objectives and, championed by President Beverly Warren, published a joint RFP in March 2015.
Evaluation and Selection: After months of vendor demonstrations, research, and reference checks, the RFP was awarded in December 2015 to the joint proposal of Salesforce, TargetX, and Sierra-cedar.
- Salesforce provides a single CRM platform that enables transparency and native integration of data between university offices. Salesforce is the CRM leader that also provides a platform for workflows and custom development. Salesforce also provides One-Stop shop capabilities within their Service Cloud.
- TargetX is a leader in student recruiting and admissions, and is part of the Salesforce ecosystem. According to Pepperdine University, “Because of the automation made possible by Salesforce and TargetX, we are able to focus on responding to student needs.” The Salesforce platform and TargetX solution provide robust capabilities for communications, social interactions, and events to support student retention efforts. The TargetX retention solution is early in its lifecycle and promises to meet our needs fully as it matures over the next 12 months.
- Sierra-Cedar is our implementation partner, and they have extensive experience implementing Salesforce and architecting an enterprise solution. They will also provide development efforts for workflows and custom applications.
An overview of our partner vendors is provided on the last page of the newsletter.
Moving Forward: We are currently in the planning and discovery phases of the CRM implementation. The following pages of the newsletter are designed to provide highlights of projects accomplishments, information, and upcoming activities.
Let the journey begin!