Virtual Education & Learning Summit | Pracedo and Salesforce

Pracedo teamed up with Salesforce to bring you a Virtual Education and Learning Summit.

The virtual event looked at:

• Digitally transforming the Student/ Learner Experience.
• Education Industry challenges and opportunities. 
• What Digital transformation success looks like.

Ollie Buckingham, from Salesforce, talked us through some of the challenges the Education industry have faced recently, with many unprepared for an online learning environment.

Salesforce has a proven track record of delivering a powerful impact in the Education industry. This impact can be felt across the whole provider from recruitment and admissions to marketing and alumni relations.

‘Salesforce is absolutely capable of replacing a record hosting system like an SRS or an SIS. Where we see the biggest bang for your buck at the moment is actually harnessing all that rich data, that rich, valuable, student data and leveraging it using the Salesforce platform in what I would call the engagement layer.’

Ollie Buckingham (Account Executive Salesforce)

Pracedo CEO, Matt Schutz, hosted a Fireside Chat with Lee Rawlinson, Director of Institutional Research at Student Ventures. Lee spoke about ways he’d seen education providers adapt to the global pandemic, engaging Generation Z learners and where the journey of digital transformation begins.

‘I think the challenge for the education sector over the coming months and years ahead is understanding the provision of support. That is something that has been one of the biggest challenges this year, with all the students being recruited you then need to figure out how do you support them, how do you do that remotely and how can you use tools to support learners beyond the academic environment.’

Lee Rawlinson (Student Ventures Director of Institutional Research )

Penny Townsend, Pracedo COO, then spoke about her experiences of running successful digital transformation projects for our customers. Penny highlighted 4 key themes that education and learning providers use as rationals for taking part in digital transformation.

1) Student expectations
The speed at which students expect things to move like the return on communication as well as being mobile and personalised.

2) Increased complexity around the recruitment and enrolment of students
One of our customer we worked with last year had a very diverse student range. This brought a new variety of challenges around validating identity as well as residency and then linking it to funding for those young people. This was a big change and a stretch on their existing systems which forced these interactions into emails and excel spreadsheets.

3) Having a 365-degree view of the learner
Our customers want to see them go from a prospectus student right through to alumni and have visibility of that entire journey.

4) Challenges around existing systems and ways of working
This is where we see a lot of our energy go. This is a systems problem and a people challenge because a lot of the customers we work with have many systems. Alongside this, some people feel like they perform at their best using the same method that they have for the last 20 years. This can create a resistance to change and a lack of belief in digital transformation.

What can we do to help as a partner?
We as a consultancy can help you to build that business case. Using the stats that Ollie mentions in his presentation and our first-hand experiences we work with Salesforce to help you build a business case and confirm the funding for the project to take place. As well as creating a realistic timescale and highlighting the successful milestones.

We can help to join the dots between different departments. It’s possible to go all-in with Salesforce and run your whole organisation from it but, it’s much more common to have integrations between Salesforce and existing software. We can help you by looking across that landscape and understanding how we can make that connection. How that’s going to be managed long term. What the single source of truth is and where your master data is.

The last thing we bring to the table is technical expertise. We have a very deep knowledge of Salesforce and its related components. Having worked across different education projects we have lots of different examples and experiences to bring to the project. This helps us to foresee where some of the challenges are and highlight them right from the start to save time and money.

‘These are the fundamentals that will make sure that you only do this project once, and that you go through a digital transformation where we’re able to on-board Salesforce and you can grow with it and not have to face these big radical changes at future points.’

Penny Townsend (Pracedo COO)

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