In this second of a series of updates we’ll give a brief description of Salesforce, UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.   In higher education, CRMs are used in recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations.  Salesforce is an important tool to help us maintain and grow our enrollment...vital to UMBC’s ability to weather the pandemic and our long term response to changing age-based demographics in our region.

Big news! Salesforce will launch on March 3rd. “Launch” means that all prospective undergraduate student communications and their activities will be collected, analyzed, and maintained in Salesforce making it the system of record for prospective student data.  

The next phase of the project is integrating prospective students’ requests for information, built and tested by our team, into the platform.  Marketing Cloud, a companion product to Salesforce, uses information from these requests from potential students with a personalized journey (experience) and helps admissions staff identify what information might be of most use to them.  

At the same time the team is finalizing the launch, we’re also conducting training and activities to maximize the value of our investment and taking important steps to extend the platforms to the Graduate School and Division of Professional Studies.  

This is a big project with many interconnected tasks. Congratulations to the cross-campus team that has accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time. 

In this first of a series of updates, we’ll give a description of what HelioCampus (Helio, for short) is and why we’re investing in it, provide an overview of UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

HelioCampus was established as an independent company after being formed at UMGC. It provides a data analytics platform covering the student lifecycle, institutional finance, and advancement.  Designed to run using Amazon Web Services, Helio provides UMBC with the next-generation decision support services we need to operate more strategically and sustainably (from a financial perspective).  

Put simply, Helio integrates our enterprise data warehouse with advanced reporting and visualization tools.  With it, we’ll be better able to share information from our systems and answer key questions through analytics, data storytelling, and data science and do it easier and faster.  Helio’s a key component of an integrated infrastructure for academic planning, assessment, and analytics and it helps to support our strategic plan, strategic enrollment plan, and the recommendations of our Middle States accreditation Self-Study.  

Our goals for Helio are to broaden and deepen our use of analytics to increase enrollment, improve student success, shorten time to degree, ensure financial sustainability, and accelerate gift giving...all key elements of UMBC’s plans to weather the current environment and position ourselves for growth and success going forward.  

Helio uses Tableau visualization software.  The first set of visualizations and tools, often called dashboards, has already been deployed to a small group of campus users to allow them to test the platform.  These dashboards focus on metrics related to admissions, enrollment, retention, and graduation.  People using Tableau have had very positive reactions to its ease of use and power.

In this first of a series of updates, we’ll give a brief description of what Salesforce is, provide an overview of UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.  Companies and nonprofits use CRMs to advertise and build relationships with, and track the contact they have with, their customers and patrons.  In higher education, Salesforce is used to support recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations.  

UMBC has started an exciting, large, multi-year project to use Salesforce to help us in all of those areas.  In the first phase, we’re customizing and implementing the portion of the platform that helps with the recruitment of both undergraduate and graduate students using the Marketing Cloud component.  Marketing Cloud helps us provide potential students with a better, customized, experience and uses new digital marketing campaigns to show the value of a UMBC education. It helps admissions staff identify who our potential students are and what information might be of most use to them.   

We’ve just finished mapping out the different processes we use to recruit and admit students so that we can improve and automate them in Salesforce and the Marketing Cloud.  Our Admissions, Digital Marketing, and SA Teams have been hard at work in support of the project. The next step involves customizing Salesforce for UMBC. 

We’re projecting a “go-live” date for the first phase in the Spring of 2021.  Go-live includes demonstrating the platform and training our staff to get the greatest return on our investment and better serve our prospective students and families.  

Salesforce is an exciting and important part of UMBC’s Strategic Plan and Strategic Enrollment Plan.  We’re delighted to let you know about it, and that it’s proceeding on schedule. 

Robert Carpenter       
Deputy CIO, Division of Information Technology

Associate Provost, Division of Academic Affairs