How Academic Advisors Can Collaborate With Salesforce

Academic advisors can leverage Salesforce to collaborate and share insights effectively, enhancing student support and success. Here's how Salesforce can be used to facilitate this collaboration:

Centralized Student Profiles

• Comprehensive View: Salesforce allows academic advisors to maintain comprehensive profiles for each student, including academic history, course enrollments, advisor notes, and communication history.
• Shared Access: All advisors can access and update student profiles, ensuring that everyone has the most up-to-date information. This shared access fosters collaboration, especially when multiple advisors are supporting the same student.
• Action Plans: Advisors can create and track personalized action plans within Salesforce for each student, setting goals, milestones, and follow-up tasks that can be monitored by the entire advising team.

Collaborative Case Management

• Case Creation and Assignment: Advisors can create cases in Salesforce when students need assistance with specific issues, such as academic difficulties, financial aid, or mental health support. Cases can be assigned to the appropriate advisor or team member.
• Team Collaboration: Cases allow multiple advisors to collaborate on resolving student issues. They can add notes, updates, and tag other advisors for input, ensuring a coordinated approach to student support.
• Progress Tracking: Advisors can track the status of each case in real-time, ensuring that no issue falls through the cracks and that students receive timely support.

Advising Notes and Communication Logs

• Shared Advising Notes: Advisors can document all interactions with students, including advising sessions, emails, and phone calls, directly in Salesforce. You can share these notes with the advising team, providing a complete picture of the student's journey.
• Communication History: Salesforce automatically logs all communications, including emails and SMS, ensuring that advisors can see the full history of interactions with each student. This helps prevent duplicate efforts and ensures consistent messaging.
• Task Assignment and Reminders: Advisors can assign tasks to themselves or colleagues, set deadlines, and receive reminders for follow-up actions, promoting accountability and collaboration.

Dashboards and Reporting

• Shared Dashboards: Advisors can create and share dashboards that display key metrics, such as student progress, at-risk students, or advising session frequency. These dashboards provide a real-time overview of student engagement and success.
• Custom Reports: Generate reports on advising activities, student outcomes, and case resolutions. You can share these reports with the advising team to identify trends, areas of improvement, and best practices.
• Data-Driven Insights: Advisors can use the data in Salesforce to identify patterns, such as common challenges faced by students or successful intervention strategies. You can share these insights during team meetings or use them to refine advising practices.

Integration with Other Systems

• Learning Management Systems (LMS) Integration: Salesforce can integrate with LMS platforms to pull in data on student performance, attendance, and engagement. Advisors can use this data to identify students who may need additional support.
• Calendar and Email Integration: Advisors can sync their calendars and email systems with Salesforce, ensuring that all appointments, meetings, and communications are captured in the system. This integration streamlines scheduling and keeps everyone informed.
• Collaboration Tools Integration: Integrate Salesforce with collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, allowing advisors to communicate and share insights directly within these platforms while still logging relevant information in Salesforce.

Student Success Programs and Early Alerts

• Early Warning Systems: Advisors can set up early warning alerts in Salesforce based on specific triggers, such as low grades, missed assignments, or frequent absences. These alerts prompt advisors to intervene early and provide targeted support.
• Collaborative Interventions: When an early alert is triggered, advisors can collaborate to develop and implement intervention strategies. They can track the effectiveness of these interventions in Salesforce and adjust as needed.
• Student Success Campaigns: Use Salesforce to create and manage campaigns aimed at improving student success, such as workshops, tutoring sessions, or wellness programs. Advisors can collaborate on planning and executing these campaigns.

Orchid Connect is a woman-owned Salesforce implementation firm with 30 years of experience serving associations, non-profits and small/medium businesses. We specialize in strategic and implementation services, go-to-market support, and ongoing support. To learn more, reach us at reachout@orchidconnect.com.