What is Interactions for Student Recruitment
Interactions for Student Recruitment is a kit for implementing a recruitment solution for universities by using Salesforce. The kit includes an unmanaged package (the Interactions Package), resource documents (such as this guide), and much more. This guide shows you the best practices of how to use the Interactions Package along with the Education Data Architecture (EDA) to match the right student with your university.
If you are not familiar with EDA, we recommend completing the Manage Your Higher Ed Data with HEDA trail in Trailhead before proceeding.
Emily is a recruiter for Graduate Business programs at Connected University (CU) where Salesforce is used to help recruit prospective students and manage their data. Emily manages recruiting for the Executive MBA program, which receives numerous requests for more information via phone, web submission, office visits, and more on a daily basis.
Since her administrators installed the Interactions Package, Emily has been better able to manage her prospective students’ data.
She can now:
- Quickly create and update records across multiple objects in Salesforce with much fewer clicks
- Identify prospects with the most interest in her program
- Track each prospect’s stage in the application process
- View current and historical academic interest information for a prospect from a single record
All these features give her the ability to streamline her marketing efforts toward potential students who are a good fit for her program and are most likely to apply and enroll, if admitted. So, what makes the Interactions Package so powerful for Emily and the other recruiters at Connected University?
You guessed it, Interactions!
Interactions is a custom object that is the centerpiece of the Interactions Package. Whether it’s coming to campus for a tour, requesting information online, or calling the office of admissions, Interaction records provide a log of every point of contact a prospective student has had with your university.
But that’s not all! These records come equipped with powerful code designed to make the recruiters’ (and administrators’) jobs easier and more efficient.
Out-of-the-box, the Interactions Package leverages the Education Data Architecture (EDA) as well as standard Salesforce functionality and a few custom objects. The Interactions custom object serves as a staging table that automates the matching and creation of records for student recruitment.
Whether Interaction records are created through an integration or manually, the results are the same: existing Leads and Contacts will be matched to prevent duplicates, Opportunity and other related records are created or updated, and all the Interactions become a historical log on the prospective student’s record of their contact with the university.
Before we delve deeper into exactly how the Interactions Package functions, let’s define some of the standard Salesforce and EDA objects in terms of recruitment as well as the custom objects included in the package.
| Object | Type of Object | Recruitment Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Leads | Salesforce Standard | A Lead represents a name from a purchased list. In other words, these are names of students that have not directly reached out to the university but whose names were gathered for marketing purposes. Each Lead represents a potential, marketable student. If your institution only uses Contacts and forgoes the use of Leads, don’t fret! It’s not a requirement to use Leads. |
| Contacts | Salesforce Standard | A Contact primarily represents a prospective student that has directly reached out to the university in some way. This could be by filling out a web form, attending an event, calling the admissions office or any other form of contact. Each of these points of contact could be recorded as an Interaction. Check with your administrator to learn exactly what type of contact or communication merits an Interaction in your instance. Note that Contacts can also be high school college advisors, employees at other organizations, or other persons that are important to your institution. |
| Opportunity | Salesforce Standard | Opportunities represent a single, potential (or actual) application a student has for your university. Depending on your business processes, a Contact may have a single application (Opportunity) for a given term (regardless of their academic interest(s)) or multiple applications (i.e. one for each academic interest) for the same term. We’ll get more into Opportunities later, but the important thing to remember is that the Opportunity record houses Interaction records, application information, and is the central record for communication between the recruiter and the prospective student (Contact). Additionally, once the student graduates (or their relationship with the university is otherwise terminated) it can be edited to reflect what program the student did (or did not) complete. |
| Campaigns and Campaign Members | Salesforce Standard | Campaigns are used to organize and track your specific marketing efforts and hosted events. Whether it’s a web form on your university’s website or a campus tour event, Campaigns allow you to give credit to the marketing efforts that were most successful in recruiting the best students by linking them with Opportunities, leveraging the standard Salesforce Campaign Influence functionality. |
| Affiliations | EDA Standard | In EDA, Affiliations are junction object records between a Contact and an Account. Affiliations are primarily used in the package to connect a Contact to an Educational Institution (i.e. the student’s current high school or previous university) or Business Organization Account record type via an Interaction. (More on Account record types below.) |
| Term | EDA Standard | The HEDA Term object represents an academic and/or recruitment term for your university. Check with your administrator to discover how Terms are setup for your org. |
| Account Record Types | EDA Standard | HEDA uses an Account Record Type model to differentiate between types of Accounts. The Interactions Package makes use of the Business Organization, Educational Institution, and University Department Account record types. |
| Interactions | Custom | Interactions represent a point-in-time interaction (see what we did there?) a prospective student has had with your institution. Additionally, Interactions act as a staging table where data can be written to other object records such as Contacts, Opportunities, and Affiliations. |
| Plans | Custom | The Plans custom object houses all the records that pertain to specific interests, degrees, programs, tracks, etc. They can be created manually or through integration with an SIS or other system. Plans have a lookup field to “University Department” Account records, making it easy to connect Plan records to the departments within your university. This can be helpful when designing security and also gives the ability to see all Plans that exist for a particular department. The Plans object also comes with two distinct types, one for Recruitment and one for Academic. The purposes of these record types are explained in more detail in the cells below: |
| Academic (Plans Record Type) | Custom | The Academic record type represents the actual interest, degree, track, and/or certificate being pursued by a current student. Academic interests may or may not look-up to a Recruitment interest (defined below). |
| Recruitment (Plans Record Type) | Custom | The Recruitment record type represents the marketable value of a degree (Academic record type) or group of degrees. These values may be displayed on a web page, event registration, or web form. Additionally, they can be used to market degrees that are not yet offered to vet interest in a new or upcoming degree plan. |
| Interaction Mappings | Custom | Similar to HEDA settings, Interaction Mappings make it easy for your administrator to specify which Interaction fields get written to another object’s fields as well as what Interaction Sources are reliable sources of data. We will cover the basics of Interaction Mappings later on in this guide. Your system administrator will decide whether or not to grant access to these records to their users (that’s you!). Our best practice recommendation is to give read only access to high-level users so they are aware of how data will be mapped. Users, check with your admin to find out if you have access to these records and learn how they are setup in your org. |
Below is a diagram that displays the objects (or process, in the case of Lead conversion) Interactions can directly write to or use. This does not show the order of operations for Interactions – you’ll see that flowchart a little later on.
