We help schools and education organizations communicate with families, recruit students, and leverage their data to make better decisions.

We Deliver . . .

  • Whether you’re communicating with existing families or recruiting new students, you need to know you can trust your data. We work to deduplicate and cleanse data before go-live, and to create processes and rules to keep data clean after we’re done.

  • Automations can help you keep data up-to-date, let you know when a student might need help, and more. We create automations to save your staff time and effort every day.

  • No matter how customized your school’s application process, we can manage it in Salesforce. We create seamless experiences for parents and students and help your staff focus on the highest quality applications coming through your system.

  • If you don’t currently have a cross-sectional view of parents, alumni, community partners, and donors, you’re missing out. Adding advancement to your Salesforce Education Cloud implementation means your fundraising team has the data they need to raise more money more efficiently.

  • Our hands-on trainings allow users to build experience in Salesforce before go-live. And we provide step-by-step end user documentation that helps your team continue to follow best practices and get the most out of your CRM.

  • Whether you’re a small-but-mighty team who needs to outsource your system administrator work or a larger team who just needs support as you grow into Salesforce, we provide affordable managed services packages that give you help when you need it.

How We Work with Education Organizations

Step 1: Discovery and Design

We dive into your existing data and workflows as well as your CRM wishlist to generate a map of your Salesforce customizations.

Step 2: Build

Leveraging as much of Salesforce’s standard setup as possible (which makes your instance easier to maintain) we build out your customized Salesforce CRM. This includes all the custom information, page layouts, workflows, and automation we mapped out in discovery. Along the way, we’ll get your feedback on the end user experience.

Step 3: Document and Train

We create step-by-step end user documentation that’s easy to digest and follow. Then we conduct hands-on virtual trainings with your team — complete with homework to help them really get comfortable with Salesforce. Our home page setup includes links to your team’s custom documentation, so it’s always at their fingertips when they need it most.

Step 4: Ongoing Support

Every Tipping Point Consulting project includes post-project support wrapped in. This helps us tie up any loose ends, add more functionality to your system, or provide more targeted support to users. And if you need more support for a longer time, our managed services packages can be a great fit.

FAQs

  • It depends! Not-for-profit education organizations are generally able to access Salesforce’s Power of Us program, which gives them free and deeply discounted access to the platform. The cost of an implementation varies depending on what your organization needs. Give us a call today to talk through your needs, and we’ll create a custom proposal.

  • Salesforce implementations can take anywhere from a few weeks for a straightforward, simple setup to several months or more. The timeline largely depends on three factors:

    1. Complexity: Are you using Salesforce to integrate data from multiple places? Implementing acorss several distinct teams? Or just looking to enhance basic Education Cloud functionality? The more complicated your implementation is, the longer it will take. (But we often do a phased approach so some of your teams can access Salesforce sooner rather than later!)

    2. Data: If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of prospects, decades’ worth of data, or data that lives in multiple databases and spreadsheets, we’ll need more time to clean it up and get it ready for import. If you’re a new organization or starting your data largely from scratch, we won’t need as much time.

    3. Availability: Any CRM implementation takes input and involvement from your team. If you have limited availability for meetings and training, we’ll implement over a longer period of time. We’d rather get it right than do it fast without your input!

  • Salesforce is not yet a comprehensive student information system (SIS), so don’t look for that here. But it is a world-class system for managing communications, applications, and high-level aggregate data.

    Leveraging Salesforce allows you to create a customizable in interface for both your internal staff users and students and parents using an Experience Cloud portal. With these tools, you can capture prospective students all the way through the pipeline to matriculation and beyond.

  • We require all of our clients to earmark at least one team member to be a system administrator and Salesforce super user. We start working with this person (or a small team of people) from the very start of your project to skill them up in Salesforce administration. By the time you’re live, they should be able to add new users, conduct basic user training, run reports, create dashboards, and generally understand how your instance operates.

    We also offer managed services package if you want to have Tipping Point on tap for ongoing development.

  • With our years of Salesforce experience, we’ve implemented a ton of excellent apps off of Salesforce’s AppExchange. In fact, the open source nature of Salesforce and the AppExchange is one thing we love about it. You can pick and choose the functionality your organization needs to thrive.

    We have a wealth of experience and a list of our favorite apps for different use cases, like event management and online giving. But if you are already using or have in mind a specific Salesforce-integrated platform or app, just let us know. Even if we’ve never heard of it before, we’re always eager to learn something new!