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What is a CRM?
Traditionally, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, but in our higher education setting we refer to it as Constituent Relationship Management. A CRM is a type of platform designed to initiate, track and support interactions and communications between an organization and its constituents. CRM users can see a wide variety of data points, from demographic information to email exchanges to personal preferences—all collected and displayed in a such a way that enable users to leverage that information and have personalized and customized interactions with constituents.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is the CRM and provider. Founded in 1999 as a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), it is ranked #1 in the world for CRMs and has evolved to provide specialized products and support for different industries, including higher education. For example, Salesforce developed Education Data Architecture (EDA), curated specifically for higher education institutions who have an operating model which differs from the out-of-the-box functionality of Salesforce. Using EDA creates consistency in the use of Salesforce across campus and saves us time and money which would have been spent building the most basic capabilities and architecture, and the added flexibility and customization of Salesforce made it the logical CRM choice for UW–Madison.
What is OneBadger CRM?
OneBadger CRM is our vision for Salesforce CRM usage at UW–Madison. The OneBadger CRM will create a way for learners, staff, faculty, and external community partners across the university to interact with each other using accurate, reliable, and timely information. This shared enterprise platform enables us to personalize and streamline our communications with all constituents and provide a 360-degree circle of support for learners.
Salesforce, CRM, and OneBadger CRM almost sound like the same thing. What are the differences between all of these?
They are essentially the same, with the main difference being how the Salesforce CRM is implemented at UW–Madison:
- Salesforce — the CRM vendor. The CRM itself is often referred to as just “Salesforce”
- CRM — the type of platform being implemented
- OneBadger CRM — our version of Salesforce CRM which features capabilities, functionality, automations and data specific to UW–Madison and the collective needs of the campus community
Will OneBadger CRM replace existing systems?
OneBadger CRM doesn’t replace any of our major campus-wide systems, such as the Student Information System (SIS) or Learning Management System (LMS). In order to realize the highest benefit from the enterprise program, OneBadger CRM should replace other CRMs on campus as well as legacy systems, spreadsheets, databases, and other external platforms and subscription services such as HubSpot. CRM’s are rapidly becoming a standard in higher education as a campus-wide complimentary system to student-focused platforms such as SIS and LMS.
What does the term Salesforce “org” mean?
Simply put, it is our instance of Salesforce with our capabilities, customizations and data. Because Salesforce is a cloud-based SaaS, it operates in a ‘multi-tenancy’ architecture. This has been described as an apartment building with apartments, where the apartment building is a Salesforce server shared by multiple customers and each unit in the building is an org. UW–Madison currently has several safe and secure orgs representing different groups and data across campus, and these orgs will be brought together to form the OneBadger CRM enterprise strategy.
