The project is designed to centralize data, improve how the university supports students throughout their journey, and lay the groundwork for other improvements like artificial intelligence-powered decision-making.
It follows two years during which the university analyzed recruitment, admissions, student success, alumni engagement and marketing ecosystems. Officials found the programs relied on a variety of separate systems to manage student interactions, creating inefficiencies and communication challenges — and constraining data.
Rene Eborn, USU associate vice president of digital transformation, who led the integration, said the new system will replace nine separate tools with five integrated ones. This will save time with administrative tasks and simplify the user experience.
“People had to run manual reports and send them to each other off manual lists,” she said. “Our hope is to streamline not just the student experience but our staff and administration workloads, so that we can take that time that we used to spend doing all those manual processes and use those times to do more effective advising or more effective teaching and learning and really focus on what we're there to do.”
The Salesforce Education Cloud draws data from sources across USU’s ecosystem, including learning management systems and advising records, using tools like MuleSoft to centralize all the information.
From the student perspective, the integration allows students to turn to one platform that updates as they progress in their journey. Information they supply in the application process will follow them, preventing redundant work on their end.
For staff, it provides a simple platform across departments to view student data and previous interactions, allowing them to coordinate messaging and avoid overlapping or irrelevant outreach. It also helps target outreach to a student’s specific needs, like providing information on academic support resources based on a student’s grades. Years of information about a student will remain visible even after they graduate and can shape alumni outreach strategies.
The new system, Eborn noted, lays the groundwork for incorporating predictive analytics and AI features in the future, part of a trend toward data-informed decision-making at USU. In June, the school appointed its first chief data analytics officer.
The full rollout of the OneUSU platform is expected to take 18 months, to ensure time to train staff and gather feedback from stakeholders. The school is starting with recruitment and admissions processes and expects the change to continue even beyond the next year and a half.
“It does look like we're taking it slow, but when you actually look at the work that's got to be done, how we've got to change our processes and redesign the way we do our business models, 18 months is probably not long enough,” Eborn said. However, the platform is expected to be in its pilot stage by fall 2025.
In addition to gathering feedback from students, parents and staff, USU will use the interface to monitor student success markers.
“The metrics that institutions care about are retention, enrollment and the time of their staff,” Margo Martinez, vice president of education at Salesforce, said.
For schools considering a similar integration, Eborn suggests reflecting on which user interfaces are effective in your personal life. For example, she took inspiration from Netflix, which also uses Salesforce to personalize suggested viewing.
“The ones that you like the most are the ones that are the easiest,” she said. “And that's what we’re trying to do, is we're trying to make higher ed a better experience.”
