Last March, UB launched Marketing Cloud, a massive digital communications platform with a pilot team representing the university's communications and marketing needs.
Now, eight months later, this process has been successful.
“More than 60 million emails are sent from buffalo.edu email addresses each year,” explained John Della Contrada, vice president of university communications. “Marketing Cloud offers a new model for university-wide digital communications; increasing the value of UB communications to its constituents by providing personalized, dynamic content and target audience segmentation.”
The adoption of Marketing Cloud is part of UB's multi-phase journey to implement a new enterprise relationship management (eCRM) platform. Powered by Salesforce, an enterprise solution used by many leading organizations, eCRM will integrate the latest data from university constituents as the foundation for more effective personal interactions and digital communications.
The Marketing Cloud pilot supports enterprise-wide CRM objectives:
- Strengthen relationships with students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors and key stakeholders through branded and personalized digital messages and experiences to support the university's efforts to achieve its Top 25 ambitions.
- Achieve operational efficiencies to support student success, increase citizen engagement, and improve university coordination in digital communication.
- Establish a single, accurate and accessible source of demographic data for all constituent groups and develop governance processes to protect the use and privacy of the data.
“This effort also focuses on reducing the volume and redundancy of digital communications sent to key stakeholders, especially students,” Della Contrada said. “Achieving our goals requires university-wide collaboration, and we have developed governance principles to support cross-unit collaboration to coordinate messaging and planning, share information, and utilize best practices in content creation.”
The Marketing Cloud pilot program includes representatives from the Office of the President, University Development, Office of the Dean/Faculty, UB Information Technology, Faculty of Arts and Science, Jacobs Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Student Life, and University Communications.
Over the summer, pilot users worked with Salesforce partners to build the platform. Initial training has been completed, and starting in August, units are sending newsletters, event invitations, instant messages and other communications that support student success and retention services with the help of University Communications and Corporate Implementation Services .
“A great example is the State of the University message sent by the Office of the President to the entire UB community,” said Jessica Kane, product manager of digital communications and chair of the Marketing Cloud Implementation Committee. “We have seen great success with Advancement communications at home and with family on weekends. Through concrete and specific messages, they achieved their goal of giving gifts to graduates in the early hours.'
Pilot units are also starting to optimize their communications using A/B testing platform, personalization, audience targeting and journey automation.
“Marketing Cloud tracks data in real time and provides students with a version of the journey that we created specifically for them,” Kane said. “It allows us to add customizations that we couldn't do manually.”
The pilot period also created opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration.
“Communications from multiple departments were coordinated to create a seamless experience for students, and in collaboration, we found opportunities to develop the potential of each initiative,” Kane said. “We review key performance indicators in every email we send and use that information to improve our strategy.”
In this phase, the executive committee develops systems and tools, standardizes operations, empowers users through training, and plans for future resource needs. They have also begun to create composite constituencies that allow for more specific targeting, such as academic chairs, departmental diversity officers, senior communicators, and community leaders.
The commission aims to expand the user base beyond the current pilot group by fall 2024.
Two additional components of the eCRM initiative that support UB's digital communications goals are currently in development. The event management component will serve as a university-wide platform that allows voters to easily register for events and will provide reliable reporting for event organizers and task managers. Alumni and donor circle management tools will strengthen targeted membership through a single source of demographic data that integrates donor recognition, donation processing, campaign management and automated workflows.
“We must work together to modernize our policies and maintain consistency in our institutional communication,” Della Contrada said. “The initial success of our trials shows that we are on the right track in coordinating these efforts.”
