WORKFORCE & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Salesforce built around how your department actually runs
Most higher ed CRM work is about admissions. This is the other department: employers, community events, placements and contract training, usually in a system built for something else.
Sound familiar?
Several people work the same employer account
Everyone has their own relationships and their own notes. Nobody has the whole picture of what the college is doing with a given employer.
The CRM was set up for admissions
You're tracking employers, events, placements and training contracts in objects designed for prospective students, so half of it lives in free-text fields.
Reporting to leadership means building it by hand
Somebody assembles the department’s numbers before every board meeting or grant report, from several places, under time pressure.
Activity gets logged when there's time
Which means it doesn't, which means the reporting is incomplete, which means nobody trusts it, which means logging feels pointless.
What we do
Custom objects for your events, your placements, your employers and the training you sell
Employer accounts that show everything the college is doing with each employer
A department dashboard on the Salesforce homepage, so the whole team sees the whole team
Placement tracking from referral through to the student starting work
Contract training tracked from first conversation to delivery to invoice
Reporting that can be pulled on demand for a board meeting or a grant application
Training on both halves: logging your own activity, and reading everyone else’s
We work alongside whatever admissions is running, in the same org. This is senior admin and design work: objects, fields, permissions, page layouts, flows, reporting and dashboards. We don't take on heavy custom development, and we say so in the first conversation.
Case study
Schoolcraft College
Several people on Schoolcraft College’s Workforce & Economic Development team work the same accounts, and they had bought Salesforce to coordinate that. What they wanted was a setup built around the way the department actually runs. We rebuilt it with custom objects for the events they run in the community, the students they place with local businesses, and the training they sell. Then we put a dashboard on the homepage showing department-wide performance, and trained the team to log their own activity and read everyone else’s. They work accounts together now, and the whole department can see the wins.
How a project works
Free working session
You show us what you have and where it's falling short, and we talk through how we'd handle it. No obligation.
Proposal
If it makes sense to keep going, we send a proposal with the scope and timeline. You can choose a fixed price for a defined project, or hourly if you'd rather have us as a fractional part of your team. Most first projects take three to four weeks.
Build and handoff
We check in with you along the way, so there are no surprises at the end. Then we document everything and train your team, so you can run it without us. Plenty of clients call us back for the next project, but they don't have to.
Questions we get asked
We already have Salesforce for admissions. Does this conflict?
No. Workforce and economic development usually needs its own objects and its own reporting inside the same org. We work alongside whatever admissions is running.
Do we need Education Cloud?
Often not. Education Cloud is built around the student lifecycle, and a workforce department’s work is employer relationships, events, placements and contracts. We'll tell you whether the license is worth it for what you're doing.
How is this different from hiring an admin?
An admin keeps a working system running. This is design work: deciding what the objects should be and how the department should see itself. It's a different job, and most colleges only need it once.
Will the team actually use it?
That's the part these projects most often get wrong. People log activity when the system gives them something back, so we build the department view first and train on both sides of it.
Can you help with grant and board reporting?
Yes. That requirement usually shapes the data model, so it's better raised at the start than added afterwards.
Tell us how your department runs.
Walk us through how the team works today, and we'll show you how we'd set up Salesforce around it.