Thursday, the first of February, I had the privilege to present to a number of dedicated Salesforce partners focused on the education space. Having seen the drive and commitment for furthering education service levels and putting the student at the heart of the processes was very encouraging.
Integrated advancement approach
Education customers have been enjoying awesome Salesforce products and capabilities for the past few years already. And with the introduction of Education Cloud in 2023 and the integration of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud fundraising model, alumni advancement support has taken a big step forward.
For a long time, integrating education and fundraising was quite challenging due to the main nonprofit product: the Nonprofit Success Pack, being incompatible with EDA & Education cloud. But the Nonprofit Cloud has changed all that. Now, universities and schools can fully integrate their fundraising and advancement into their education data model. Creating a true 360 view on their students and constituents, from prospective application to post-graduation alumni fundraising details.
Sector-wide innovation in a holistic solution
And while some customers choose to imitate this functionality in the past with custom integrations and configuration, the switch to a standard product allows sector wide innovation to be much more effective. Now, both small and large organizations can utilize the same technology to more effectively raise funds to support students, finance research, and launch or expand projects across the organization.
But no solution is fully complete without payment processing capabilities as part of the core solution. Because FinDock has a native integration with Nonprofit Cloud these donations can be collected using any suitable payment method natively from Salesforce, including Direct Debit, (Recurring) Credit Card, MOTO (Credit Card details over the phone) and a variety of local payment method such as Bizum, Twint, Vipps, iDeal and many more. Creating a truly holistic solution touching all aspects of the education process and weaving payment processing throughout all of that.
But it’s not just about advancement
However, fundraising and advancement represent just one use case for FinDock. Education journeys are rife with payment related processes – think about enrollment fees, event payments, tuition and so many more. Because FinDock is a Salesforce native solution, integration with all those processes is really easy and can be done with point and click configuration!
And if you have a portal, enriched with the amazing components by our friends at Advanced Communities, you can enjoy an out of the box integration between AC and FinDock’s payment capabilities.
But what sets FinDock apart from many other solutions, is the unique ability to combine online, customer facing payment processing with offline back-end processing like bank transactions, direct debits, recurring payments etc. Having one solution with a unified datamodel able to capture and process all of those different payment channels and processors means a solid and consistent approach to payment processing and more importantly, follow-up on successful or failed payments.
Conclusion
Thanks to Fabrice Pierre and Curtis Longland for inviting us to join the partner enablement day! I’m looking forward to seeing how integrated fundraising and payment processing capabilities will impact the education space and further improve the day to day operations of schools, universities and their students. If you’d like to learn more about how FinDock supports education, reach out to us for a demo or visit the FinDock for Education page!