 from Cornell University, and we'll get started. I think it's probably right on time. Yeah, a few minutes early, but that's fine. Yeah, okay, so Shannon Osburn and I, Rebecca Jaffrey, we're from Cornell University, and we about three, two years ago, embarked on a project that actually started out as a Salesforce project. So we had a mandate from the provost to improve the student experience, and lots of our colleges were using Salesforce as a way to orchestrate experiences with our students. And so we set out on this project, and then we realized we needed an elegant front end, and so we approached the custom development team, which Shannon runs, and she can talk about what happened then. Sure, thank you. Becky came to me and said, I'm working on a Salesforce project. I think it might have started as, I need some design work or some help with design. And then quickly, once we said, well, we like to start with discovery, we like to do UX first, and we started digging in with users, we started uncovering, you need more than a little bit of design, and then it quickly dove into, well, maybe we need to just look at what technologies we're using for everything. So the first thing I'm gonna show you is kind of the problem. So if you are a student coming to Cornell, thinking about Cornell, or like the example I always like to share with everybody is my oldest daughter, when she was looking for colleges, she was doing it the wrong way, the way you're not supposed to do. She was Googling, where can this college send me? Can I go to Costa Rica with this college? Can I go to this cool place? Yeah, exactly not what you're supposed to do, but that's what she was doing as a student. So when she came to the Cornell website or any of the sites she was looking at, her, this web space, as you know, being in universities is so, so distributed in some cases. So we'll watch this real quick. So we find with all of our UX, most of our students or potential students start with Google. Even if they know our main site, they always go to Google and start there for the most part. They kind of come to our homepage. They peruse the navigation a little bit, although you see how slow the person who did the video for us is going. When I watched my oldest daughter do this, it was like click, click, click and just jumping all over the place. And so what she's looking for coming here in this example is Becky's talking about the student experience. Part of that was finding your programs, your opportunities to study abroad. So they didn't find what they were looking for on the homepage, so then they went to search study abroad. Well, the first site is a disability services site. That's not what they're looking for. So what this is demonstrating as she clicks through is the Cornell web space, we have like hundreds of thousands of websites. We pretty much have a website for everything, every unit, anything you could ever imagine. And so being a student coming here to think of, okay, if I spend four years here, what can I do? What kind of opportunities can Cornell open up for me? It's very hard or was very hard to find these. This example has shown you they've gone from Google to the homepage to now a page not found. They ended up on a disability services site. It's kind of all over the map for students to try to find and figure out where they want to be to get this kind of information. So when we did a UX phase to talk to students, focus groups, interviews, what have you, before kind of diving in on the technology side on how are we gonna solve this, things we heard was currently to find things I have to go to many internal and external websites, like we just saw a minute ago. Most people don't even hear about these opportunities until three days before the event. And then in most cases what they're saying is they can't even go. And then right now, this was my favorite quote, Cornell is like a treasure hunt because we're talking about opportunities here but there's many other examples across our university web spaces you could apply this to. And so basically the student meant you're really lucky if you find something at Cornell, but that's not how we want our students to find things. We don't want them to find it based on luck. And so what we ended up with is we need a website that helps students pull things together across campus, aggregates them, and then partner that with Salesforce in the backend. We needed it to be open to the public. We needed it to be help that discovery they need to do. And so as we started doing comps for what this website would look like, things we started hearing and then also as it's moved to launch, very easy to find things like the style, it's organized, super helpful. Everything's bringing it together in one place so much I could have done. Somebody reflecting back now that they see this site, oh, I could have done so much more here in my time. And so I'll give you a quick preview and we'll talk through this a little bit. All right, so this is the case that someone knows the URL. So find your opportunity. They come to the website. They can quickly filter into their opportunities via the Drupal website. They're gonna go in for global. And then as they click, they get a pre-filtered view of the global opportunity. So this is now in Drupal. I think we have 800 opportunities or north of that. And so Drupal was really important here for content. There's a lot of content here. We didn't wanna use Salesforce for all this content storing. And Drupal using a content type, a really big content type for this, was really good for let's get as consistent as we can in the view of the opportunities. So now we're clicking over to the application. So the student clicked apply. I'm gonna go back to that real quick. So this is kind of where we kick over to Salesforce. You see that apply button there? And they'll click on that in just a minute. It stays with them no matter what page they're on and the opportunity. This page has a lot more content. But when they get down and they click apply, this is where we do the handshake between Drupal and Salesforce. So we styled Salesforce to kind of make it not quite so jarring as you go between the two. And then I'll turn it over to Becky to talk a little bit about that. And so Shannon's team, I mean the user experience research showed us that students can't find things at Cornell. And so the goal of the project became to help students find and apply to opportunities, not just study abroad but research and immersive learning and all kinds of things. And so the important thing is, is if all they do is find it, you don't know what they're doing. We had no way of tracking that a student was actually going to France unless we called the study abroad office and they had their own little applications tool and students would apply. So they could report and then we could go to the research office, but which is like faculty all over campus. There is no office and find out, oh, then the student did a research project. And so by linking it to this application tool, built in Salesforce, now we can track what our students are doing. And that to me is the important marriage of content and CRM which is tracking people and their activities and our ability then in this tool when they're applying we can then start to orchestrate their process. So we could see if a student started an application and stopped, you could send them a prompt in three days. Once they apply and they're in the system you can add them to a community group to meet the other students who have applied. You can do all kinds of process orchestration. And so that's the rich marriage I think between the two systems. And so when we first started talking and I'll pause this just for a second before the handoff goes back to Drupal. When we first started talking about what she need leading a web group, our answer was you don't need Salesforce. You just will build it all custom. We were not sold. Why do you even need that? It's just one more thing to integrate, one more point of failure. However, I'd say leaping two years forward. A lot of what Becky just described is that like the marketing automation and pushing, we're just one website, the experience website but there's a lot of websites that can connect to Salesforce. So for the student record we're starting to build this repository. So then it kind of came to light even for the web team on, okay, Drupal's gonna do all of this but there is a little niche that makes sense to connect over to Salesforce. We did that with the Drupal Salesforce suite. We partnered with Marcus at Message Agency and they were a great partner to help us figuring out how to use that suite to connect Drupal to Salesforce. I think that was really important because we had many endless conversations and figuring out what data do we send over? What data do we just keep in Drupal? How are we sending it over? What are we pulling back? And so there was a lot of once we got through the UX phase really just digging in to figure out how do we bring these two technologies together? So for the end user, it feels seamless. So they kind of bounced out here. Students will never know they're in Salesforce when they're filling this out. But once they get to the end of their application what it's gonna show is they can submit their application here in just a minute and then they're gonna be able to come back to Drupal because all the student knows is experience.cornell. They don't know whatever this URL is and they're not going to go check their status over in Salesforce, at least not for this. I think after they click save, they go back. All right, so the submit application it kind of tracks down the side all the steps they have to do before they go back. So they're good. It tells them click on your dashboard. Can tell you the single sign on handoff between Drupal and Salesforce was probably where we spent a lot of time. I like to say one of my devs worked kind of Drupal magic figuring that out. That'd be a whole different session but getting Samuel to work with both Drupal and Salesforce was quite a bit. So here's the dashboard. So they came back here. So this is the site they recognize and this is the site they can go back to. So what we're doing is we're polling. Okay, I'm a student. I came back to my dashboard. Here's my Salesforce applications. Again, they don't know their Salesforce. We're masking that. We're kind of created like a teaser page for the students so they can track. We're also pulling more data back from Salesforce here later on as the application is processed. So as something is approved or waiting for review or whatever the status is, the student can eventually then withdraw or confirm here right from the website that they're used to. So this is an example of a more robust student who has a whole bunch of applications going on the one we looked at was just two. Okay, I think I want to add something. Yeah, and so here we used, again, sort of the process orchestration idea of not just letting a student reply but helping them through it so they can see the status of their application. If they, and then in the backend in Salesforce, there's a person who's admitting them to the program. Once they're admitted, it then kicks them up to that top section where they can commit or withdraw and then we can move them to an onboarding checklist and so all that process orchestration makes it a richer experience than other independent form tools or things that schools often use for students to apply to things. And this section over here to the right became really important data to pull back over into Drupal from Salesforce. What we heard through a lot of the UX testing was these applications, I mean you saw kind of a light process going through the applications, they're huge, they're long, it takes them forever to fill out and then once they've even filled it out, there's a whole slew of checklist items they have to go do to really have Cornell send them abroad to be able to study abroad. And so here it tracks for them in their dashboard, we pull data points back from Salesforce, okay out of seven, have they filled out three, have they filled out four? Instead of making the students maybe traditionally what we would have done five years ago, you go here for this and then here's a whole nother place you go to to go figure out all this information. We do that a lot, we have separated systems for a lot of things. So this was a nice marriage to bring those two things together. And so the formula that we've discovered in trying to blend CRM and CMS, like Shannon said earlier, I think what her team might have been doing in the past was using Drupal to build CRM type functionality and then the CRM Salesforce team was using Salesforce to build content functionality and so merging these two, the formula for us has become discovery. If students need to find or discover something that is content and that should be built in Drupal, but when they need to engage where you need to understand a person and how they're moving through a process, that is Salesforce. And so the blend of those two tools and then once you have that engagement data, you can feed that into your CRM platform, which is the student record and that's the data that you can report on and do a whole bunch of things with and you can track the students activity not just for these applications but for lots of other things as well. Do you wanna go to the next slide? I think it shows. I'll add one thing too. I think what Becky just said also, it took me a while to come around too because I would keep saying, but no, you can do that too. You can build those things in Drupal. What finally kind of really helped understand that is how does a student move around the university because they become point solutions. And so I think really we're contributing to that student record just like the next website that connects to Salesforce is gonna add to the student record. So it really, I think it took us a while to get there, but then it kind of came around using everything for their best fit. And so in this student record, this is what advisors see about student activity. And so here in this space is the applications. These are all the things that a student has applied to, but we don't just see that piece of their experience. We also see the meetings they've had with an office, the appointments they've scheduled in their office and other offices across campus. So by building those engagement modules, we're able to get a full view of student activity across Cornell, the applications, but other things as well. Salesforce, yeah. And this is just native Salesforce. It's what a CRM is. Is it's a 360 degree view of a constituent? Yes, in our case, PeopleSoft. Yeah, but that's over here. That's our system of record data. And then the difference between an ERP and Salesforce is you're not just capturing system of record data, but engagement data. And so the question is, how do you get the engagement data? And it's through these engagement tools. Because we did the front end in Drupal and not in Salesforce, we could do really other great things. And so connecting sites across campus, consistent content was also what we heard from students. I might find the opportunity to describe to this way on this website, this way on this website, and barely at all on this website. So what we did is we created a feed from our experience site, so that all the different colleges or units across campus could consume that data and render it on their websites. So this did two really great things. One, the video I'm gonna show in a second, it saved them a huge chunk of budget. When they were gonna redesign their site, they had all this functionality written up to do exactly what we built on experience for opportunities. And so we got involved and said, okay, don't do that, let us build it. And then you guys just consume the feed from us and render your opportunities however you want to. So they had a big win from that. And then as we roll this out across campus, the idea is the college sites will start highlighting the opportunities that they have on their websites too to keep that consistent voice for the opportunities. So in this use case, the students going to global.cornell.edu or Education Abroad. So they might have met with an advisor and their advisor said, here, go here. And so they go to discover programs and they pick college administrative or administered. So here you see each one of these sort of cards. This is all coming over the teaser content from our site and then they're linking to it. They have two options. One, they can link to our details page or there's some that are really important for them. This is their cornell sponsored ones. And so when you click on them, they're taking our content and they're putting their design wrapper around it. They're taking the fields and they're saying, these are so important. I actually want to render these on my own site and I want to put a little more around them. So that's working really well. It's keeping things consistent. It saved them time. They didn't have to write content for one website, write content for another website because we're knocking on their doors too saying, we need content for our website. So it's streamlining it a lot for them. So in addition to the content experience across campus, we also have an engagement tracking experience across campus. So we can track student engagement with a 360 degree view. So examples of other engagement modules that we have either integrated with Salesforce or built are appointment scheduling. We use Microsoft bookings. Students can make online appointments. Their appointments go into the student records so we can see if they met with the transfer student office or different units across campus. There's a check-in module. So when a student comes into an office, they check in. Ultimately, we'll extend this to other things across campus, the gym, the tutoring center, the advising center. And so we'll get to start to understand the student where they're getting services that we're providing and email tracking. This is not to track every email that goes out to a student, but if an advisor wants to keep a record of a conversation, this is an Outlook plug-in that goes into Salesforce and you just CC Salesforce and it goes into the student record as well. So it just makes it, you're not having to cut and paste and do all that. So this, I think, tracking their engagement is important and I know there's all kinds of privacy issues about this, like do we have the right to do that? We will have a student consent process where they sign off, they sign it when they arrive, but we're trying to be more deliberate when they actually enter the system that they check it off. But I think it's, you know, Cornell invests a lot in resources and if we don't understand if students are using them, we can't improve them and we can't, you know, if there's a tutoring center, are we staffing at the right hours when students really need it? Things like that. So we'll have data now that we can use to answer those kinds of important questions. So looking ahead, back to kind of the 360 degree view and tracking engagement. We're starting to, we've got the experience design. Well, maybe we should go look at the front desk check-in that's here and try to align that a little better. Or if we have a student support community website, that should align. So we're trying to take things that are in the student experience and align them better with the family designs looking ahead. Experience.cornell itself, more features. Obviously, if you launch something, that always gets a lot of eyes on it and then everybody wants something added to it. So we've got a whole JIRA list of things people would like. We question ourselves a lot. You know, could we have done it different? Should we have done it different? Should we have done Drupal in the back end to manage the content in a React front end so that we could have done the front end a little differently? Resource library. Much like we have a whole library of opportunities, next idea for campus would be if you're a student and you wanna find resources across campus, how do you find them? Well, right now, I think you do the same thing to the way you use to find the opportunities. You hunt and you search and you try to find them. A few others. You wanna talk about digital signage marketing automation? Yeah, and so in the find your resource, so we have experience.cornell.edu. The long-term vision is find your opportunity, find your resource, find your event, find your courses. We can kind of go down the line with that. And then for each content type, there's an engagement type, right? When you find an opportunity, you apply. When you find a resource, you check in. And that allows us to have that kind of data that we need. One of the biggest values I think is what Shannon said is that we have a system of record for all our opportunities across campus now. And we've never known that. If a dean asked how many research programs are out there, we would have no ability to answer that question. And now that we have this content repository or a system of record for our opportunities, we can push it not just into other websites, but into digital signage across campus. So now our content can be geolocated based on interest. So if we wanna push out certain programs to computer science students, we can go to the cafeteria where they hang out and put the content there. We're also trying to do more with a mobile experience. And that's, you know, this site is responsive. It's wonderful, but on our mobile experience design, we're thinking about what students are actually needing their phone to do to check in as they move across campus to see their appointments. And so we will coordinate with the Drupal, the custom dev team to build that experience. And then email automation and marketing automation. Those are really powerful out of the box Salesforce tools that I think once we start to have this ability to orchestrate experiences for students, we can then promote other opportunities to them based on a point in time. So maybe, you know, if the resource, find your resource, if a student's grade goes down, we could push out content automatically without somebody having to figure out who those students are, push out content for the tutoring center. If a student's taking Spanish or they enroll in a Spanish class, we could push out content saying, hey, have you considered these study abroad programs? The last thing I'll say is now that we've discovered this magic, it's very much in demand now. And so as we launch other initiatives around different constituents, right, we focused the past two years on students. Next, we're moving to corporate relations and our corporate relationships. And I think we'll repeat the formula of having a content, a discovery platform for so external organizations can understand Cornell and all that we have to offer. And then they will engage somehow through some Salesforce tools and then we'll have that constituent record of that relationship. But the power of Drupal to me is that it's content that draws people in. That's how you present what your institution is about to the outside world. And once they're in, then you can engage them. But if you only, I come from the Salesforce world, if all you do is Salesforce, you're not attracting people to get the engagement that you need to track. That our applications were already in Salesforce? They weren't, no. Yeah, we had point solutions. So some people use Google Forms, some people use Teradata for study abroad, Fluid Review, there's all kinds of tools out there that different offices are using. Yeah, right. And that's the challenge, right? So Teradata is a study abroad portal. More students can apply, but it doesn't work for domestic opportunities. So Cornell and Washington DC wasn't in there. And then that study abroad office, they owned the tool. And what they would find is the other offices that wanted to have an application would be in their tool. And so suddenly the study abroad people are managing a technology platform for offices that aren't their own. So it's a really, it was a crazy ecosystem. So as far as information that you're pulling in from Salesforce, are you actually ever showing, pulling user information into the Drupal site at all? Or is it only just displaying it? Information into the Drupal site. Okay, so then you have user accounts on multiple places? Yes, and actually figuring out that and then who owned the profile between the two. Correct. So for the, it was really easy for the Cornell login side nothing was easy. It was easier on the Cornell login side. On the non Cornell login side, we went back and forth would Salesforce have the user profile? Would Drupal have the user profile? At the end of the day Salesforce creates the profile and just sends the data back to Drupal. And then my second part of the question is kind of off his, so did you already have, so obviously Cornell was heavily invested in the Salesforce. So did you already have like that whole UI? So basically did you have to develop the UI tools that you needed for Salesforce as well? Like basically did you have to develop two things? Yes, and that's I think where the Salesforce team operated pretty independently because we had such a tight timeline but now we're stepping back and we're really gonna use the UX talents of Shannon's team to help us make those better experiences. Okay, thank you. The opportunity data that you have in Drupal are departments all across campus entering that directly in and how do you manage what they can enter and what tags they can use and who has access? I like to say everybody gets tag happy. That's our biggest problem. They did hire somebody who's supposed to start kind of calling through the content and making sure the tags are appropriately. I think there's this idea if I pick all the tags and the content type, my opportunity will get really good marketing which then, as you know, makes the integrity of the site not so good. So there is somebody who's looking at that. We're having them, they have two options, the global folks. One, we had a feed, a one-time feed come over from Teradata to pull in all of their opportunities and then what we did is we kind of put them in a staging spot, let them go clean them up using our content type and then put them on the site. Now they're managing them just on the Drupal side. We did an integration also with our class roster. It's a little weird, but we have opportunities that are also courses. So they're specifically tagged ones in the roster that we're now pulling over, doing the same thing, bringing them to staging, letting them pretty them up and then they get put on the site and then you have all the hand-entered ones. There's some really good use case studies. It's almost like if my friend has something cool now, I want it too. We're seeing some of the communication directors sit in these meetings and if one says I went using this from 50 applicants to now getting 200 and somebody else hears that, then all of a sudden they want to put their stuff here and use it. Do you have a continuing feed from Teradata or does this replace Teradata? Replace. I don't know if this question is on anybody else's mind, but it seems that each student when applying for an opportunity, they require the use of a login to the Salesforce. How did Cornell University manage the licensing for Salesforce in that situation? Because it could be quite expensive if everyone got a license. So Salesforce has a community license and it's a login model, so you just buy enough logins and it's actually not that expensive. I think Salesforce has a reputation of being very expensive. It can be, you have to know how to buy the licenses and how to structure them, but in the end that is not the most expensive part of owning Salesforce. It's much more about hiring vendors to get it stood up and get the data model in place and all that. So the licensing I find pretty reasonable and especially when I look at the cost of all these point solutions that we're now able to retire, the cost of an ERP Salesforce is a lot less than that. So it is a new class of technology and it's an investment, but the community side specifically, that is a reasonable price. Thank you. So we recently implemented a similar system and I'm wondering now if it's something that is a common initiative that a lot of, because I've been hearing about it at other universities too. When we did our UX, we had difficulty because the students and the participants had difficulty kind of wrapping their heads around what was gonna be involved and how they could benefit from it. We kind of took an approach where it was kind of more iterative where we created the interface and then we've been improving it over time. And because of that, we identified one of the motivators for our audience members was that they're looking for, our students in particular, are looking for a way to improve their skill sets with these soft skills that will allow them to have opportunities in their careers. So they wanna have some kind of hard copy, I guess, of what they've completed. So we identified groups of opportunities based on these skill sets. So for example, there's a leadership area and I notice you don't have that and I have sometimes wondered if because we're presenting them as these navigation groups that are based on these soft skills, if we're keeping them from discovering things, I see on your site you have a filtering option where you can allow them to identify. Have you ever thought or do you have any plans to update anything about that filtering? Because it seems very simple to me right now based on what the opportunities are. Yeah, so there's a lot in that, that idea of a sort of a co-curricular transcript is something that we feel now equipped to be able to deliver. On the filter side, I will say that has been the biggest win of this is getting so many people in the university to align around the filters in a very simple way. And so leadership, we have a feature filter and so we could and probably at some point, we'll add leadership as a component of one of the tags. We wouldn't put that as the type because I think we tried to be a little more, like you mentioned, soft skills. We looked to align with the kinds of things that students wanna do, research or study abroad and then or volunteer opportunity and then there's leadership components to it. So we sort of flipped it. I like the simplicity of your interface. Anyways, it'll be interesting for us. I'm thinking, oh, maybe we'll do some comparison testing with our audience groups to see. That's great. It's a live site. So experience.cornell.edu, you can all see it. The filters have changed endlessly since we started. And one interesting tidbit from the students was they don't use all the filters either. And so they really wanted it kept simple in the six big boxes you see on the front. We did testing with three versus six versus nine versus more, six was across the board, like the sweet spot. Thank you. We'll check one more. Two quick questions for you. Are you using Drupal seven or eight? Eight. Okay, that's great. And what single sign-on solution are you implementing? SAML. So it's kind of a custom code written by someone or available in the community? Available, because they're using the module, but I don't know if they customized around that. So thank you, everybody. We're gonna camp out outside the room. So if anybody has more questions, we're happy to chat. Thank you. Thank you.