Reporting on student data can inform institutions, educators, and families on student performance, course attendance, engagement, program equity, and more. Your team has spent valuable resources to put in place the infrastructure to receive and organize student data. In this post, we share how you can take reporting a step further with Salesforce by integrating in data from your SIS.
Student Information System (SIS) Integration
The core information that most Education organizations operate on lies within their SIS system. Often the features education institutions are looking to build in Salesforce are dependent on information that already exists in their SIS, such as student, guardian, school, term, course, and roster data. As a result, most of our Salesforce for Education implementation projects will include an integration with their SIS in order to make key information available in Salesforce. By integrating SIS and other key data from other external systems, educational institutions are able to establish Salesforce as a comprehensive integrated solution that allows users access to a complete view of all of their data in one central location.
Using Salesforce to Enhance SIS Capabilities & Data
Once this foundational data is integrated to Salesforce from their SIS, we will work with our clients to build out functionality to enhance the data that already exists in their SIS. Below are just a few examples of how we’ve done this for our K12 clients:
- Provide an application process to special programs offered by your district (e.g. Application to attend an Innovation Campus, online school, or after school program)
- Collect student registrations for school events and competitions
- Track industry credentials earned by students
- Manage work based learning opportunities including student applications, time sheets, and employer feedback
- Track hardware and other assets at the school and which student / staff member / school building is assigned
Overcome reporting challenges with Salesforce
With most SIS platforms, reporting is limited or may require you to pull in someone more technical to gather and manipulate the data set to see the desired information. Alternatively, Salesforce native reporting is built with the standard end user in mind. Salesforce provides a simple drag-and-drop report builder that is easy to learn and intuitive for a standard end user to be able to build reports on their own. Salesforce reporting provides a great visualization tool for complex data, and with cross object filters, relative dates and formulas, you can be easily set up by the report creator and break up large amounts of data quickly.
By integrating SIS information into Salesforce, users can take advantage of Salesforce’s native reporting to access data from both Salesforce and their SIS together. Basic reports that summarize data by home school or grade are always accurate based on the information in your SIS. Also, by integrating in demographic information (e.g. gender, race, age, special populations) from your SIS, reporting on equity of access to programs you are tracking in Salesforce can now be just a few clicks away.
In addition to the native and custom reporting tools, Salesforce can streamline sharing previously siloed data from multiple sources, scale to benefit schools of various sizes, and incorporate automation into the data gathering process. Just to name a few benefits of utilizing a platform like Salesforce to enhance SIS data.
Take reporting up a level
Implementing tools like Tableau can give your team even more flexibility with data and visualization tools. Large data sets can be engineered using various dimensions, measures, parameters and filters. The end result is informative visuals that make trends, events, and correlations much more identifiable.
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