UA Makes Impact at Salesforce.org Higher Education Summit

Darcy Van Patten was on stage in front of 2,500 university professionals from across the country, a pre-keynote speaker at Salesforce’s Higher Education Summit April 16–18, 2019. Only four months into developing Salesforce services for the University of Arizona—none of them yet launched—what did she say to the audience?

She explained that constituent relationship management isn’t only about becoming a more efficient operation. It’s about the university community becoming information sharers in ways we never knew we could.

This meshed perfectly with the "make change, make changemakers" message of the 7th annual summit. Co-hosted by Salesforce.org and the University of San Diego, the two-and-a-half-day conference brought together attendees in downtown San Diego to exchange stories and connect with campuses driving change through CRM.

A quarter of UA’s Trellis CRM team, plus representatives from Community & Government Relations, Advising, CALS, Eller, Financial Services, and other UA leaders, attended the summit to capture concrete examples of how peers from other institutions are leveraging Salesforce to improve outcomes. The summit also provided quality professional development for the team to understand how CRM can benefit higher education.

Darcy, UITS Executive Director for Student and Academic Technologies, also co-presented Tuesday’s breakout session “Going Enterprise at Speed and Scale” with Ryan Clemens, Salesforce Consulting Director for Huron Consulting Group. The duo covered UA’s start-up journey, adaptive roadmap and governance method, and bold vision to move forward an enterprise CRM strategy using startup methodologies.

The Trellis CRM team is using agile development. To turn the rapidly growing talent pool into an effective team, they are using processes like vocabulary norming (creating common definitions) and scrum training (orienting everyone to how the team works in short sprints). The session was listed on the agenda as an integration, best practices, and thought leadership topic that attracted many participants looking to follow UA’s journey.

Read more about the UA Trellis team and the summit at trellis.arizona.edu