Salesforce for Higher Education: A Marketing-First Build for a 67-County Extension System
Challenge
A public research university in the US Southeast with a statewide cooperative extension system spanning 67 county offices was running its constituent outreach on a stack of manual processes that weren’t built for the scale. Staff entered registration data by hand, constituent records lived in disconnected systems, and the marketing function lacked the targeted segmentation, branded execution, and engagement measurement required by a modern outreach operation.
The organization wanted a Salesforce environment that could integrate constituent data, event management, and marketing execution into a single connected platform, provide staff with reusable workflows that reduced manual data entry, and enable leadership to see how programs were performing across the county footprint. The work also needed to address compliance and brand control as content was created and sent across associations.
Solution
Apex IT delivered a Salesforce implementation that brings marketing, sales, and service together on a single environment. The Salesforce implementation services Apex provided spanned Salesforce Marketing Cloud for branded content, journeys, newsletters, and analytics; Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation and Salesforce Service Cloud for the constituent record and service workflows; and a Salesforce Partner Community to extend access to staff across the county offices. Linvio Events/Commerce sits alongside the Salesforce stack for event registration and payments, integrated via Apex’s Salesforce integration consulting work to keep registration data flowing automatically into the constituent record.
With Marketing Cloud at the center, the organization can segment constituents, deploy branded journeys and newsletters, and measure engagement consistently across the 67 county offices. Approval-gated content and standardized communications give the central marketing team brand control even as county staff create and send their own outreach. Apex’s Salesforce consulting services team designed the platform around how extension staff actually work day-to-day across the county footprint.
Results
The platform is still delivering measurable gains. Staff efficiency and productivity are up 15%, and registration and attendance tracking have improved by 20%, with more complete constituent records and stronger segmentation driving both improvements. County staff have visibility into program engagement that manual processes never provided; the central organization has compliance and brand control even as content scales across 67 offices; and the new Salesforce foundation is positioned to extend further as the marketing operation continues to mature.
FEATURED SOLUTIONS
Strategy & Consulting Services
The hardest work happens before go-live. It’s also the work that decides whether everything after it was worth doing. Connect with our team to see what real strategic partnership can do for your business.
Artificial Intelligence
Apex IT is already inside this work, every day, in our consulting practice and on our customers’ platforms. We learn AI the way we’ve learned every platform shift since 1997: by building with it, alongside customers who are ready to make it a part of how their business actually runs.
Technology Implementations
An implementation is the operating foundation your business will rely on long after the project ends. We build it for that horizon from day one, and we hold the work to the exacting standards that a long-running platform demands.
Managed Services
Managed Services work picks up where most engagements drop off. The architects and consultants who built your system stay involved into the run phase, so the institutional knowledge that comes from implementation goes with you into operations instead of resetting at the handoff.
Cloud Migrations
A cloud migration is one of the few chances a business gets to step back and ask what its platform should actually look like. Apex IT ensures every answer is built directly into the work.
Data Management
Clean, governed, connected data is the least visible part of a transformation and the part that decides the most. Apex IT has done this work through every platform era since 1997, and we bring that experience to the records your business depends on. Talk with our team about where your data stands today, and what it would take to trust it completely.