COVID-19 Update from the Education Cloud Team

By: Nathalie Mainland, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Education Cloud
Kevin Francis, Senior Vice President of Sales, Higher Education & K-12

As the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread around the world, we have a heightened awareness at Salesforce.org of our responsibility to our education customers, partners, and community during this important time. We understand that you’re navigating new terrain as you rapidly work to transform the education experience. Canceling classes or moving them online, postponing events, evaluating how to reach out to your constituents — we understand these changes are taking a toll on K-12 and higher ed institutions and dramatically altering student life.

Your health, safety, and success is our top priority. As such, we’d like to communicate a few things.

First, we wanted to let you know that Higher Ed Summit 2020, originally scheduled for April 29 – May 1 in Indianapolis, will be replaced with a new virtual experience. We’re excited to re-imagine our annual Higher Ed Summit as an innovative virtual event. We’ll be sending out additional communications to our customers and partners regarding this change.

Second, to support the global response to this virus, Salesforce is donating $1 million to UCSF’s COVID-19 Response Fund and $500,000 to the CDC Foundation’s Emergency Response Fund, which is meeting rapidly evolving response needs around the world.

Third, in these times of crises, collaboration is key. To help you drive productivity across your institutions, our collaboration tool Quip Starter is available for free through the end of September 2020. You can also access Trailhead classes on remote work covering everything from virtual collaboration to team engagement and more. We’re committed to supporting you through this challenging time and hope to continue enabling collaboration for workforces everywhere.

Finally, we want to be there for you as you may have extra needs on the Salesforce Platform. We realize you’re on the front lines of dealing with crises and we’ve instructed our account team to be highly sensitive at this time. But please contact your account executive if you need anything and the team will be happy to help.

We also encourage you to connect with the broader Salesforce.org education community on the Power of Us Hub. You can check out the K-12 group or higher education group to connect and learn more. If you aren’t already a member of these groups, simply click the “Join Group” button at the top of the page.

We truly are all in this together as we navigate our way forward.

About the authors

Nathalie Mainland is senior vice president and general manager of Education Cloud. Kevin Francis is senior vice president of sales for higher ed & K-12.