Georgetown University Leads in Campus-Wide CRM

Details of How Georgetown Won a Campus Technology Impact Award

Georgetown University’s GU360, an enterprise-wide CRM, was selected as the winner of this year’s Campus Technology Impact Award. The award honors exemplary colleges and universities that are making an extraordinary impact with technology on campus, doing important work in the service of teaching, learning, administration and operations. GU360 provides a holistic view of students, faculty, alumni enabling proactive advising and lifelong meaningful engagement.

An impetus for change

The genesis for the GU360 project was the need to replace Georgetown’s 20-year old, on-premise Advancement system to support a 100% increase in fundraising. At the heart of Georgetown’s fundraising is meaningful lifelong engagement and their students and alumni are at the heart of Georgetown’s philanthropy initiatives. When interviewed, most of their alumni and students say they think of Georgetown as “home.” So, when they set out to replace their advancement system, they wanted to operationalize the concepts of home and cura personalis. But just as they do at home, their students expect modern, consumer grade technologies and data information systems so they created a modern, personalized experience for each constituent that would authentically represent their time at Georgetown and ongoing interactions with the school.

What were the challenges?

To stay competitive, keep their students and alumni engaged, continue to evolve to meet their changing needs and to support timely decision making, Georgetown knew it would need to modernize its antiquated systems and develop a robust constituent relationship management system (CRM) that would not only integrate their data, but enable students to share the data they deem essential for a personalized experience in a secure and reliable manner. In this way, Georgetown enables meaningful lifelong engagement for all of their students and alumni, not only with each other but with faculty, advisors, staff – in short with anyone they encountered at Georgetown while on campus and long after they graduate.

How did they do it?

GU360 is built on the Salesforce.org Education Cloud platform leveraging Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and Community Cloud. It consists of four parts to provide a 360-degree view of their community members: GUFaculty360, Advising360, Hoya360 and their Advancement solution build in Affinaquest. In designing GU360, they focused on the concept of a Virtuous Cycle. At heart, Georgetown believes that if a student has an excellent experience, this will lead to gains in reputation, further recruitment and donations. However, this experience can only be excellent if the teams that support it within Georgetown are also having an excellent experience – every hour spent struggling with a spreadsheet, report or old technology is an hour not spent with a student, faculty member, parent, alumni, applicant or donor. Therefore, a distinguishing feature of GU360 was the high level of engagement with the business offices. The project had experts from Advancement and the Academic enterprise embedded in the project team. The design process was iterative and engaged users from the faculty, advancement, advising deans and students throughout.

The Impact

With Education Cloud and enterprise-wide CRM, Georgetown can gain timely, accurate insights about its constituents and increase the level of interaction and collaboration across the greater university community. Faculty can now easily manage their public intellectual presence which helps facilitate review of book or grant proposals; advising deans now have access to a holistic and integrated electronic student files. For students, Hoya360 provides a one-stop shop that allows them to find the information they need without having to search multiple websites. Additionally, students can now connect with faculty and advising deans in a whole new way, allowing for a deeper and more meaningful engagement.

The most immediate benefit has been in the Advancement area. Within 60 days of go-live Georgetown successfully processed 6,000 gifts and pledges with as many as 1,600 in a single day. They were able to do this with minimal training time, while providing up-to-the-minute reporting of anticipated projections and gifts/pledges in backlog which was nearly impossible in their legacy system.

On behalf of Salesforce.org, congratulations to Judd Nicholson, VP and Chief Information Officer; Linda Buckley, AVP, Administrative Applications; JoAnn Grainger, AVP for Advancement Services, Office of Advancement; Douglas Little, Senior Assistant Dean, Student Academic Affairs, School of Nursing & Health Studies (SNHS), Jacob Landis, Technical Director for CRM and the entire Georgetown University team!

For More Information on Georgetown 360 and to get inspired about how you can transform your campus, please visit:

• How Georgetown Creates a Personalized Student Experience
• How Georgetown Builds Stronger Alumni Relationships