One Thing to know about University CRM Project Team in 2024
Who are you guys?
We are a team of seven, based in Ardmore Annex. We’ve been working together as a newly formed team since the beginning of October this year. However, between us all, our team has clocked up almost 100 years of experience working in UCD, as well as a considerable amount of external expertise.
Led by Frank McCracken, the project’s implementation director, the team brings together expertise in the form of three Business Leads, two IT specialists, and a HR Change Management Lead. Together, our role is to implement a new Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system in UCD. You can read more about the project here.
Where do you fit in in the broader UCD picture?
This project is the result of extensive preparatory work carried out by colleagues in UCD, with invaluable input from Registry, EAG, UCD Global, and the University Relations Marketing Team, as well as representatives from a wide range of Schools, Colleges and Units.
The first phase of this project covers the journey that a prospective student goes through, from marketing, to recruitment, to application and admission. It is envisaged that subsequent phases of this project will include University Partnerships and Alumni as well as Research & Innovation, and so the reach of this project will in time extend to many corners of UCD.
The work of the project is guided by the University CRM Steering Committee, co-chaired by Dolores O’Riordan (Vice President for Global Engagement) and Tristan Aitken (Chief People Officer and Director of SIRC & Legal Services).
University CRM is supported by the UCD Programme for Operations and Services Transformation (UCD POST), and the work of our team very much reflects the people-centred and technology-enabled nature of that transformation programme.
What would you like to make your colleagues aware of coming into 2024?
As 2023 draws to a close, the University CRM team is concluding the scoping and design phase of the project, which has seen extensive consultation with stakeholders. With the project’s configuration and build phase about to begin, we want to ensure that all our colleagues can keep up to date with regular updates on our work in 2024. We’ve been publishing a weekly ‘Monday Minute’ on our website, a short 60 second video update on the work of the project team. You can watch back to see what we’ve achieved since October, and bookmark our page so that you can keep track of progress.
2024 will see the first phase of implementation of Salesforce as a University CRM in UCD, and this will be pivotal in how we recruit students to our programmes in future. Kevin Griffin, Senior Director of Registry, and the project’s Business Owner captures the sense of anticipation and opportunity that is connected with the project:
“The implementation of a world-class CRM in UCD in 2024 reflects the world-class ambitions of the University. It is an exciting opportunity and will be of enormous benefit in terms of how we engage and interact with stakeholders, most notably prospective students in the first instance and then moving on to alumni and other areas.”
University Customer Relationship Management is tailored for higher education institutions, and will allow UCD to collect, maintain, and analyse useful data about prospective, current, and past students, giving us a more connected and unified view.
University CRM utilises best-in-class technology, and this will be key to the sustainability of the project, as Frank McCracken highlights:
“Our Education Cloud platform is continuously improving by adding the latest technological advances as they arrive, essentially future proofing our investment and keeping UCD at the cutting edge.”
If you have any questions about the project you are very welcome to contact us. We are looking forward to engaging with many more of our UCD colleagues directly as we work together to implement our University CRM in 2024.
Written by Katharine Slattery
