About
What is CRM?
Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) is not just one tool, but rather an ecosystem of products that offers integration with source systems and adds value around institutional data, event management, and surveys.
What is the Ross CRM Initiative?
In 2014, the MBA admissions office started a project to evaluate the possible use of CRM systems for tracking potential students interested in Ross.
After evaluating options, Ross joined with 3 other graduate admissions units (Education, Public Policy, and the School of Information) to purchase Salesforce.  The admissions pilot made progress that year, adding automated data feeds from Wolverine Access (Peoplesoft) and fielding many requests from other schools / units who wanted to join.  In December of 2014, Scott Berkley planned an initial meeting for those interested in CRM at Ross, which resulted in the creation of the Ross CRM task force, chaired by Amy Contrera.  It’s goals were to conduct an internal discovery about usage of CRM to track and communicate with constituents; as well as to make a recommendation on strategy, budget and staffing as we moved forward.  This process led to the discovery of more than 8 different CRM like products used at Ross, which all had issues with sharing data across units and keeping data up-to-date. This led to the launch of an RFP process in May of 2015.  The RFP initially focused on the needs of Marketing and Communications to replace their current marketing tool, but it eventually expanded to include the larger scope of the current project which foresees the Salesforce platform being used across Ross.  ​
With the help of our implementation partner Sierra Cedar, the Ross IT project implementation team will be working with all Ross units to gather requirements, migrate existing systems and on-board users into a new Salesforce instance designed to track constituent data on prospective students, current students and alumni.
