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A Public University Unites Seven Application Processes on One Platform 

“Technology should make it easier for students to connect with the University and easier for our teams to support them. Our work with Coastal has helped us bring key processes onto a shared platform, improve visibility across teams, and establish a foundation we can continue to build on.”

— VP of IT, Public University

Challenge

For this university, access is the whole point. It serves a diverse, driven student body, and enrollment has grown nearly 10% in just two years. This wasn’t just a corrective measure; it was the next step in delivering on a mission already in motion.

The university’s mission is access and opportunity, so every friction point in admissions or advising is a missed chance to serve students better. Supporting seven academic departments, multiple service teams, and an active events calendar had left coordination scattered across numerous tools. Challenges included:

  • Limited Visibility: Undergraduate Admissions, Workforce Development, a specialized college, the Registrar, and Facilities each managed student interactions independently, making it difficult to see the full picture of any one student.
  • Fragmented Admissions: Seven academic departments ran their own application processes with no consistent way to track status, assign counselors, or follow up at the right time.
  • Manual Outreach: Reaching prospective students depended on email tools and the outreach instincts of individual staff members.
  • Standalone Events: Campus tours and recruitment events lived outside any central system, leaving no integrated view of who attended, who converted, or what drove pipeline.
  • Informal Operations: Requests for facilities, IT, and student services moved through decentralized channels, making it hard to track, prioritize, or report on them.

Each approach made sense for the department that built it. But as ambitions scaled, the seams between them created friction that was hard to see and harder to fix. The real question was how to modernize without disrupting a university mid-stride.

Solution

The university needed a shared platform that could serve students, staff, and leadership without requiring every department to overhaul its work at once. Coastal structured the engagement as a phased rollout, beginning with True North, a discovery process that sequences the work and grounds every decision in the systems, data, and teams already in place.

  • Scalable Applications: Digital application processes for Undergraduate, Workforce Development, and specialized college programs now run on Education Cloud and FormAssembly, with smart form logic, counselor auto-assignment, and real-time applicant tracking.
  • Personalized Outreach: Marketing Cloud journeys and Mogli SMS replaced one-off emails with automated campaigns that meet prospective students where they are.
  • Unified Operations: Service requests for IT, student services, and facilities now flow through one Salesforce-based system with MuleSoft, replacing informal processes and the previous Track-IT tool.
  • Integrated Experience: Campus tours and recruiting events were migrated into Salesforce using Blackthorn, linking attendance data directly to recruitment records.
  • Bridged Student Lifecycle: Integrations with CommonApp, Niche, and Banner SIS connected external recruitment platforms to the internal CRM, building a true student lifecycle view.

The result is a shared way of working, built on one source of data and a common view of the student journey.

Clouds & Products

  • Education Cloud
  • Marketing Cloud
  • MuleSoft
  • Service Cloud

Results

From admissions to facilities, the numbers tell a clear story of adoption and alignment.

  • Growing Application Volume: More than 2,000 applications have been submitted through the Salesforce platform, with seven academic departments running on one consistent process for the first time.
  • Strong Daily Adoption: More than 95 staff across admissions, recruitment, and operations work in Salesforce every day, a signal the tools matches how people actually work.
  • Rapid Deployment: The Service Desk, Facilities, the college event portal, Registrar forms, and the Niche integration all went live in a single week.
  • Digitized Student Services: Six Registrar forms, including Change of Major, Reapply for Graduation, and Enrollment Verification, now run online instead of requiring paper, email, or a phone call.
  • Automated Personalization: SMS communication is now live for admissions teams, and Marketing Cloud campaigns handle engagement journeys that previously required multiple staff members and a spreadsheet.
  • Cross-Department Alignment: Admissions, advising, operations, and facilities now work from the same data, making it possible to see the full student experience instead of pieces of it.

For mission-driven institutions, connecting the systems behind the scenes is part of delivering on their purpose. When every department can see the same student journey, that commitment shows up in every interaction students have with the institution.