Case Study: Indiana University achieves a 360° constituent view and 7% enrollment conversion lift with Salesforce for Nonprofits

Indiana University Enrolls Salesforce to Connect with Prospects, Students, and Staff

Indiana University, a nine‑campus system with more than 114,000 students, faced fierce recruiting competition and struggled with a legacy CRM (deployed in 2009) that was complex, siloed, and rarely used. The old system required IT support for mass communications, produced inconsistent, unbranded outreach, and left prospect and constituent data fragmented across campuses, undermining efforts to build a true 360‑degree view of students and staff.

IU’s Lifetime Engagement Initiative deployed Salesforce (Lightning CRM, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud) in targeted pilots and departmental rollouts, consolidating more than 400 email instances into a single, branded Marketing Cloud platform and centralizing recruitment and HR workflows. Results included dramatically improved targeting (about 70% of 35 million annual emails were properly branded), a 7% increase in applicant‑to‑enrollee conversion at IUPUI, a centralized HR case system that logged over 13,000 cases in six months, and an expanding enterprise CRM initiative to bring these gains to more units.

Indiana University

Terry Brown

Associate Director of Admissions for Marketing and Recruitment Communications