Case Study: The Bren School achieves 70% alumni engagement with Salesforce for Nonprofits (Community Cloud & HEDA)

The Bren School achieves 70% alumni engagement after launching “BrenConnect”

The Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara trains the next generation of environmental leaders through master’s and PhD programs for roughly 200 students each year. As the student and alumni base grew, the Career Development & Alumni Relations team struggled with fragmented data across spreadsheets, outdated CRM systems and multiple platforms, which made personalized advising labor-intensive and hard to scale.

The school implemented Salesforce Community Cloud and the Salesforce.org Higher Education Data Architecture (HEDA) with a nonprofit consultancy to launch BrenConnect, a CRM-backed portal featuring a searchable Alumni Finder, LinkedIn syncing, networking groups and job postings. Within a year BrenConnect achieved 70% alumni engagement, 3,000+ article views and 1,100+ job postings, while HEDA consolidated records into single master contacts, cut manual data work and enabled more personalized, higher-value advising.

The Bren School

Kristi Birney

Associate Director of Career Development & Alumni Relations