How DePaul University Scales Student Success and Retention with Salesforce Data Cloud

DePaul University, located on two campuses in downtown Chicago, is the largest Catholic research university in the United States. Named for 16th-century French priest Saint Vincent de Paul and founded in 1898, DePaul University is recognized as a national leader in student-centered education, offering more than 130 undergraduate majors and over 170 graduate programs while continuing its commitment to a liberal arts tradition. The university’s mission is centered on serving low-income, first-generation, and minority students from Chicago—an ethos that deeply aligns with Cloud for Good’s own nonprofit and education-focused work. One-third of DePaul’s undergraduate population identifies as first-generation university students, and students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and in fall 2024, DePaul’s total enrollment was 21,210 students.

“Somewhere north of 60% of our freshmen fit our mission criteria every year,” said Bob McCormick, Vice President for Information Services at DePaul. “We’re not looking for an incrementally better solution—we’re looking for a paradigm shifter.”

The Challenge

From Passive to Proactive Student Support

Historically, DePaul’s student services model mirrored that of most universities: build career centers, student success offices, and advising hubs, market them loosely to students, and wait for them to show up. But as McCormick explained, that reactive approach left too many students—often the ones most in need—outside the support network.

“Why make things optional when you know they’re in our best interest?” one student had asked. That question helped inspire a shift to a proactive, data-driven outreach—meeting students where they are, and connecting them to the right resources before problems escalate.

The challenge was that, with 21,210 students, DePaul could not hire enough advisors and counselors to reach everyone at the right time. They needed technology to identify at-risk students early and direct staff attention to where it would have the greatest impact.

Technology Pain Points

In addition, several key pain points in DePaul’s legacy technology systems facilitated an opportunity to seek better technology and tools that could drive the university’s student success and support goals.

Disparate Data Sources: DePaul struggled with disparate data sources, which spanned 37 data streams, 6+ platforms, and 95 million+ records. Because of these disparate data streams, DePaul was limited in its ability to surface actionable insights from across the student journey.

Lack of Scalability: DePaul’s legacy systems were outdated and could not scale with the university as it grew. This interfered with efforts to proactively reach out to disengaged or at-risk students.

Overreliance on External Solutions: At the time, DePaul used external solutions, but the university sought to build and leverage predictive capabilities and tailored data insights. However, the more DePaul relied on its eternal solutions, the less capacity it had in-house to develop the predictive capabilities and tailored insights it sought.

The Opportunity: A Strategic Partner With Proven Higher Education Expertise

DePaul was already a Cloud for Good client, having engaged with Cloud for Good to implement Salesforce for Student Success and Marketing Cloud as part of its digital transformation initiatives. This initiative also included student retention and engagement efforts.

When DePaul first evaluated multiple implementation partners for its digital transformation initiative, Cloud for Good was selected for its expertise in large-scale, complex enterprise projects, its dedicated higher education practice, and its experience with ETL tools such as MuleSoft. DePaul wasn’t just looking for a partner to install and configure Salesforce for Student Success for its student retention efforts; instead, it wanted a strategic partner to deliver a digital transformation that would challenge institutional staff to imagine how flexible a technology platform like Salesforce could be for student engagement.

With DePaul’s prior success working with Cloud for Good, the two teams engaged to implement Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Intelligence, with the objective of the implementation being to drive proactive and dynamic student retention efforts by connecting disparate data sources and surfacing actionable student data with Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Intelligence, which would consequently inform strategy and data-driven decisions.

The Solution: Salesforce Data Cloud for Higher Education

Through Discovery sessions, Cloud for Good and DePaul identified and established the integration patterns, tools, and techniques to integrate their existing Salesforce EDA org, Google Analytics 4 platform, Desire2Learn (D2L), and Civitas systems with Data Cloud in a Salesforce Education Cloud org. They also determined and documented DePaul’s integration mapping, frequency, and use cases during Discovery, which led to the implementation of Salesforce Data Cloud as a key priority deliverable.

Salesforce Architecture Supporting the Student Lifecycle

To enable its technological transformation, DePaul partnered with Cloud for Good to design an integrated Salesforce architecture that spans the student lifecycle:

Education Data Architecture (EDA): DePaul’s existing CRM foundation, centralizing student, course, and engagement data.

Education Cloud: DePaul stood up a new Education Cloud org to power Data Cloud capabilities, paving the way for a complete migration from EDA in the future.

Salesforce Data Cloud: Aggregates and unifies data from multiple systems—including Desire 2 Learn (D2L) for its LMS, Civitas, registration, and financial aid—into a single view of each student.

Marketing Cloud: Delivers automated, personalized communication journeys, such as push-to-register campaigns and at-risk student outreach.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence (MCI): Consolidates data for advanced analytics and reporting to measure the impact of campaigns.

Agentforce (in progress): Agentforce will launch at DePaul first as a staff-facing financial aid AI assistant. It will later be expanded for student-facing use cases and leverage Data Cloud insights to generate contextual “student-aware” responses.

Data Cloud Enables a Data-Driven Approach to Student Retention

Using Data Cloud, Cloud for Good built Calculated Insights for DePaul to flag students “trending toward risk” using a points-based scoring system. Behaviors such as registering late for classes, turning in assignments late, or falling behind in online discussions would add to a student’s risk score.

When a student crossed the threshold, Marketing Cloud Journeys were triggered automatically, alerting advisors in real time and sending targeted communications to the student. This proactive model allows DePaul to prioritize high-impact interventions while keeping advisors focused on complex, high-empathy conversations.

When the system went live in the spring academic quarter, Data Cloud identified 2,000 students—10% of the population—at risk. Although the Go-Live occurred towards the end of the academic calendar, it provided an immediate roadmap for student intervention outreach in the fall, when the process would run from Week 1.

“The great thing about Data Cloud is this isn’t an algorithm set in stone,” McCormick noted. “We can tweak it, pull different levers, and improve over time.”

DePaul’s early results are promising, even before Data Cloud went live. A simple push-to-register campaign in Marketing Cloud led to 1,000 more students registering in the first week compared to the previous year. Improved retention at DePaul has kept its enrollment steady despite a 400-student drop in the incoming first-year class due to FAFSA delays.

The Results: Scaling Student Success and Retention at DePaul University

Unified and Connected Student Data Sources

Data Cloud connected disparate data sources (e.g., Salesforce, Civitas, D2L, Google Analytics 4) to drive proactive, dynamic student retention efforts. By the time the implementation project wrapped up, Cloud for Good had integrated 37 data streams from 6 platforms, totaling more than 95 million records, into a unified Salesforce Data Cloud environment. In addition, Marketing Cloud Intelligence harmonized disparate data sets.

Maximizing Advisor Efficiency With Automation and Analytics

With Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Intelligence, DePaul can report on at-risk students and run automated journeys that maximize advisor efficiency and student success. The university created 12 custom insights that run daily to flag students who are falling behind their peers in real time. Marketing Cloud Intelligence is also used to enable predictive modelling.

Building Internal Data Competency

With Cloud for Good’s help, DePaul reduced its reliance on external vendors and solutions, building internal data competency among in-house institutional team members.

Laying the Foundation for the Future of Student Success

This transformation project is part of DePaul’s long-term vision of achieving a quantum leap forward in graduation rate and ensuring students graduate with minimal debt—ambitious goals that McCormick has acknowledged will take years of systematic change.

With the Data Cloud infrastructure in place, DePaul is already developing its first Agentforce use case—a staff-facing financial aid agent to streamline processes, reduce errors, and guide counselors through complex regulations. Future iterations will include student-facing agents for financial aid, student accounts, and academic advising.

“We do not view Agentforce as staff replacement technology,” McCormick emphasized. “We’re going to save staff time for the students who need it the most.”

Partner Value: Mission-Driven Higher Education Partnership

When selecting a partner, DePaul looked beyond technical expertise. “The thing that swung us toward Cloud for Good was the similarity in mission,” McCormick said. “You’re focused on not-for-profits, and that resonated with us.” Four years later, that shared purpose continues to drive innovation for student success.