Featured Case Study:

Studierenden
Gesellschaft

Cloudideas enables the Ruhr-based student organization to bring more predictability to their business.

StudierendenGesellschaft

About Studierenden
Gesellschaft

StudierendenGesellschaft (SG) is a non-profit organization founded by the student alumni of Witten/Herdecke University in 1995 that provides financial support to students based on income sharing agreement (ISA).

Currently, SG has over 4000 student members registered under its financial schemes. The 10-member student organization pays out close to 300 000 euros in financial support every month while clocking around 33 million euros in total assets.

Challenges

Before Salesforce came into the picture, SG’s student database lacked a structure. SG makes statistical estimates about its income for the next 10 years based on the income expectations from its student members.

They heavily relied on Excel, email, and other manual processes to calculate the huge amount of data which was often erroneous, time-consuming, and prone to financial losses.

An SG employee had to regularly analyze at least 3–4 sources of data to compute one student’s repayment contribution in relation to their income, which made their day-to-day administrative task challenging.

It was also getting increasingly difficult for SG employees to pull up the information on a recent graduate and calculate how much money they owed to the organization from the legacy database system.

The SG team had no holistic visibility of the student information or a consolidated system to put all the pieces together.

“Salesforce empowers us on a technological level to live up to our values because we don't need to use time on manual admin work anymore. This allows us to fully concentrate on our goal of providing free access to higher education to UW/H students.”
Richard Ulrich, CFO at Studierenden Gesellschaft Witten / Herdecke e.V.

- Richard Ulrich

Managing Director, StudierendenGesellschaft

How Cloudideas Helped

The SG team chose Cloudideas as their technology consultant after discarding other alternatives for being expensive and complicated. Cloudideas thoroughly understood SG’s business model and the complexity of their processes.

They implemented Sales Cloud as an easy solution that only needed a browser and login credentials to get started. Unlike other solutions they were evaluating at SG, there was just a small learning curve with Salesforce.

As a student organization, SG has a high employee turnover rate because most of its employees are soon-to-be graduates. Cloudideas helped SG to facilitate the knowledge transfer between two groups of employees—the one that left the organization and the new group that came in later.

Cloudideas also maintained thorough documentation of all the projects at SG to ensure a seamless hand-off between the two employee groups.

Key Results

SG integrated the entirety of their process starting from student enrolment, study tenure, to repayment—all into the Sales Cloud. Soon after the implementation, SG’s metrics started to show an uptick across all its metrics:

  • SG tripled the number of student members coming in for financial support in the last few years.
  • With Salesforce, they are able to manage the additional workload without increasing their employee count.
  • Salesforce has helped SG cut the time of calculating a repayment amount by more than 50%.
  • Their staff now had more free time to consult and support the student members on a 1:1 basis.

The reporting feature in Sales Cloud is one of the favorites among SG’s teams because it lets them estimate the repayments and obtain crucial data to project their future business.

Over the years, the reports have helped SG develop a statistical program they can lean on to project their financial standing based on the repayment amount.

There is more!

Are you missing some details? We have them! Discover the full story or download the solution specifics below.