Automate This: How to Automate Student Enrollment with Salesforce

Quick Summary: To automate student enrollment in Salesforce, connect your application and enrollment forms directly to Salesforce using Prefill and Submit connectors, then chain multiple forms together with Workflow to guide students from application to advising sign-off — no developer required. Olivet Nazarene University used this approach to cut manual enrollment work by 50%, save 80 hours of staff time per week, and grow new student enrollment by 850%

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Enrollment offices at colleges and universities run on paperwork – applications, transfer credit evaluations, advising forms, and financial aid documents, just to name a few. Behind each bit of paperwork, you’ll usually find a staff member manually entering data into a system of record, chasing down a missing signature, or double-checking whether a record already exists before creating a new one.

Olivet Nazarene University (ONU) knew this problem all too well. As a result, faculty and staff were buried in manual processing, and the university’s senior class numbers were shrinking year after year. Something had to change, not just to save staff time, but to make the university competitive again.

The manual enrollment problem most universities share

Before automating, a typical university enrollment process runs through several common, disconnected steps:

1. A student submits an application or transfer request through a static web form
2. Staff manually check Salesforce (or another system of record) for an existing student record
3. Data gets re-entered by hand into the correct object, such as Contact, Application, or transfer course record
4. Advisors and faculty follow up separately, often through email, to move the student to the next stage

Each handoff adds delay, and the failure modes are predictable: duplicate records, inconsistent data, slow turnaround for prospective students who are also evaluating other schools, and staff time that should be going toward advising, teaching, or anything else besides data entry.

For ONU, the stakes went beyond convenience. Chief Strategy Officer Kathy Lueckeman put it directly: faculty wanted to shift their focus away from paperwork and toward the bigger question of how to improve the student experience.

What you need before you build

This workflow requires:

• A FormAssembly account
• A Salesforce org with objects like Contact, Application, and course/transfer configured for your students
• The following FormAssembly features:
  • Salesforce integration (Prefill and Submit connectors)
  • Workflow (to chain multiple forms into one guided process)

This workflow does NOT require:

• A developer
• Coding knowledge

How to automate student enrollment in Salesforce: 4 steps

Step 1. Map your enrollment data model before you build

Before touching a form, confirm which Salesforce objects the enrollment process actually touches: for example, a Contact or Lead for the applicant, an Application or Opportunity object for the enrollment record, or — for transfer students — a course record object.

Pro tip: Get sign-off on field mappings from whoever owns your Salesforce data model first. Fixing a mapping after a connector is built costs far more time than getting it right up front.

Step 2. Build your base application and enrollment forms

Start with the fields your enrollment process actually requires: personal and contact information, program of interest, academic history, and — for transfer students — prior coursework. Group related questions into sections using page breaks so the form doesn’t feel like a single long list.

Step 3. Connect the form to Salesforce with Prefill and the Salesforce Connector

This is where the manual re-entry problem gets solved. FormAssembly’s Salesforce integration has two sides: Prefill and Submit.

The Prefill side pulls existing Salesforce data into the form before the applicant sees it. A returning or transfer student doesn’t need to re-enter information the university already has on file — their name, contact details, and academic record can populate automatically.

The Submit side is what ONU uses to instantly create transfer course records in Salesforce as students submit coursework for evaluation, rather than a staff member manually opening Salesforce and creating the record by hand. For a broader enrollment workflow, this same pattern typically means:

• Creating a new Application or Enrollment record
• Updating a Contact’s enrollment status
• Creating a transfer course record tied to the student’s file

Step 4. Use Workflow to connect enrollment to the student portal experience

A single form rarely covers the full enrollment journey. FormAssembly’s Workflow feature is able to connect multiple forms and steps into one guided process so a student can move from initial application, to transfer credit submission, to advising sign-off, without re-entering information at each stage.

ONU paired this workflow layer with Salesforce Experience Cloud and myTrailhead to rebuild its student portal entirely, called Your Way, built in partnership with ElevateActual. The portal shifted the focus from a single grade-book view to an ongoing space for community and course access, with FormAssembly and Workflow handling the data collection and Salesforce record-keeping underneath it.

“Faculty actually cheered when they heard we would be providing a single interface for grading and modernizing the grade-book process and student portal.”

— Kathy Lueckeman, Chief Strategy Officer, Olivet Nazarene University

What automated enrollment processing looks like at scale

Since launching Your Way, ONU has seen an 850% increase in new student enrollment to date. On the operations side, the university has cut manual work by 50% and saves 80 hours of staff processing time per week — that’s more than 2,080 hours annually returned to advising, teaching, and the parts of the job that actually require a person.

What to build next

Once your base enrollment workflow is running, a few natural extensions are worth considering:

• Conditional Logic: Show or hide sections of your application based on how a student answers earlier questions. For example, only showing transfer-credit fields to students who indicate prior college coursework.
• Form Authentication (SAML): If your enrollment portal sits behind campus single sign-on, SAML authentication lets students access personalized, prefilled forms without a separate login.

Stop managing paperwork. Start managing enrollment.

Faculty didn’t sign up to spend their week on data entry, and prospective students won’t wait around for a slow application process while they’re evaluating other schools. When your enrollment workflow handles the record-keeping — prefilling known data, writing directly to Salesforce, and connecting to the systems your staff already use — your team gets time back for advising, teaching, and the work that actually grows enrollment.

ONU didn’t just modernize a portal. It reversed a declining enrollment trend and gave staff thousands of hours back in the process, without a single line of code.