Create a List of Parents

Introduction

In this article, we show you a use case about tapping into the professional networks of your students' parents.

See how an advisor at the school's career center uses Salesforce and the Education Data Architecture (EDA) to sift through relationship and affiliation data to match students with potentially valuable career connections at a great local company. Our goal is to identify the parents and students we want to invite to a networking event, where they can chat about internships, jobs, and what it's like to work for the company.

What you're looking for:

• A list of parents
• Who work for a major employer in the region
• That is interested in hiring undergraduate Business students with at least a 3.0 GPA

First, we'll review the use of relationships in EDA. which is a powerful way to track all of the relationships that matter to your students—with moms and dads being among the most important ones. Then we'll use a standard EDA report to identify the parents we're interested in. You'll see how we use joined reports in Salesforce to combine the parental affiliations data with student data that meet your criteria.

Important The explanations and data analyses we provide in this article assume that you're already familiar with the various components of EDA . If you haven't done so already, read through all of the EDA documentation related to building your architecture before you move on.

Relationships and Affiliations: A Quick Review

In this section we'll review how EDA stores information about Contacts and their relationships with other Contacts and Accounts.

In the EDA Account model, two custom objects work in conjunction with your Contacts:

• Relationships, which help you track relationships between Contacts
• Affiliations, which help you track affiliations between Contacts and other Accounts

This diagram shows the concept of Relationships and Affiliations for a student.

For a concrete example, let's look at the Contact record for our student, Wyatt Hill.

You can see in the Affiliated Accounts related list that Wyatt is majoring in B.S. Business. In the Relationships related list, you see his parents. Just like Wyatt is a Contact, his parents are also tracked as Contacts in EDA. If you were to click through on his father's name, you'd see in Calvin's Contact record his reciprocal relationship with his son. You'd also see that Calvin has an Affiliated Account with Bellerton Vocational Training, which happens to be his employer.

In the details of Calvin's Contact record, because he works for Bellerton Vocational Training, it's listed as his Primary Business Organization. In EDA, this type of Affiliation is a Primary Affiliation for the Business Organization record type.

We're now going to use this essential piece of affiliation data to find out which of our parents have connections to one of the region's biggest employers. Doing outreach, facilitating networking, and potentially matching students with internships and jobs is a whole lot easier thanks to EDA and Salesforce reports.

If you want to follow along as our career advisor uses Salesforce reports to create the invitee list for the networking event, you'll need to first create sample data in your org for about a dozen students and their parents. For maximum efficiency, we recommend creating records in this order.

1. If you previously created sample data for the Create a List of Current Students use case, you can reuse those student records. If not, complete the sample data setup steps 1 through 5 in that use case, and then continue with the steps here.
2. Create at least two Account records to represent the different companies that are the parents' employers. Choose the Business Organization record type. Name one of the accounts, "The Fullerton Company," to match the main employer in our use case.
3. Create a couple dozen Contact records to represent the parents. When creating each Contact record, set the Primary Business Organization field to one of the companies (Accounts) that you created in the previous step. In our use case, four parent individuals work for The Fullerton Company.
4. From either the student's Contact record or the parent's, create Relationship records so that every student has relationships with a pair of parents.
5. For the half-dozen or so students who are B.S. Business majors, go to their Program Enrollments and assign them a range of GPAs, including a couple that are less than 3.0 (so that you can see filtering by GPA later).

If you'd rather not set up this sample data right now, you're welcome to just sit back and watch as our career advisor works with the data.

Create a Relationships with Contact Report

Let's create our report using EDA's Relationships with Contact standard report type.

It shows us contact relationships, so that we can mine the rich network of connections amongst our parents.

Note The procedures in this document are written for the Salesforce Classic user interface. If you're using the Lightning Experience interface and want to follow along with the steps in this use case, switch to Salesforce Classic so that you can access joined reports.

1. Click the Reports tab. (If you don't see the Reports tab, from the App Launcher , find and select Reports.)
2. Click New Report.
3. Expand the Other Reports folder and select the Relationships with Contact report type.
   
4. Click Create. The resulting report is skeletal and not that useful in its out-of-the-box format. Let's fix that.
   
5. Drag fields into and out of the Preview pane of the report builder so that you end up with these fields in your report.

   • Contact: First Name

   • Contact: Last Name

   • Contact: Primary Business Organization

   • Related Contact

   • Type

   
6. Add a filter to narrow our list to only the parents who work for our region's largest employer, The Fullerton Company.
   1. Click Add next to the Filters option.
   2. Set the filter: Contact: Primary Business Organization equals The Fullerton Company.
      
   3. Click OK.
7. Check your filtered results in the Preview pane. Only the parents who meet your criteria should display.
   
   

   Note Make sure that the report options under Filters aren't restricting your data. For example, make sure that the Show menu is set to All Relationships, and the Relationship: Created Date date range is set to All Time, so that your report includes all possible results, regardless of who created the records, or when.

Add a Joined Report with Program Enrollment Information

Now that we have data about the parents who work for The Fullerton Company, let's turn our attention to the students that we might want to match with this employer.

1. From the report format menu that currently shows Tabular Format, select Joined.
   
   

   Note If you don't see the Joined option, make sure that you're working in the Salesforce Classic user interface, not Lightning Experience. Joined reports are available only in Salesforce Classic.
2. In the joined report view, click Add Report Type.
   
3. Expand the Other Reports folder and select the Program Enrollments with Contact report type. (If you don't see this report type, click Show more … at the bottom of the list.)
   
4. Click OK. Notice that a new block appears in the report.
   
   Also notice that the Fields pane updates with a new area that contains fields unique to the report type.
5. Drag fields into and out of the Program Enrollments with Contact block so that you end up with these fields in that block.

   • GPA

   • Program

   • Contact: First Name

   • Contact: Last Name

   

Create Filters for GPA and Program

We're almost there.

Our last task is to filter for Business majors with a minimum GPA that The Fullerton Company prefers to see when considering student hires.

1. Add a filter for GPA.
   1. Click Add next to the Filters option.
   2. Set the filter: GPA greater or equal 3.
      
   3. Click OK.
2. Add another filter for Business majors.
   1. Click Add next to the Filters option.
   2. Set the filter: Program equals B.S. Business.
      
   3. Click OK.
3. Check your filtered results in the Preview pane. Only the students who meet your criteria should display.
   
   

   Note Make sure that the report options under Filters aren't restricting your data. For example, make sure that the Show menu is set to All Program Enrollments, and the Date Range is set appropriately, so that your report includes all possible results, regardless of who created the records, or when.
4. Click Save to preserve your hard work on this report. Save it with a name like “Fullerton Co. Parents with 3.0 Biz Major” and a description to make it easy to find in a Reports folder.
   
5. Click Save. You can return to this report over and over again, and it will update automatically with any data you add or edit.
6. Click Run Report.
   

And just like that, you have a report of the parents who work at The Fullerton Company combined with a report of the current B.S. Business students who have at least a 3.0 GPA. (In this example, there are four such parents and five such students.)

With this type of data at your fingertips, creating highly personalized, targeted outreach campaigns becomes a much simpler task. You can see how EDA makes it easy to tap into your constituents' networks and help students make important career connections.