Imperial College London

Imperial College London Enterprise Lab’s mission is to maximise the impact of Imperial’s dynamic enterprising culture in which everyone has the opportunity to develop the contemporary knowledge, skills and experience to translate their ideas from science and technology into practice.

They aim to bring staff and students from all disciplines together with their global community of alumni, friends, partners and business, to stimulate and support the development of the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.

The Challenge

Most of the college was already using Salesforce, and whilst it had been configured for use by the Enterprise Lab, the functionality wasn’t providing for their needs. They had disparate systems including a spreadsheet of visits to the E-Lab site and Event attendees.

In order for Enterprise Lab staff to use Salesforce, the functionality held in other systems needed to be replicated. In addition to this, they wanted the facility for logging visits to the E-Lab site by the visitor inputting their email address into a site on an ipad, and having those visits logged as activities in Salesforce against a contact. The team also preferred the look and feel of the other systems compared to Salesforce Classic which the rest of the college was using.

Project Aims

  • A single user-friendly interface / database replicating other systems in Salesforce for the Enterprise Lab team to manage both operations on a single Salesforce log-in platform.
  • Integration into broader Enterprise division salesforce database (such as access to and ability to update contact list and events calendar).
  • Option to produce weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly reports based on aggregated data, which has been cleaned (and duplicates removed).

The Solution

  • Set up E-Lab Users as Lightning interface users, without affecting the rest of the Imperial College users
  • On visiting the E-Lab, visitors sign in using their email address and the system searches for any existing contact and if found, adds an open activity for ‘E-Lab Visit’, if not found, it creates the contact and adds an open activity. On signing out, the system recognises the email address and updates the open activity to Closed with a sign-out date/time.
  • Zapier was used instead to fetch the data out of Eventbrite and import it into Salesforce, and ongoing sync
  • Form Assembly was set up to create the Start-up Annual Survey form and capture responses directly in Salesforce
  • Contacts, Accounts and Campaigns were customised to ensure the ability to record the data being held elsewhere

Imperial College London

“It's great having all the information in one place, much more efficient not having to log into different systems to get the information. Use of the Lightning experience is good. Lightning views are good. We are now a Trailblazer in Salesforce use in the organisation rather than lagging behind!”