University of Kentucky Selects Salesforce’s Work.com to Help Bring Students, Faculty, and Staff Back to Campus Safely

With Work.com, the university will be able to conduct daily health and wellness assessments of its entire student body, faculty, and staff, and employ manual contact tracing

SAN FRANCISCO and LEXINGTON, K.Y. — August 10, 2020 — Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced the University of Kentucky, the largest public research university in the state, will deploy Salesforce’s Work.com to help it safely welcome back students, faculty, and staff to its campus on August 17. Work.com includes technology for emergency response management; manual contact tracing; health and wellness assessments; shift scheduling; and a Command Center dashboard that captures all relevant data to help organizations reopen safely.

Since 2017, the University of Kentucky has used Salesforce.org Education Cloud to connect all of its departments on a single platform to deliver connected experiences and real-time communications to students, parents, alumni, faculty, and staff. With Education Cloud, the University of Kentucky was able to quickly pivot to address the emerging pandemic, beginning with a university-wide wellness outreach campaign in March when it contacted all 30,000 students via phone to check in on their mental health and wellness, and share additional resources. 

Also in March, the University of Kentucky began to assess how it could safely and effectively bring its community back to campus this coming fall semester. It quickly assembled a cross-departmental team comprising 500 faculty, staff, and students who worked extensively over three months to create a comprehensive return-to-campus framework, outlined in its Playbook for Reinvented Operations. To execute this strategy and manage its return to campus, the university will implement Work.com solutions that will enable it to:

• Conduct daily wellness assessments and symptom checks of its entire student body, faculty, and staff who plan to be on campus this fall
• Manage, triage, and track initial testing and contact tracing operations 
• View data and insights from its community in the Command Center to assess campus readiness and rapidly respond to changing conditions
• Implement a faster and more accurate emergency response with manual contract tracing
• Listen to and generate feedback from its community of 50,000 parents, students, alumni, faculty, and staff through surveys, and share real-time information through personalized communications at scale

Comments on the News

“Our investment in Salesforce’s solutions is more than a crisis response—it’s an investment to come out on the other side of the pandemic stronger and show our community how deeply we care about them,” said University of Kentucky President Dr. Eli Capilouto. “We are using Salesforce’s Work.com solutions as a springboard for a healthier community, supporting student mental health and well-being, and preparing our university to handle any number of future scenarios.”

“Reopening will be a different journey for every higher education institution across the U.S.,” said Rob Acker, CEO of Salesforce.org. “Having a comprehensive framework and agile infrastructure in place are critical to not only returning to campus safely, but to retaining student community culture. We look forward to our continued collaboration with the University of Kentucky to reimagine and deliver the future campus experience with Salesforce’s Work.com technology.”

About University of Kentucky

Founded in 1865, the University of Kentucky (UK) is a public research university in Lexington with more than 30,000 students and 8,500 faculty. UK’s mission is to serve as not simply the University of Kentucky but the University for Kentucky by fostering a community of belonging, delivering academic excellence and creating a safe, best-in-class learning environment for its students, faculty, and staff. UK has been recognized by Forbes as one of America’s best employers and one of the best employers for diversity, and among the top 30 campuses in the nation for LGBTQ inclusion and safety. UK is also ranked among the top 10 percent of public institutions for research expenditures and UK HealthCare has been named the state’s top hospital for four straight years.