SFMC | Business Units

Business units allow colleges and units to organize and manage data, assets and access within Marketing Cloud. This page provides details about the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) business unit structure at The Ohio State University. Details outlined include audiences and use cases that are approved for sending within each. As well as how lists are created, future state integrations, opt-out information and who to contact for more information.

A requirement of SFMC is to use the university’s campaign tagging guidelines for the naming convention of all emails. This is very important with the updates to privacy laws as email inbox applications protect their users.

Google Analytic’s UTM parameters are configured in each business unit. SFMC will automatically append the parameters to the end of sent email links. When the email is named properly, the UTM tags allow Google Analytics to track how tactics and assets work together within an overall campaign.

Quick reference for business units

Business Unit Name*	Business Unit Details
Alumni, Donors & Friends	Commercial emails to alumni, donors, friends, parents, students, faculty and staff. TAS database audience only. Solicitations, newsletters, invitations to events. All emails are sent to constituents identified with a tas.id
Buckeye Business (Restricted)	This BU sends to audiences Ohio State faculty/staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students connected to an osu.edu email address. This business unit is home to the Brosar and Registrar offices.
Ohio State Online (Restricted)	Online and Continuing Education business unit. Sending online and continuing education communications to prospective online students and online students. Connected to online.osu.edu.
Recruitment	Recruiting emails for future students of Ohio State. Connected to Salesforce CRM.
SAE (Restricted)	Salesforce CRM business unit for recruitment journeys and student data.
Subscription	This audience is captured in a webform and or brought into SFMC from a different bulk email application. Audiences are typically external to Ohio State, but can be a mix of internal and external. All emails sent from this BU are designated commercial and require an unsubscribe option.
The Ohio State University (Restricted)	Parent business unit. Sending President and BOT communications and onCampus, house the shared templates and other content.
University Community	This BU sends to the University Community connected to an osu.edu email address. The three overall groups are faculty/staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students.
*All private business units are not listed here.

1 Alumni, Donors & Friends

This is the primary business unit for Advancement (solicitations, donor and alumni communications), email communications and is shared by multiple colleges, campuses and units. It is connected to data in The Advancement System (TAS), a TAS ID is used as the subscriber (primary) key for individual constituents. All recipients sent to from this business unit must have a TAS ID. If someone with whom you want to communicate with for Advancement-related topics does not already have a TAS ID, we recommend having a TAS record created for those individuals. This allows you to send to them through SFMC (by filtering on their TAS ID or other attribute you specify when having the constituent’s record created) and for the opt-out history for Advancement is maintained in TAS.

Send requests for new TAS records to bioupdate@osu.edu, and be sure to include first name, last name, email address and any other information you have about the constituent. Specify a college or unit this person has a relationship with to capture opt-out preferences accurately. Please note the SFMC will only email an individual's email address.

Approved audiences for advancement marketing use cases:

Alumni of The Ohio State University
Senders may contact the alumni of their respective areas
Donors to The Ohio State University within the last 5 years
Senders may contact donors to funds associated with their respective areas

Parents of current students at The Ohio State University
Senders may contact the parents of students within their respective areas
Attendees and volunteers of events at The Ohio State University
Senders may contact attendees and volunteers of events hosted by their respective areas
Faculty, staff and current students at The Ohio State University for advancement marketing purposes only

Senders may contact faculty, staff and current students within respective areas
Other constituents contacted by advancement offices for advancement marketing purposes, including peers, board members, community members and other friends
Senders may contact these constituents if there is a data point tying them to their respective areas. Does the university have a relationship with this person? If no then we should not send email to them.
Email addresses for companies and not individuals are not permitted in SFMC.
This BU does not include use cases for internal communications, meaning communications intended to reach faculty, staff and current students based on their employment/enrollment with the university. Internal communications are a separate use case and do not require an opt-out. See also: University Community for internal communications

The Advancement Business Intelligence and Data Science team creates lists (data extentions) for use within SFMC in the Alumni, Donors & Friends business unit (and lists for college business units sending to Advancement audiences). List requests can be made in this queue - Advancement Reporting - SFMC List Request.

All Alumni, Donors & Friends audiences can manage their preferences/opt-outs via the Manage Preferences link, found in the Advancement footer portion of the branded templates in SFMC. Reach out to the Office of Marketing and Communications’ Email Team for specifics on the advancement footer.

The SMS capability is enabled for the purpose of sending to those opted-in for general marketing or giving/volunteer messages. SMS functionality is enabled for Advancement only at this time.

2 Buckeye Business

This business unit is home to all communications pertaining to being a student, guardian or faculty at Ohio State. All communications can be categorized as all things pertaining to being a buckeye at Ohio State defined as messages to faculty, staff and/or current students. Emails sent from this business unit are considered transactional and are a condition of active employment or enrollment with the University. Recipients may not opt-out from this type of email message.

Current faculty of The Ohio State University
Current staff of The Ohio State University
Current students of The Ohio State University

The SMS capability is enabled for the purpose of sending Ohio State News Alerts to faculty, staff, current students and external audiences that choose to opt in.

3 Ohio State Online (OSO)

This area of Salesforce Marketing Cloud sends email messages on behalf of Ohio State Online. This business unit is connected to Salesforce Sales Cloud and facilitates student lead tracking for Ohio State Online purposes. Please email the Ohio State Online team for more information about Ohio State Online. Or submit a request for Ohio State Online information to Buckeye360 support.

4 Private business units

Colleges and units have the option to purchase their own business unit, if desired. The benefit is that data and assets are in a private space, providing an extra layer of risk protection and making it easier to navigate within the platform. There is a fee associated with setting up a separate business unit.

Private business units can be set up for the following use cases:

Alumni, Donors & Friends audiences specific to the college
Undergraduate recruitment audiences specific to the college
Graduate and professional audiences specific to the college (if first integrated with the Salesforce CRM)
Internal communications to faculty, staff and current students of the college (manual import)

5 Recruitment

Colleges share this space to manage their student recruitment efforts for undergraduate and graduate/professional marketing and communications. If a college or unit has its own Business Unit (working area) within SFMC, recruitment data is made available in that space. Recruitment data for colleges is shared with the Recruitment business unit. Data and assets are organized through a specific folder structure and naming convention. A Salesforce CRM captures the potential student population for recruitment campaigns. Opt-outs are managed through a SFMC Cloud Page that ties into the CRM (single opt-out for all recruitment emails). The Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) recruiting team provides training and support for SFMC Recruiting efforts.

The SMS capability is enabled to send to prospective students providing, that specifically granted permission to message them.

6 Subscription

A subscription-style audience in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) originates from a sign-up form on a college or unit's website or an external gathering of email addresses for a specific email communication. This web form inputs the contact information into the list (data extension-DE) within SFMC. The subscribers can be internal to Ohio State, external or a combination thereof. The email communication the audience subscribed to must have an opt-out process to comply with the federal CAN-SPAM Act. The great thing about the subscription area of SFMC is that it provides the opt-out functionality. A web form is needed to gather audience contact information.

Audiences that fall into subscription email communications:

The recipients explicitly opt-in to a specific email newsletter or communication
The audience may be affiliated with the university in several ways – or not at all – their subscription is not dependent on any affiliation or recruitment status
- Business contacts
- University committee or community
- Combination audiences of internal or external (facutly/staff and students)
Audience can opt out of the email communication

It will take time to:

Develop the new web form built for SFMC audiences
Train your team in SFMC and send the first email.
This timing is dependent on many factors. This could mean needing to extend contracts with the other email tools.

Subscription audience information page

7 University Community

This business unit is home to internal communications at Ohio State. Internal communications are defined as messages to faculty, staff and/or current students. Emails sent from this business unit are considered transactional and are a condition of active employment or enrollment with the University. Recipients may not opt-out of this type of email message.

Current faculty of The Ohio State University
Current staff of The Ohio State University
Current students of The Ohio State University

The SMS capability is enabled for the purpose of sending Ohio State News Alerts to faculty, staff, current students and external audiences that choose to opt-in.