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Maryville University has announced the appointment of Kathleen Lueckeman as its first chief innovation officer. Lueckeman comes to Maryville from Salesforce.org where she was director for higher education strategy. In her new role at Maryville, she will lead the enterprise-wide implementation of the Salesforce platform. Maryville—a pioneer in the system-wide implementation of Salesforce across the entire organization—will use the program to more effectively connect with students, parents, alumni, and donors.

“Kathleen brings a unique skill set that is vital to Maryville’s strategic goals. She is an innovation expert in the transformational power of Salesforce, and she understands the mission and vision of the academy,” said President Mark Lombardi, PhD. “She has been working with Maryville for the past year, and understands our enormous potential.”

“She has been working with Maryville for the past year, and understands our enormous potential.”

At Salesforce, Lueckeman was responsible for initiatives and programs designed to orient prospective and new higher education institutions to Salesforce, promote best practices among current users, and foster engagement within the higher education community.

“I’m thrilled to be joining Maryville at a true industry inflection point, when we can realize the transformation from administrative silos to a custom student experience,” said Lueckeman. “As a team, we’ll work to disrupt business-as-usual so we can focus on successful student outcomes.”

Before joining the Salesforce.org, Lueckeman served as senior director of customer relationship management at Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich., and oversaw an enterprise deployment that included recruitment, service, retention, human resources and economic development, among other use cases. During this time, she was named a Salesforce MVP, a designation restricted to the top 1 percent of Salesforce users in the world. As a customer, she hosted the first Higher Ed Summit and founded the Higher Education Advisory Council.

In addition to her CRM position, Kathy held a concurrent appointment as director of the Office of Graduate Admissions, increasing applications for admission by 80 percent and new master’s student enrollment by 16 percent, adding net-new millions in revenue in one year.

For a short time, Lueckeman held a third concurrent appointment, as interim associate vice president for enrollment management, while the university conducted a search to fill the new position. Prior to these roles and as concurrent work, Kathy served as the university’s senior director for marketing operations and strategic planning, focusing on enterprise branding, recruitment, fund-raising campaigns, advertising, events and other marketing initiatives.

This story also featured in the Fall 2016 edition of Maryville Magazine.