How UW–Madison Built a Salesforce-Native Foundation with Blackthorn and Attain Partners

University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies (DCS) plays a central role in lifelong learning across a highly decentralized campus. While academic units across UW–Madison manage their own programming, DCS helps bring consistency, structure, and scalable operations to the broader continuing education ecosystem.

As Alan Ng describes it, the work often comes down to coordination across a large institution with many moving parts.

“We’re responsible for… I call it herding the cats of a very large Public R1 University, which is highly decentralized, and our job is to attempt to make it behave as if it were centralized.” – Alan Ng, UW–Madison

That mission requires infrastructure that can support a wide range of program types, credit and noncredit, revenue-generating and impact-focused, while still operating efficiently at scale. For UW–Madison, that scale is significant: around 21,000 learners per year, with tens of thousands of course registrations processed through DCS annually.

Before adopting Blackthorn, UW–Madison DCS relied on a third-party platform to manage event registration. Over time, the platform became a limiting factor. UW–Madison saw the vendor stop investing in the capabilities they relied on, and in some cases, even remove features the university needed to operate at scale. Despite that decline in functionality and support, costs remained high. The result: a premium-priced solution that no longer aligned with UW–Madison’s complexity, growth, or long-term goals.

“They wouldn’t or couldn’t fix issues when we wanted something different… It became clear we were no longer in the target audience,” Alan shared. “They’re selling to pro football teams… higher ed, continuing ed, is not it. We cannot compete with the Green Bay Packers.”

As the mismatch grew, UW–Madison faced a familiar challenge: they needed a system flexible enough to support complex higher-ed registration scenarios, without being locked into a roadmap built for entirely different industries.

At the same time, the team recognized that selecting a new solution would require more than simply replacing one vendor with another. UW–Madison needed buy-in across stakeholders and a shared understanding of what the future state should look like.

That’s why the university took a deliberate approach. Before reviewing products, UW–Madison invested six months in requirements gathering, gathering input from stakeholders across campus, and surveying peer institutions to understand what was working and what wasn’t, elsewhere.

This discovery effort helped UW–Madison avoid the “easy path” of turnkey platforms that peers warned could create long-term constraints. It also helped align internal stakeholders early, laying the groundwork for long-term success.

“I wouldn’t discount or underestimate the importance of that six-month project in advance in terms of building stakeholder buy-in.” — Alan Ng

UW–Madison’s approach to selecting a new system was intentionally disciplined. Rather than jumping into vendor demos, the team prioritized stakeholder alignment and peer-driven research.

“No demo… literally no demo. No product vendor demos will be involved until this project is done. Thou shalt not talk to vendors.” — Alan Ng

By the time UW–Madison began evaluating solutions, the direction was already obvious: the university wanted a Salesforce-based approach that provided long-term control and configurability, especially for the complex workflows common in continuing education.

Peer institutions consistently pointed toward Blackthorn as the most established Salesforce-native solution capable of meeting those needs.

“Peers had said Blackthorn. If you’re going to do Salesforce, you want configurability—Blackthorn’s kind of it.”  — Alan Ng

However, UW–Madison also understood that choosing Salesforce-native events would require the right implementation strategy. Unlike a turnkey platform, the long-term benefit of configurability comes with upfront build and configuration work. That made selecting the right partner critical.

UW–Madison evaluated three implementation partners. Attain Partners stood out quickly, both for the strength of its proposal and for its real-world experience implementing Salesforce-based systems in comparable higher education environments. Attain Partner’s experience navigating public-sector procurement, governance, and stakeholder complexity proved especially valuable in a large state university setting, helping UW-Madison move forward with confidence, alignment, and a clear path to long-term success.

“Attain Partners stood out, head and shoulders, on hands-on experience doing this… They offered specific stories of customers they could talk about… We could trust the people.”  — Alan Ng

The implementation team included multiple Attain Partners specialists, with two primary Salesforce administrators supporting the work day-to-day, along with project management and data-focused resources.

UW–Madison also credited Attain Partners’ project discipline as a key factor in ensuring steady delivery—particularly around budgeting and execution.

“We respected… Attain Partners promise and living up to its promise on how they estimate cost… They did not come at us [with a change order]… Instead, we came in under budget.”  — Alan Ng

That predictable delivery enabled UW–Madison to stay focused on adoption, change management, and long-term sustainability, rather than getting derailed by scope surprises. The Attain Partners team also supported stakeholder alignment and adoption planning, which was essential in a decentralized institution where shared governance and consistent processes ultimately determine whether a solution scales.

Today, UW–Madison uses Blackthorn Events and Blackthorn Payments as a Salesforce-native foundation for continuing education registration and transaction processing. For DCS and its program teams, the priority is clear: enable high-volume registration workflows while supporting the real-world complexity of modern higher-ed programming.

That complexity is especially visible in UW–Madison’s Precollege programs, where registration often involves youth safety requirements, parent-child relationships, and multiple stakeholders tied to a single learner record.

“The Precollege program staff… think this is the best one yet.”  — Alan Ng

Supporting Complex Registration Workflows

Blackthorn enables UW–Madison to support nuanced registration processes where the registrant is not always the learner. In many cases, parents are registering children, registering multiple children at once, or navigating programs with application-like workflows and eligibility requirements.

For UW–Madison, these scenarios are not edge cases; they are core use cases. Having a system that can support them reliably is essential for program growth and operational consistency.

Flexible Payment Options for Higher-Ed Programs

UW–Madison also uses Blackthorn to support payment scenarios common in continuing education, including higher-ticket programs where learners may pay deposits, pay in full, or require more tailored payment options.

This flexibility helps program teams reduce friction during registration, especially for programs with a higher price point.

Salesforce-Native Data Foundation for Long-Term Scale

UW–Madison’s approach also prioritized long-term sustainability in the data model. By combining Salesforce Education Cloud with Blackthorn’s native event and registration objects, the university accelerated implementation, avoided reinventing the wheel, and ensured long-term alignment with industry standards.

Blackthorn’s data model became a key component in enabling UW–Madison to build toward future reporting and visibility goals.

Payments That Work Within Institutional Constraints

UW–Madison currently processes transactions through Authorize.net rather than Stripe, based on procurement requirements and contracting constraints typical of public institutions.

Alan described this decision as one made “eyes wide open,” reinforcing UW’s commitment to balancing modern tooling with institutional governance.

Vendor Responsiveness During Rapid Implementation

UW–Madison moved quickly through implementation and encountered challenges along the way—an expected reality when deploying complex systems at scale.

What stood out was Blackthorn’s responsiveness when issues surfaced.

“…Blackthorn responded promptly… by actually fixing the bug by a deadline and not just saying you’re going to put it on the roadmap someday.”  — Alan Ng

This responsiveness, paired with Attain Partners’ hands-on support, helped UW–Madison maintain momentum even while moving through a demanding timeline.

For UW–Madison, this initiative is not simply about modernizing registration. It is part of a broader strategy to reduce operational friction, improve learner experience, and create a scalable foundation for lifelong learning.

“We’ve been talking in higher ed about how we want the Amazon experience for 20 years… we’re getting a little closer.” — Alan Ng

The long-term goal is clear: reduce human labor where it doesn’t add value, respond faster to academic units and learners, and create systems that support both revenue-generating and public-service programs without requiring excessive overhead.

This matters because continuing education programs are not all built the same. Some programs generate significant revenue and require high-touch service. Others are grant-funded or impact-driven and require operational efficiency simply to remain viable.

As Alan explained, lowering administrative costs has a direct public-service benefit because when overhead is too high, programs disappear.

“If we can lower overhead costs, that has a real public service benefit… There’s a lot of really cool programs that would do the world good that we had to kill… because overhead is too high.”  — Alan Ng

At the same time, UW–Madison is realistic about what remains ahead. Reporting visibility for program teams without Salesforce licenses—and giving registrants a clear “single source of truth” view into complex transaction history are areas still in progress.

UW–Madison has already begun addressing these needs through tools like Tableau, and those learnings continue to shape the university’s roadmap and feedback loop with both Attain Partners and Blackthorn.

The foundation is already in place: a Salesforce-native platform capable of supporting scale, complexity, and long-term evolution—supported by an implementation partner with deep experience and predictable delivery.

For UW–Madison, Blackthorn and Attain Partners have enabled a model built not just for today’s continuing education needs, but for what lifelong learning will require next.

To learn more about how Attain Partners and University of Wisconsin-Madison are working together, watch the on-demand webinar now >> “Inventing the Future of Continuing Education: How University Wisconsin-Madison is Driving Innovation with Education Cloud.”