Explanation:

The alumni volunteers are external users with Customer Community Plus licenses (now Experience Cloud external licenses with access to standard objects like Reports).

External users in Experience Cloud can create, customize, and edit their own reports (in "My Personal Reports" folder) if the specific permissions are enabled on their profile:

Create and Customize Reports – allows building new reports and report types.
Report Builder – enables the modern report builder interface.
Edit My Reports – allows editing reports they own.

These are profile-level permissions (found under Administrative Permissions or System Permissions). Enabling them on the volunteer profile meets the requirement declaratively—no sharing rules or role changes needed, as reports in personal folders are private to the user by default.

Why the other options are incorrect:

B. Create a volunteer public group and a sharing rule that grants Read permissions to reports
Sharing rules on the Report object only grant view access to existing reports/folders. They do not allow external users to create or customize reports. Creation/customization is controlled by profile permissions, not sharing.

C. Create a new role for the volunteers in the role hierarchy, and grant permissions to Create and Customize Reports
Roles in the role hierarchy primarily control record-level access (OWD + sharing). They do not govern object/feature permissions like report creation for external users. External users (Community users) are not placed in the internal role hierarchy—they use sharing sets, sharing groups, or super user access instead. Report creation permissions are profile-based only.

References:
Salesforce Help: "External User Permissions for Reports" – External users with Community Plus licenses can create/edit reports if Create and Customize Reports, Report Builder, and Edit My Reports are enabled on their profile.
Trailhead: "Experience Cloud Reports and Dashboards" – Explicitly requires these profile permissions for external report creation.
Education Cloud Consultant Exam Guide: Community/portal access scenarios for volunteers (common in Advancement) – enable report permissions directly on the external profile.

Explanation:

✅ Why this is correct
Early Alerts in Student Success Hub are specifically designed to help advisors proactively identify and respond to potential student issues before they escalate.

Early Alerts allow institutions to:
Flag academic, engagement, or behavioral concerns
Surface issues early (attendance, performance, risk indicators, etc.)
Trigger follow-up actions, outreach, or case management
Support proactive intervention rather than reactive support

This directly aligns with the requirement to identify student issues as they arise.

❌ Why the other options are not correct

A. Advising Events
Advising Events track meetings and interactions between advisors and students.
They are useful for documentation but do not proactively identify issues.

B. Mass Actions
Mass Actions allow advisors to perform bulk updates or communications (e.g., sending messages or creating tasks).
They are not designed to detect or surface student risk indicators.

D. Success Plans
Success Plans help document goals, milestones, and action plans after an issue or objective is identified.
They do not proactively detect emerging concerns.

✅ Summary
To proactively identify student issues as they arise, the correct functionality is:
👉 C. Early Alerts

Explanation:

In Salesforce, the Opportunity object is designed to track revenue-generating activities and deal progress—making it the ideal fit for managing sponsorship requests in a continuing education context.

When corporate recruiters work with employers to sponsor programs, each sponsorship request can be treated as an Opportunity record, allowing the university to:
- Track the stage of the sponsorship (e.g., Proposed, Negotiation, Closed Won)
- Record expected and actual funding amounts
- Associate the Opportunity with the employer Account and recruiter Contact
- Forecast revenue and report on sponsorship pipeline

This approach aligns with standard Salesforce sales processes while adapting to the university’s advancement and partnership goals.

Why the other options don’t fit:
A. Campaign: Useful for marketing and outreach efforts, but not for tracking individual sponsorship deals
C. Program Plan: Represents academic structures—not financial or partnership transactions
D. Affiliation: Tracks relationships between Contacts and Accounts, but doesn’t support opportunity stages or revenue tracking

Explanation:

Why this is correct
Pathways (in Student Success Hub) is designed to help advisors and students view program requirements and the courses/classes tied to a course of study, so the advisor can confirm the student is on track for graduation and discuss academic options. Salesforce describes Pathways as enabling access to program information and supporting Program Plans/requirements for students.

Why the other options are not correct
A. Academic program:
An Academic Program (often an Account record type in EDA) identifies the program (e.g., “B.S. Engineering”), but doesn’t by itself provide the structured view of required classes and progress that Pathways/Program Plans provide.
C. Affiliation:
Affiliation captures a person’s relationship to an organization (department, program, etc.), not the set of courses/classes required for a course of study.

✅ Why this is correct

Sales Cloud is the best fit for University Investment Services (UIS) because it is designed to manage exactly the types of relationships and processes described:

Accounts → Investment companies / financial institutions
Contacts → Individuals at those organizations
Leads → Potential new investment partners
Opportunities → Investment opportunities or deals
Activities → Meetings, calls, emails, and engagement tracking

UIS operates independently from the academic mission and does not manage students, programs, or education data, so Education Cloud–specific solutions are unnecessary.

Sales Cloud provides:

Standard CRM functionality with minimal customization
Robust reporting and pipeline tracking
Relationship management optimized for external partners
A scalable solution commonly used by finance and investment teams

❌ Why the other options are not correct

B. Heroku
Heroku is an application development platform, not a CRM.
It would require building a custom solution from scratch, which is unnecessary for this use case.

C. Education Data Architecture (EDA)
EDA is designed to support student-centric data models (students, programs, courses, affiliations).
UIS works exclusively with investment organizations, not students or academic processes.

D. Financial Services Cloud
Financial Services Cloud is tailored for retail banking, wealth management, and insurance, typically focused on individual clients, households, and financial advisors.
It adds unnecessary complexity and is not optimized for an internal university investment office managing institutional relationships.

✅ Summary

Because UIS needs a straightforward CRM for managing organizations, contacts, opportunities, and activities, the best solution is:

👉 A. Sales Cloud