College Preparatory High School

Overview

A highly regarded college preparatory high school in the Chicago area wanted to empower the school’s leadership, administration, and staff with easy to run reports and education dashboard visualizations of their data. Their goal was to make faster and better-informed decisions using easy to access, up-to-date, and reliable data.

They plan to use this data to measure and track:

• Student Enrollment Pipeline
• Student Diversity
• Annual Fundraising
• Alumni Giving
• Donor Information

They chose to partner with 2nd Watch based on our proven experience with education data and analytics management.

The Challenge

Better Data Access: Moving from Excel Exports to a Modern Data Warehouse

The first step to creating high quality education dashboards and reports is to ensure the data is centralized and analytics-ready. Prior to this project, the data the client needed for reporting was only accessible through an Excel export. All reports were being sent out via email with reports being manually updated. This process meant that data was difficult to access, highly susceptible to error, and often out of date by the time it reached the person who needed it.

The Solution

2nd Watch’s first goal was to create a central location for all users to access the same data and to create a streamlined process for sharing reports with up-to-date information. To do this, 2nd Watch leveraged the use of APIs to access the data from all of the systems the client needed for reporting. Azure Data Factory and Azure Functions were used to orchestrate the process of calling the APIs and integrating and storing the data in a Snowflake cloud data platform.

Creating a Data Model for Easy-to-Create Reports and Dashboards

Once the data was centralized in Snowflake, a data model was created to integrate with Tableau and provided the client with a template to use for new reports and dashboards. A custom education giving and fundraising dashboard starter pack was also created to enable the client to start finding immediate insights in their data. This education giving and fundraising dashboard starter pack included:

• Fundraising Campaign Tracking
• Donor Journey Mapping
• Annual Giving Totals
• Annual Giving Percentage

The Outcome

With their new modern data platform, our client is now able to create user-friendly Tableau dashboards that provide fast and accurate insights into the data they care about. They’ve also been able to set up automatic emails of the dashboards to their stakeholders. The time spent creating and updating reports was reduced significantly, allowing the client to develop new reports around subject areas that were not accessible before.