Harnessing Data to Improve Mission Impact

Challenge

Common App, a leading nonprofit serving higher education, needed a data warehouse and analytic capabilities to bolster mission impact, support industry research and internal business operations. Our client was looking for a cost-effective, extensible and scalable solution that could grow with the business. Specifically, the organization needed to address:

The lack of software, infrastructure, and tools to support data warehousing and analytic needs
Insufficient staff to manually deliver on internal and external requests for research and operational reporting metrics
Disparate systems and sources of data, making it time consuming to retrieve the necessary data required to satisfy the needs of internal and external constituents
A desire to shift toward a data-driven mindset throughout the organization to measure performance and drive decisions

Solution

Developed a strategy and plan to build an initial version of the data warehouse and analytics capability that included:

Interviewing internal and external constituents to understand their needs and the questions that could be answered by available data

Analyzing and prioritizing constituent needs to provide quick wins and a roadmap for analytic capabilities

Architecting, securing, and implementing AWS environments and services to provide a scalable and extensible foundation for the data warehouse and analytics ecosystem

Executing an agile process to iteratively ingest data sources and visualize the data utilizing AWS QuickSight

Providing ongoing change management and training to ensure adoption and maintainability of the solution

Engaging executives, stakeholders, and constituents throughout the project to ensure delivery of the highest value needs

Outcome

A cost-effective, secure, scalable, and extensible AWS-based solution that:

Centralized core client data and external data sets in a secure and economic manner

Automated data pipelines to ingest data updates to reduce ongoing operations and maintenance needs while meeting GDPR and CCPA requirements

Leveraged AWS AI services to extract raw text from PDF files to address higher ed analytics use cases

Simplified access to organizational KPIs through numerous visualizations that quickly gauge performance in near real time

Significantly reduced the amount of time required to produce standard reports and dashboards through self-service, on-demand reporting capabilities, versus former manual processes that took up to two weeks

Published August 2, 2023

Challenge

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Outcome

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