Pomona College create an award-winning Higher Education Analytics Portal
At Pomona College there was a mandate to drive efficiencies across all faculties, increase productivity and manage stakeholder SLAs without increasing the size of the reporting team. They needed an analytics portal solution, but was very reluctant to retire any of its BI systems, each of which provided valuable reports and visualizations for different scenarios.
Download the case study →
About Pomona College: The Mission
Pomona College’s fundraising operation, the Advancement Office, had been humming along nicely for several years, unfailingly meeting its annual goal to raise $30 million from generous alumni, parents and friends. In mid-2018, however, change was brewing. With a new VP set to join and raise the team’s target by up to 25 percent, Nadine Francis, Senior Director of Advancement Services & Information Systems, knew it was time to address growing issues with its business intelligence (BI) reporting.
The team was successfully meeting targets, but accessing different BI reports had become increasingly unwieldy over the years. Not only were there four systems in use – Cognos, Tableau, PowerBI and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) – reports were proliferating all over the network. People were complaining about having to keep track of multiple links and difficulties with locating reports when needed. This created extra work for Nadine’s team, whose people wound up spending considerable time building specially curated report dashboards for individual users.
Pomona were seeking to find a solution that would manage the complexity of continuing to use the most appropriate BI tool for the job instead of standardizing on one. Learn how Digital Hive allowed Pomona to keep using all its existing BI tools but dramatically improve the user experience by making all reports accessible from a single user console.
*Learn more about Pomona College’s Analytics Portal ‘ConnectTo’ here
Solution success
Continued Usage of Existing Analytics Tools
Improved User Experience
Users now enjoy a unified, fully branded, and easy to use portal that’s designed to suit their requirements – something traditional BI tools don’t cater for.
Single Cross-Platform Sign On
Employees have single sign-on and no longer need to log into multiple systems. Everyone can easily bookmark their own favourite reports without relying on data teams to curate custom dashboards.
Boosted Tool Adoption
Only 20 percent were actively using the previous intranet, which was near the end of its lifecycle. Team members now actively using BI tools and resources has more than quadrupled to 90+ percent.
Testimonial
Now Major Gift Officers will log into the system regularly to get updated reports on the status of people’s portfolios. Every morning, Pomona’s Annual Giving Director views the report that shows the current alumni participation rate. And ConnectTo is fired up at every board meeting to show members a real-time view of how Pomona is faring against its overall and departmental goals.
Nadine Francis, Senior Director, Advancement Services & Information Systems