Student Data Metrics

A marketing company within the educational market who focuses on student enrolment and retention wanted to create a way to help universities, colleges, and schools track the student enrolment process. Through a focused dashboard it would provide them with an overview of students contacted, interested, applied, and enrolled, along with student demographics to help Educational institutions to better understand where their students come from.

At the time, schools were using reports they had to custom-make in Salesforce to gain these insights. But as Salesforce did not have reports tailored for this purpose, schools often found that key data was missing. Not to mention that these reports did not show schools how they were doing compared to other schools in their area, or schools of their type across the state or country, which in turn made it hard to give their data any real context.

We created a dashboard called ‘Insights’ that is fed by Salesforce data. It tracks students from initial outreach to acquisition all the way through to retention, allowing the institution to track targets like the total of students that attended events, began studies, etc. Insights also show institutions how they are doing with respect to competitors, providing valuable information and data on problem areas, and improving the acquisition and retention process individually to each school.

During a Full Agile development process, a fully customizable dashboard system was developed to present all metrics that institutions observe during acquisition and retention of students.

Millions of rows of data spread over many Salesforce instances sync in real-time to a central data repository.

Insights allows users to view information points, funnels, charts and tables, with the ability to compare with custom targets for each school term and other schools of the same type and/or within the same region. It also provides data filtering by topics like academic terms, subjects, source institution, and other student demographics.

The frontend of the project is a single-page web application created in React, a fully responsive application available for mobile and tablet and accessible for impaired users.

The application has reached a mature state and its functionality has been proven useful for their customers, it currently provides service to more than a dozen different institutions.

As a result of its success, between 2-3 new institutions are onboarded with the company each month, with the average institution having 1.5 million records analysed by the tool. Of all institutions using this, the biggest of them contains 5.5 million rows of data.