Enable the insights to answer key questions about admissions, student retention and alumni engagement
Universities are operating in a complex and competitive higher education landscape. To thrive, they’ve got to manage a host of interrelated challenges. They need to attract and retain the best staff and students, help students graduate and find great jobs, and then connect with alumni in engaging ways to drive funding and keep the university strong.
Increasingly, this makes having accessible, accurate and interactive data a key to success. Insights from this data help answer many valuable questions about the health and performance of a university across admissions, retention and alumni engagement.
While universities are awash in valuable data, many have difficulty gathering together millions of student records and alumni data across disparate data sources and departments, especially if they don’t have a standard approach to managing and governing data. As a result, many end up acting on intuition instead of insight, as they leave opportunity on the table.
Put insights in the hands of your decision-makers
We’ve developed a platform to help universities quickly execute, analyze, and react to today’s challenges with a simple, powerful and intuitive view of their data. We call it the Higher Education Advanced Dashboard User Portal (HEADs UP).
HEADs UP puts insights at the fingertips of higher education administrators, and delivers predictive and prescriptive answers to key questions around admissions, student retention, financial aid, alumni engagement and development. Leveraging IBM Cognos technology, this “visual storyboard” offers views into high-level academic KPI metrics, and performs additional analysis based on trends within the data.
The platform also runs Integeo – Spectrum Spatial from Pitney Bowes, a powerful tool for drawing intuitive maps within the BI tool. The platform can also be easily augmented with valuable Pitney Bowes data sets that would be interesting to many universities.
Answer key questions about university performance
Before we dive into the details of the platform, let’s look at some of the key questions that it can help you answer. If the university has the data, the platform can integrate it and help you:
Gain insights on student acceptance and retention: You can understand how many applicants entered specific degree programs each year. You can see student retention rates and which areas need attention. You can view graduation rates across all campuses and for specific programs. You can understand which programs have the highest success rate for placing students for internships. You can also run sentiment analysis to see what students think about student support services.
Improve engagement by seeing what your alumni are doing: See where your alumni live, what events they attended and who else attended that event. You can see if events are well attended and which are more popular to help you decide where and when to hold your next event. See which donors have become inactive and what the average donation amount is for certain age ranges. You can find out how much and when an individual donated and quickly view their age, living location, year graduated, and high school age people in their household to continue and grow your relationship with that alumni.
Unify your view of performance across your institution
HEADs UP provides high-level overviews of your KPIs and analyzes trends within the data. It offers a variety of perspectives to view data, such as campus, enrollment, admissions, retention, sentiment and alumni. You can also drill down into the data to understand what’s causing certain trends.
The platform provides out-of-the-box metrics, yet is highly customizable to the specific needs of an institution. It’s accessible online, and offers an easy-to-use and interactive dashboard that lets non-expert users make adjustments and navigate through the data to get the answers they need, with no coding needed.
Instead of spending hours scouring for data, the platform provides a unified and intuitive view by simplifying data collection, navigation and analysis across all university departments, delivering information in a quick and insightful manner. This helps universities measure learning effectiveness and financial performance across the institution.
The platform establishes a single version of the truth, with unified definitions, governance and enterprise data standards. This reduces data risk and complexity and reduces the time spent on data collection and analysis. Integrating and consolidating data across sources improves information sharing between departments and enables unified views of how departments consume data. Data sets can be integrated whether they reside in extractable flat files or data warehouses.
Let’s make something happen
It’s time to give your decision-makers the insights they need to answer the questions that matter most to your university. We’re excited to have a conversation about how the intuitive views of HEADs UP can help you achieve the vision of your institution.
