Turning Data into Action with Einstein Analytics
The Client
Reading Partners mobilizes communities to provide students with the proven, individualized reading support they need to read at grade level by fourth grade. They know that reading is the foundation for all future learning, and the ability to read transforms lives and empowers children and communities to reach their full potential. Research shows that students who read at grade level by fourth grade have a greater opportunity to succeed in school and in life. That’s why Reading Partners works directly in under-resourced schools—engaging volunteer reading partners to work one-on-one with students who are behind grade level in reading.
Challenges
Stronger Metrics Needed to Drive Program Results
With a focus on innovation, Reading Partners looked for an easier way to find the data they needed to drive increasingly successful outcomes in their tutoring programs.
Reading Partners turned to Cloud for Good to find a solution that could pull information from their Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud and allow them to make better and more informed decisions.
“We needed to find a way to gain insight into both operational data, such as the pipeline of tutors and impact data, such as the performance of specific location,” said Gina Tomlinson, National Director of Information Technology.
Managing tutoring programs across multiple states within the United States, Reading Partners also needed the ability to see progress towards their goals and participation across different categories (such as volunteers by demographic and English as a second language status of students enrolled) at both a national and local level. A task made increasingly difficult as their organization continued to grow.
No Automated Reporting Solution
Reading Partners’ data for both operations and impact was housed in multiple systems, making it difficult to automatically generate reports. If they wanted to combine their reports, they would have to export the data into Excel. Using their ‘Excel magic’, they would then merge and manipulate the data to begin to see the results they were looking for. This time-consuming process wasn’t providing the insights that Reading Partners needed. Salesforce standard reporting tools didn’t enable Reading Partners to transform the data in the ways that they needed to answer the questions they were asking, and Salesforce Dashboards were not able to handle ‘a point in time history’.
The Solution
Reading Partners selected Einstein Analytics to enhance the standard reporting functionality of Salesforce and selected Cloud for Good as their implementation partner. This allowed Reading Partners to take the data from disparate systems and report back at national and regional levels. They were then able to share these reports and take immediate action directly in Salesforce from the dashboards they created.
“Reading Partners selected Cloud for Good to help with our Einstein Analytics setup because they understood our data and the importance of metrics to our organization. They were able to provide an expert Einstein Analytics implementation and the recommendations needed to present our data in a way that was easy to understand,” said Salesforce Administrator Lola McCall.
Einstein Analytics Dashboards
Reading Partners came to Cloud for Good with an instance of the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) already installed and utilized for their constituent and program management.
With Cloud for Good’s help, Reading Partners was able to take their data and create two Einstein Analytics dashboards; one for program management and the other for community engagement.
The program management dashboard was created to view their locations and subsequent activity at both a national and regional level. The dashboard reported on key performance indicators such as how many students are enrolled in each location, what percent of students are meeting their goals, and how many volunteer tutors are engaged with Reading Partners.
The community engagement dashboard focused more on tutor recruitment. This showed regional progress to their goals, what demographics they were engaging, how many sessions were being provided, and sourcing details to deliver insight into where their tutors are coming from.
Results
Automated Reporting
These new dashboards have replaced Reading Partners’ Excel manipulation, delivering a reporting foundation to help them better understand their data and answer questions that they didn’t know to ask when just utilizing standard Salesforce and NPSP reports.
“We’re now able to look at the data and ask how and why questions to drive impactful program and community decisions. How does diversity in tutors affect the success of our students? Why are there more inactive tutors at one location over another? The dynamic nature of Einstein Analytics dashboards allows us to dig in deeper and ask and answer more complex questions.” McCall notes.
Identify Gaps in Tutor Recruitment
McCall continues, “Einstein Analytics makes it easy to visualize our data all in one location. This allows our team to be more proactive in identifying areas that may need more attention.”
Specifically, with their engagement dashboard, Reading Partners was able to identify gaps in tutor recruitment and proactively drive action back into Salesforce through activity management using tasks, reporting, and email tools to better engage volunteers through the onboarding and recruitment processes. This allowed Reading Partners to realign their recruitment focus with the locations that need it the most.
Identify Characteristics of Success
Using impact data, Reading Partners is also able to identify the characteristics and datasets of successful locations. They can then use these characteristics as benchmarks and drill into the locations that aren’t meeting all their goals to find similar patterns and help increase Reading Partners’ successful expansion.
Share Results to a Greater Audience
With Einstein Analytics, Reading Partners can utilize Chatter to evangelize the dashboards to a greater audience, in an easy to understand format. The dashboards, using easy customization, can even be branded in company logo and colors.
“Cloud for Good helped set up Reading Partner’s dashboards in a way that made sense for us. The information presented at the top of our dashboards is more general information that the entire team needed to see, followed by the more detailed reports. This set up makes it easy for any user to look at the dashboards and understand the story the data is telling us,” said McCall. “Because the dashboards are branded, we are also able to publish results at a National level, without the manual ‘Excel magic’, and continue to increase funding with this data .”
See Reading Partners’ Einstein dashboards in action in this on-demand webinar.
