The challenge
The advancement services team exported six reports from Raiser's Edge NXT every other Friday, pasted them into Excel, and built a campaign progress deck by hand. By the time leadership saw it, the numbers were two weeks old and nobody could reconcile them to finance.
The approach
- Two-week discovery: interviews with the VP, the analysts and the finance liaison; audit of the existing reports.
- Custom SKY API integration to a Power BI dataflow, refreshed nightly, documented and owned by the university.
- Data model built around the campaign hierarchy the team already used, with finance's fund codes mapped in.
- Six dashboards: campaign progress, proposal pipeline, portfolio activity, retention, LYBUNT/SYBUNT and a one-page executive view.
- Three training sessions so the analysts could extend the model.
Sentinel gave our advancement office a dashboard the Provost actually opens.
VP, Advancement Services
The result
Nine hours a week back to the analysts, a one-day data lag, and one set of numbers that advancement and finance agree on. The team now adds its own views without a ticket to us.