2023 Oct – SchoolBI Information Session

Well, welcome, everyone. This webinar is actually the school BI information session. Thank you for joining.

Before we get started, I just have a few basic housekeeping things to say. One is that the content for this webinar will be about twenty minutes, and then we’ll have about five to ten minutes of q and a at the end. But at any time during the discussion, if you have a question, please use the zoom q and a section. I will keep an eye on it. Sometimes it pops Sometimes it doesn’t. If I can, I’ll answer it real time. If not, I’ll just, review them at the end, and we can kinda go through questions at that point.

This record sorry. This session is being recorded, and I will send it out after we’re done. And thanks for all that attending. I’m really excited about today. So let’s get started.

As folks were trickling in, I noticed a few names that looked familiar, And there’s a few names that don’t. So I’m gonna quickly introduce myself. My name is Ryan Bowse. I’m the founder and CEO of SchoolBI.

It’s great to see so many names that I used to work with in the past. So that’s exciting, and also I can’t wait to meet some of the new ones.

My passion for data in the independent private School space runs deep. And I made this slide quickly just to give those that do not know me a little insight and glimpse into me It’s all it’s very accurate, but it’s also a little tongue in cheek. If anybody’s wondering, the next John Steinbeck book I’m reading happens to be the grapes of wrath, I finished up, east of Eden this past summer, and, I’m on to the next one. So I’m originally from Boston. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, with my family.

And while probably a lot of you don’t know, but I’ve been in this space for quite a while, and I’ll talk a little bit about that. In a moment. But, we’re really here to talk about school BI and get you all up to speed around what we’re doing. We’re building something really unique at school BI, and I’m really excited about, kind of sharing where we are in our vision.

So a lot of folks ask what does school BI do? And I say we do a lot of things, but we’re really focused on becoming a beautifully easy data analytic platform designed to enable schools to become truly data driven.

And when I say this out loud, some folks say an Rifling so ask, what do you mean by truly data driven? And I I thought it would be kinda helpful for me to kind of explain that because I think it could put some of the next pieces of content into perspective.

I think the most important part is to think of data driven as not as a journey, not an endpoint.

There are a lot of different places in that journey that one could be. And speaking of organizations, schools specifically, too could be in a different point in that data maturity journey.

There are things like people process tools and culture which impact the stage of that journey and I can go into that. We’ve worked with a a bunch of different folks to kind of design this data maturity analysis and where folks fit and what you should be working on. But the best way to think about, being truly data driven is that each stage you move through this journey builds upon the prior stage to ultimately help you get to a place that you can say that you’ve democratized data for your community to be its best self as an organization. Not you.

But the important part here is to think of it more as a journey of creating systems processes and culture and using tools to get farther along in that maturity than not.

And again, It could be as simple as you’re using data to make decisions in real time, or it could be using data to formulate strategy with deep, forecasting or predictive analytics. So with that, one of the things that I think is important is that you think about why we set out to build, school b I. And this one is very near and dear to my heart. I my life was transformed because of two private independent schools.

The last one I went to, I graduated from Proctor Academy.

And by going to Proctor, it actually has enabled so many gifts in my life One being the fact that I’m in educational technology and the fact that I was able to, reconnect with an alum to get me involved in EdTech probably fifteen years ago, was because of Proctor. We were two alums in, navigating the world of software. And so, I have that privilege to say that Proctor gave me that gift of getting into the educational technology space, in living and bringing this. I love my job I love everything I do.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard, some days. It’s hard many days. But ultimately, I have a deep passion for helping schools figure out better answers with technology and software.

And I’ve worked at companies that have been focused on a wide range of things student, student management, student learning, LMS, admissions, enrollment software fundraising, communications, business office. And I’ve worked with a variety of different functions at schools, of all sorts over the last fifteen years. And What’s interesting and the reason why I think it’s important to ring a proctor was that, back in two thousand nine, while I was working at Whipple Hill and for those of you might remember Whipple Hill, There was a concept of a way to pull whipple Hill data, into a some sort of data store of Black BOD’s fundraising software razors edge.

And we were trying to think of a way to do this, and I went out and investigated a couple of different new technologies back then. It was a product called GoodData. They’re still around. But it was very expensive.

And frankly, the timing wasn’t right. The technology that, both Whipple Hill and Razers Edge were using the technology of good data, it was actually really custom to build out a kind of any data integration and data consumption. And also, the second thing was timing wasn’t right for schools. They all knew a data was gonna be important, but they weren’t investing time, energy, or money into figuring out how to solve it.

And things have changed quite a bit in that appetite, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re really excited about what we’re doing. This itch that’s been scratching at my back of my head of how we bring technology together? How do we actually bring data together, has been there throughout the last couple of roles that I’ve had, and I’ve had to scratch it And, you know, I I think that, one of the things I’ve learned about being part of Procter’s alumni community the president of the alumni association. I’m also on the board at Procter, is that I’ve actually lived, some of the real world challenges that schools face when they start to talk about data.

And so I’ve even said some of the next few statements, but after interviewing a bunch of different schools, size, types, and and makeups of schools, whether you’re the head of school, whether you’re injured as a contributor, first year teacher, you know, folks feel stressed and they feel underprepared when they have to make a decision because they don’t have access to data. And I’ve said those things as, you know, President alumni association. I I’m actually sometimes nervous about making a decision where it represents the alumni community because I don’t have the data that I want in real time.

It’s getting better. Don’t get me wrong.

I’ve also said things that I’ve heard folks say there’s too many roadblocks to get the data that I need. Right?

And ultimately, what’s really you know, kind of true across all schools is that oftentimes there’s this Hercules effort that you need to do to get data from different systems, silo data systems together to do, what you want it to do. And so the commercial markets, you know, I’ve been doing this for quite some time. And so When I hear people say there there has to be a better way, the truth is is that there is, and I’m tired of schools not having that data at their fingertips and not having the insight to provide value to their community as much as they can. And schools deserve better quality here. They do they deserve you know, a higher level of maturity when it comes to some of our software, as well as the data, protocols, to make it easier for them. You know, and I used to joke, but I used to say, why is the dentist down the street have better data systems than a private school. And the reality is is that can change, and we’re at that time.

The problem is, and you all know this, you’re all from schools, is that schools are messy. They’re organic organizations. That’s what we love about them. They’re living and breathing things that change and build and grow and shrink, and that can make things messy.

The interesting thing is that the amount of data that’s being produced by schools and the sources they’re using is only increasing.

Right? And the schools that are, using systems to become more efficient and more optimized and service their clients, meaning their students and families better, are creating silos of data, which is okay. We all know that the one solution to rule them all has kind of gone away, and the point system point solutions have won, And ultimately, that does not mean that you can’t still have a data strategy that allows you to get reports about, easily.

The other thing is is that data is oftentimes messy at schools. You might have twenty five years of data, but it could be messy because maybe you changed a system in the middle of those twenty five years. Maybe you decided to and admissions change one of your application step statuses or your stages.

So and this is common. This is not new to just schools. This happens in the commercial market as well. And oftentimes, which is under kind of recognizes that data that is stored in these core systems is structured for operational effectiveness, not necessarily structured for reporting purposes.

And the last, but not least, the reason why this is so messy is that schools sometimes are building their data strength. They’re in the early stages of understanding all of these things and building up a process or program to actually address it, which is no fault of their own. It’s happened in a lot of other industries.

But it’s really important for us to kind of Pause and acknowledge these things because I actually think there’s a better way. It’s going to take a paradigm shift. It’s going to take away or sorry. It’s gonna take a kind of a little bit of a step back for folks to actually think about solving the problem differently.

But I think we can do that. And one of the examples that I like to give about, kind of switching our view or perspective on this problem about how it’s messy, is an opportunity. But I wanna tell a quick story first, and that quick story is, really interesting, and I could talk all about this until I’m blue in the face, but I won’t. I’ll just give you previewated version that is nineteen seventy seven NASH, NASA launched two spacecraft, the Voyager one and Voyager two.

And if you know or might remember, like me, the primary mission was to explore the outer planets or the solar system The spacecraft, which is very unique, both carried something called the Golden Record.

It was legitimately a phonograph record made of gold plated copper. Is important in the second.

The intent of the golden record was to be a message to potential stir terrestrial civilizations. I know it sounds a little kind of sci fi like, but, they wanted to put things on the ship that if somebody bumped into them, they would be able to get a snapshot kind of a, a view of cultures and sounds and pictures of what’s going on on Earth. And what was interesting was what got on this record was actually led by Carl Sagan, and he took about a year for the selection process, the the, kind of, what goes on it, how it goes on the record. And this was the proverbial message in a bottle for the big space ocean, so to speak.

It included fifty five greetings, in different languages. It had images. It had, recordings of crickets. It had all sorts of pictures of, different art.

It actually even had pictures of folks standing in the grocery store buying lettuce. It it really kind of had all these things that we’re trying to show the rich diversity of the earth’s culture. And if somebody out there intelligently being sort of got it. They would be able to get glimpse into our world.

So why am I talking about this? I’m not putting any of you on a spacecraft and sending you to space. But what’s interesting is that the technology systems and databases that we use today do use a term called the Golden Record. And it’s usually defined as something as the valid version of a data element.

It’s the record of single truth system. So we use this term today to represent that. But what’s interesting is if you notice what Voyager did with the Golden Record, that none of the data pieces that were on the golden record came from, one source.

Nope. It came from multiple different sources. It was different types of imagery, different types of content. But one thing is common. It was curated. It was cleaned. It was organized and formatted for consumption.

They didn’t just put a bunch of raw things on there. They actually made it so that the data was structured so that if someone viewing this could understand it. Now this golden record approach has been tried at schools. They’ve tried to use golden records with their course systems, but I think the paradigm switch here is that we need to think about how we actually can get the golden record approach without actually using the raw source material without perated cleansing and organizing and formatting that data for consumption.

And I think we have a path forward.

If you don’t know what a data lake is in a data warehouse, I’m gonna spend one minute explaining it. It’s, there’s lots of information. If you’re interested in reading more about it, I can.

Data warehouses and data lakes are big organized storage spaces for organizational data.

Data lakes are slightly different than data warehouses. I’m not gonna get into the nuances, but in general, they have the same similar outcome.

Data is ingested, It’s cleaned, it’s organized, and it’s optimized for faster performance.

Medadata or tags or attribute or apply to that data, which make the data warehouse easy for users to report on, and it makes it easier for segmentation.

It also has its own separate federation or security access controls on it that is different than the core systems it pulls data from. This allows better democratization of data with still keeping privacy and, you know, sensitive data at bay or in control.

And then after it goes through all this process, the data is ready to be consumed or presented in a business intelligence tool, BI tool. A graphing tool that allows you to make visualization of that data. Now what’s really interesting is is I firmly believe and school BI firmly believes that if this is done right, This is actually our best path forward in our quest to get to a golden record for schools.

And this is where school BI comes in.

We are helping schools go from text based data reports to visual representation of their data.

Through dashboards, we’re ingesting it, we’re cleaning it, restoring it to scale, and allowing them to build rich data sets off of that data present in highly engaged visuals.

Now, ultimately, what ends up happening is you get to a dashboard so to speak, which we help schools build.

The interesting thing here is is that we help dashboards, pull in data from KPIs or school goals You can highlight core programs or insights specifically for a specific segment of your, community.

You can pull in historical data regardless of source.

So I oftentimes use an example here for the admissions and enrollment folks, you might have used a piece of software, maybe it was file maker based for twenty years, then moved to a web based application process and admission software. And now you’ve got forty year or to, you know, say thirty years worth of data, but they sit in different systems. We can actually bring that all into a data warehouse, into a data lake, and actually allow you to have longitudinal studies and longitudinal graphs off that data.

We can also bring in datas from multiple data sources, and we can overlay custom attributes.

And all while doing this with a BI tool, which I’ll explain which ones we work with in a second, you enable your users or the consumers of that data have self-service controls. Some products call those slicers. Some people call them knobs, but the idea is that if I was a board member at your school and I wanted to see how many students were applying from a particular ZIP code, I would be able to actually click on the ZIP code and see the number of students. So over, in a secure way being able to help folks self serve their inquiry or their questions they’re trying to answer.

So One of the things that I’ll just say here, and that, I think, is important, is that we’re helping schools go through that data journey, data maturity journey with them. Some of them may be starting very early and may may not be able to get here in a short amount of time. We believe by using school BI, you would be able to do that, and it’s about them building upon the success that they have.

So how does it actually work and what does it look like? We are a software company that’s passionate about what we do and knowing our limits is one of the most key points of that. What we do is we actually do the heavy lifting of connecting to your data sources through data connectors to pull in data into the center of the warehouse, which we call school BI platform, and be able to pull that data in scheduled or in real time to be used later. So this is a slide that I have just an a nice basic graph up You can envision you might have data sources.

I put Black bought up and Google sheets. We actually have, this week. We’ll be announcing Vericross integration to be pulling Vericross data in. And ultimately, we wanna lose sleep over building out those connectors and building those datasets from each one of those pieces.

And then in that school BI green bubble there, we actually do all of our warehousing, techniques as words, ingested, cleanse, standardized, We apply rules and organize so that it can be presented in the two different type of visualization tools which we support today.

Looker studio by Google and Power BI by Microsoft.

So all of our libraries and metrics and visualization packs will be built in those two tools that any school can use as we go forward. The truth of the matter is is that schools will build these as well on their own, and they will use, technologies and services from partners that do this type of work, but ultimately, we’re providing that middleware, so to speak, to allow them to rapidly do this with more scale and with less, cost.

The other thing, which it does, which is really interesting that I just wanna point out is, this foundation, helps you set up for future data intelligence or data work, which, I can do a whole another session on, which I won’t today, and that is about the fact of setting this up for advanced AI and, machine learning to do on your data, which can be a key thing to look at in the future.

So I put this slide together. It’s really busy. I’m only gonna be talking to the top row, and I’m gonna go through each one of these columns, so to speak, in a second. So these these columns actually were created by the center for institutional research in independent schools, a fantastic organization, pushing this industry forward.

I never know what to call Cyrus or cirrus, but they have put together these three categories of different types of data, analytics or data, use. And they call it descriptive explanatory and institutional. And a lot of times, people say, well, right, I don’t I don’t really understand what would we be doing with school BI. And so just gonna take an example. This is one of many thousand examples of, of what you could do with the data warehouse and visualization, but One of the things and think of them as building upon each other at maturity as well.

One of the things that gets asked a lot is do I create a head of school or a trustee dashboard that shows real time enrollment that I can show it by race, gender grade, or pick a segment of your choice?

And so that is a descriptive type of, data visualization. It’s showing you kind of what is today. Doesn’t give you any insight of why. Doesn’t give any advanced tools about what to do with that data, but it gives you kind of a snapshot.

And so in school BI, you could do that. You create a dashboard, and there’s a little font on there that says enrollment dashboard, live, numbers by segments. So you’d be able to have a graph that shows you the number of real time enrollment whether it’s applications or people leaving attrition, you could do that. That would be something.

And if you wanted to go to the right and go up a little bit in the in the maturity model, and go to the explanatory.

You can think about that as, okay. Well, I know why I have, say, an enrollment drop for females in tenth grade, I wanna find out why. So you could actually start to pull in additional data from different sources and you could create an emissions dashboard that looks at your goals, say, to target females, in your recruiting efforts or in your targeted mail campaigns. And you could actually see well, actually, we’re we’re down for female applicants because we didn’t hit our goal of getting out to enough have enough girl inquiry side. I’m kind of projecting here what the problem could be. But it’s in that cas causality of why that is happening. Of what your current snapshot is now looking at why.

And then the institutional level, you could all you could do this using an infrastructure and a foundation from school BI.

The institutional one is think of that as the the one that, is the most mature out of all these. And that is imagine having that problem where you’re female applicants were down. You you realized it was because you didn’t get enough inquiries, and you wanted to say forecast or model out maybe an enrollment strategy change and see what the options were.

An example could be an ROI on, you know, investing in maybe three more open houses at, you know, female based feeder schools. I don’t know. Something like that. And you wanted to actually see based off past performance of those schools.

You know, if we went to them a couple more times, would you actually get more applicants? So think of that as the modeling, the the predictive, analytics, the forecasting kind of concepts. All of this can be done when and if you move to a data warehouse model, AKA SchoolBI and Leverage Business Intelligence, BI tools on top of Now, some of these are very easy. Some of them are a little more complex, but you can’t do the institutional without doing the descriptive if they all build on each other.

So most schools have to start somewhere and ultimately grow their program, again, back to that journey rather than an end state.

What does this all do? And I’m realizing I’m kinda running out of a time right here, but I wanna I wanna quickly go because I think it’s important is The whole goal is to enable you as a school to tell rich data stories.

There’s nothing more impactful than a an amazing story where you use data that people jaw drop and kind of come away moved. And the best one that I always think of as this, example by Al Gore, when Al Gore was in an inconvenient truth movie, and he was talking about how much c o two, and temperature fluctuations in the atmosphere in six hundred and fifty years. And if you haven’t seen it, you should go watch the scene if you don’t wanna watch the whole movie, but at the movies premium. Impressive in general.

But the idea was Al Gore gets through this whole discussion that over the last six hundred and, you know, forty nine thousand years, CO two and temperatures have fluctuated. You can see the graph. And then what he’s trying to highlight here, and if you’ve seen it, he’s trying to say in the last you know, hundred and fifty three hundred years, we’ve seen exponential, growth in the projected is even higher. And he gets into a scissor lift and he goes up to point to high assist.

Now this is, like, the this is, like, you know, the goal standard, so to speak, of trying to get people emotionally engaged in data. So we’re trying to get there. Right? But you gotta have a you gotta have a programming platform to build off of to get to these emotional moments.

And so I always joke, but we’re all trying to strive to that inconvenient truth story to get people to change, but you have to have that foundation.

And the irony is is that it wasn’t too long ago that this was how folks got information. I’m dating myself, but microfiche wasn’t that long ago that you would go into the archives to get data. Well, we’re in a situation where, jumps and technology are exponential, and we’re going to experience another big leap forward. And private schools are going to benefit from that. And and there’s a lot of schools that are still just learning about this, but the schools who rapidly move to this holistic data approach we’ll not only just be able to survive, but they’re gonna thrive and leave this industry. And we believe it’s just the beginning.

So while wrapping up and leaving time for questions at the end, I always like to say, because this is what what I’m trying to make sure everybody understands is imagine implementing a process or program that effortlessly helps your school be truly data driven today and in the future.

And I’ve got quotes from a bunch of different schools that we’re working with. We’re in the early stages of launching our company, so we have a small handful, high dissected schools, But we’re really trying to build that. And so the webinar today was built designed around me showing you what’s possible with school b I.

And I always like to say, where will you start? What thing will you go back to your office with today and where will you start this journey? You may be farther along than you think, and we can help you, or you may be just beginning. And ultimately, I always say don’t boil the ocean, start small and build, build, build.

That’s how all these amazing processes and changes take place. And with that, I’m just gonna wrap up Two things. Thank you for being on this webinar. I greatly appreciate it.

You will get a post webinar feedback form, a pop up from Zoom once we’re done. We love feedback please fill it out. We’d love to get the feedback about this content and other content in the future. I’d like to connect on LinkedIn.

If you’re on LinkedIn, please reach out. We also have a couple resources I’ll share, in the email following this session with a data maturity assessment and guide. It’s very similar to the one that, Cera’s put out, just different similar outcomes you could use theirs. You could use ours, but it’ll help you build a good plan to actually get into this space and moving forward.

We have a great newsletter that takes place every month. We’re gonna have one that comes out in the middle of October. And if your school at all wants to learn more specifically how we can help you and answer any questions. You can obviously book a team, a book a meeting with our team, and you can learn more, and we can set up thirty minutes and talk.

So I didn’t see any questions come in specifically, but I did see someone typing in a second. So I wanna just take a quick glass of water and answer that. So just give me one second.

Alright.

Good question.

They asked when you say platform, what do you mean? So I think the best way to explain it is if I go back to this slide here, and think about what we do as a as a company.

We chose very intentionally not to be specifically in the business intelligence software business. In other words, we didn’t wanna compete with Looker. We didn’t wanna peak with Power BI. Both of those products are great.

There’s even other ones like Tableau. There’s, good data. There’s, you know, Domo. These are kind of big enterprise class.

They’re all very, very much built for commercial markets.

And so what we wanted to do is we think there is a need to be a data warehouse for a private school, and we want to worry about how to get the data ready as a platform.

To enable schools to use visualization tools like looker and power b power BI. They’re relatively free or sometimes they charge a little.

For schools to use. And you can create your own data strategy, use visualizations on top of that, but you need to get the warehouse set up in order to do that. That’s kind of what we’re focused on. That’s why I try to show this graph, whenever I talk with someone because it helps them understand that we’re gonna be in the middle. We don’t replace any one of these products. We’re actually sitting on top of, so to speak. Hope that helps.

Yeah, someone asked, let me go back to the question and answer.

Someone asked, this one came up, when I gave this presentation to a a group of folks the other day, they asked who builds the actual dashboards.

We have dashboard packs. They’re in the infancy. In other words, is we have some dashboards that you could right click save and make your own.

But the schools can build them. However, we know that schools might not have time, resources, or energy or expertise abilities. So we have a couple of different options for a school One could be they could buy what we call a data artist service from us. It’s like a one time engagement where we’ll help you build out one or two of your dashboards And then we can work with you to either find, a consultant to help you with that if you don’t wanna bring in house, or you can we can work with, folks at, you know, the center of institutional research and independent schools to find out if there’s folks that could help you in a longer kind of, program because they do some really great work in that organization.

Yeah, someone asked, oh, do you support Ravenna school admin dot dot dot. The the answer is We will. Right now, we started with the two primary, core systems, Black BOD, and Veracross.

If you remember, I showed you a slide, we actually support Google Docs. I could say custom files. And so the point there is is that we do wanna support School admin, Ravena, Clarity, SSS, magnus, how you name it, right, any of the players that are in this space. Some of them have systems that are a lot easy to connect to, and some are much, much more complicated. And so in that journey, we’ll be releasing those over time. And some may be so problematic that we we don’t use API connectivity.

We might have to use a export import methodology you know, if you picked something really random that we’d have. But the idea of being able to support Google Docs or CSVs or Excel files is that we can almost ingest any data that you have in your organization, even from archives. I I worked with a school that has they’re in the process of defining this and and using Scooby eye for it is they’ve got fifteen years of, in residence data backed up on a server in their environment, and they can’t get to it. I mean, they technically can get to it, but nobody that needs to do a report can get to So that’s all gonna go into a CSV and Google sheet, and we’re gonna ingest it. And then at least they have it in a data warehouse that they could build reports off, And, you think of the, you know, the the idea is that then we would pull in their current emission system data, and they would have a nice kind of longitudinal ability to, build some great reports.

I’ll take one more question.

Alright. I think, oh, someone just typed one. Yeah.

So, if you’re interested, everybody says, like, how does it how does the price they didn’t say it specifically, but how does it work to become a customer.

Frankly, if you go to our website, our pricing is on our website. And so you can see it. We have three tiers have different levels.

You know, we’re and we’re really early stage in this process. We’re looking for more schools to join us. But we also wanna do this right. So we aren’t looking to grow by, you know, a thousand schools right now. That’s not our goal. Our goal is actually to have healthy growth, but we try to make as much information as transparent as possible.

Hope that helps. And if you have any questions, you can obviously reach out to me. Well, I’ve really appreciated the time. Thank you all for attending If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to respond. If you liked any of this content, share with your friends and colleagues. We’ll be doing more of these. We’ll be doing other subject matter expertise.

Last pitch I have is please fill up the post webinar feedback form, both on the quality of this content, what you got out of it, and what you didn’t. And also for future webinars. We want to actually produce a lot more subject matter, expertise, best practices, and looker. What is the data warehouse, you know, data warehouse one zero one? However, you can think of topics, please recommend we wanna hear from you. So thank you all for attending. Have a great afternoon or morning depending on where you are, and thanks a lot.