RNL (Ruffalo Noel Levitz), the leading provider of higher education enrollment management, student success, and fundraising solutions, has developed an award-winning innovation to help its campus partners live up to and exceed the expectations of students, parents, and alumni.
April 18, 2022—Powerhouse brands have set a very high bar for curated and timely content. This creates a challenge for colleges and universities whose stakeholders have been conditioned by the likes of Google and Amazon but whose budgetary, technical, and human resources cannot compare. RNL (Ruffalo Noel Levitz), the leading provider of higher education enrollment management, student success, and fundraising solutions, has developed an award-winning innovation to help its campus partners live up to and exceed the expectations of students, parents, and alumni.
RNL’s IT innovation was rooted in the challenge of processing large amounts of data at scale, optimizing data flows, and building modeling capabilities that support prescriptive analytics and interactive dashboards.
Annually, RNL works with 1,900 higher education and nonprofit partners who use various advanced analytics algorithms with data that often exists in independent architectures. Incoming data therefore required significant preprocessing across multiple platforms before RNL and its partners could leverage it for marketing insights and recruitment outreach.
To streamline this process, RNL began to design data engineering and machine learning pipelines by forming interdisciplinary teams of customer-facing consultants and internal specialists to work alongside the technical experts and ensure that subject matter expertise was inculcated into the algorithms intended to drive the data-driven analytics. RNL’s innovative new cloud-shared analytics and data platform processes information at several layers of complexity.
RNL also emphasized democratization of advanced algorithms. Typically, data analytics is a domain of specialized teams. However, RNL initiatives will put AI and machine learning at the fingertips of all team members.
These efforts have produced numerous benefits for the firm’s partners, including:
- Hyper-personalized client engagement
- Always-on AI with advanced algorithms running in the background, processing new data and enhancing existing models
- Products with embedded analytics
- Insights-based optimization algorithms
- Prescriptive modeling capabilities
As RNL AI and Data Scientist Jack Brzezinski, Ph.D., said: “RNL’s mission to ensure the success of its higher education clients required RNL’s own market leadership in AI-driven analytics and prescriptive automation that goes beyond machine learning, including optimization algorithms, prescriptive analytics, and multi-scenario simulations, with data privacy and security.”
RNL’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer Kader Sakkaria will receive the award for this innovation at the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards in California in August 2022. For over 30 years, the CIO 100 Awards have recognized innovative organizations around the world that exemplify the highest level of strategic and operational excellence in IT.
For more information, please contact Brandon Trissler of RNL at Brandon.Trissler@RuffaloNL.com.
About RNL
RNL (Ruffalo Noel Levitz) is the leading provider of higher education enrollment, student success, and fundraising solutions. Every year, more than 1,900 colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations partner with RNL for advanced analytics, personalized engagement, and industry-leading insights to achieve their missions. The firm focuses on the entire lifecycle of enrollment and fundraising at the undergraduate and graduate levels, assuring students find the right college or university, graduate on time, secure their first job in their chosen field, remain engaged as lifelong learners, and give back to support the next generation. RNL conferences, research reports, papers, and articles help clients stay on top of current trends. Learn more at http://www.RuffaloNL.com.